Audience Project

Brief

In this project the aim is to create a 3D textured diorama of a small environment or a prop in the style of the company we aspire to work for. This is to help us create something for a audience that desires a certain style of work, the audience being the games developer that we aspire to work for.

Research

Games

Naughty Dog  

Naughty dog is a first party Sony studio that have created multiple award winning franchises, most notably Uncharted and The Last Of Us. They usually create very realistic models and textures. They are most notable for their use of motion capture and use of actors. Naughty Dog are a developer that are consistently pushing forward the most realistic graphics in the games industry. The Last Of Us is set in a post-apocalyptic world this means they have a lot of organic and natural looking assets into a more urban and hard surface environments. Their usual work flow seems to be concept art in Photoshop, that is then taken into Maya or Z Brush so that it can can be modelled this is only done in very certain props as all of their characters and major props are scanned in and recorded in motion capture so very little has to actually be modelled in the software. Substance designer and painter are used to texture models, this is the most time consuming part of the production as everything has to be as realistic as possible because having really well made model doesn't matter with poorly made textures.

The Coalition 

The Coalition is a Xbox first party studio, they have started to create the Gears of War series now that Epic Games have stepped away form the series. They made Gears of War Ultimate Edition and Gears of War 4. Their work pipeline is normal for the most part, 2D concept to 3D model to texturing and animating. The only difference is the company seems to have a core software package with Photoshop, Maya, and Unreal but after it seems that artists can use what they want to, I've seen lots of different software including Knald, Quixel, Mudbox, and Marvelous Designer. It seems that artists at Coalition are allowed to use what they want as long as the finished product is what they are looking for. Their style is over the top, bulky looking models and their characters and environments are usually run down and grimy, this along with their use of blood and more brutal guns give the game a more harsh feeling.

   

Capcom (Street Fighter)

Street Fighter V has a more comic book feel, the characters are abnormally large and out of proportion. Their stages have many different styles because of the places they are set. Street fighter always draws from the most famous aspects and sometime stereotypes and plays them up in a comical way. Unfortunately I couldn't find any information on the art of the series, I feel this is because of it being a Japanese developer and I don't know if they are as open with their process as western developers and if they are I don't know what websites they would use. Most of their textures seem hand painted, I imagine they have a similar pipeline to other companies and would use the same software such as Photoshop, Maya, and Unreal Engine 4. Maybe with Substance Designer, Substance Painter and Mudbox used for the more organic look.

Analysis

This scene is very bright with light colours and a lack of shadows to darken it, this gives the scene a calming feeling. If you look at this scene with the rule of thirds you can see that lower in the scene (closer to the players) the more vivid the colours become. The colours are low saturated which gives a calming fell to the scene. The rule of thirds is a clearly divided by the houses on the left, the mountain and the houses on the right. The large building on the right is the dominant form, as it is the largest and has the most contrasting colour, whereas the cherry blossom tree on the right is the most notable sub-dominant form. Following the leading lines, of the railings, the floorboards and the roof of the dominant form leads your eyes to the back of the building on the right.  

Plan

Research - 1 Weeks 
Concept - 2 Weeks 
Modelling -3 Weeks
Texturing - 3 Weeks
Evaluation and Blog - 1 Week

Chosen Company

Capcom are my chosen company, the creators of Street fighter, which is the series i will concentrate on most. I've decided to make my own Street Fighter stage based on Birmingham City, as this is the city I know and there are no other Street Fighter stages based in Birmingham.

The demographic for the Street Fighter games show that younger males are more interested in the series. It also shows that people with lower income prefer the game probably because its replayability and lack of need to buy DLC or make future investments to enjoy it.

The artists for the games include people like, Hitoshi Niitsu, Yuko Yoshida, Rahil Soni and Nicola Russo. The problem is that I couldn't find any information on them. This is probably because they are a Japanese company and I don't know if they are very open about their process or what websites they would use if they were.

I am not positive what software they use or their process but based on looking at the credits i can assume they use similar software as we do. Most likely Photoshop for concept and then to Maya (or possibly ZBrush or 3DS Max) for modelling and finally to Unreal. They also use simplygon to render their scenes whereas I would use Maya. 

They attract their demographic by using over the top looking characters and special moves. It also helps that people who play the games now grew up playing the game as it isn't graphic and is very cartoon looking so most parents feel its safe to show it to their children.  

Street Fighter (1987)

Street Fighter was created by Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto. There isnt much information on the game we know that it was inspired by a 1974 Japanese martial arts film name The Street Fighter and a sci-fi anime from 1974 called Space Battleship Yamato. the Graphic designer Keiji Inafune, creator of Megaman, used Karate Baka Ichidai, as inspiration for the characters of the series. In SF the back grounds and characters were painted in, the systems at the time wouldn't have been able to handle more than that. This game had some differences to the later games, such as Ryu having red hair and wearing red slippers.

Street Fighter II (1991)

Street fighter II tweaked and added things that became staples of the series, the health bars had now changed to be side by side horizontally instead of vertically like 1. Ryu was also now brunette and barefoot. The background and characters stayed 2D with no modelling. But now with a pixel style instead of clear cartoon characters. Yoshiki Okamoto was lead on the project and Akira Yashitani and Akira Yasuda were designers for the game. Later favourite characters and mechanical changes were added with Super Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II Turbo.

Street Fighter III (1997)

Street Fighter 3 was a much more updated looking game, it was still 2D fighters in a 2D environment, this shocked many people as most other fighting games had moved onto 3D. This game added the ability to switch character colour palette. This allows some form of personal touch to the games. But overall it keeps the same style as the last game but just improves upon it.

Street Fighter IV

Street Fighter was quiet for 10 years, when headed by Yoshinori Ono it made its triumphant return with Street Fighter IV. Aimed to feel like Street Fighter II, in feeling but was set apart with its new art direction, It was the first 3D Street Fighter game. It still had over the top proportions and character design, but the game now had more of a comic book feel to it. The game was very brightly coloured with clear black lines surrounding the characters to make them distinctive from the background. The backgrounds had 3D character models that would react to things in the fight, a new addition to Street Fighter, and with buildings and assets that added never before seen depth to the game.

Street Fighter V

Street Fighter V kept a lot of the comic book style that Street Fighter IV had. But instead of having black lines surrounding the characters to differentiate them from the background they made the characters colours more vivid and muting the background colours. The games special attacks also now had a water colour/inky style to them. this was to make the attacks feel more important and make them pop more. The feelings conveyed changes from stage to stage, Kanzuki Estate is calming whereas Bustling Side Street is hectic. This makes each match feel different in the game.

Birmingham

Peaky Blinders 

Were a Birmingham based gang, their name was supposedly given to them because they sowed razor blade into the peak of their caps. This is most likely not true and the real reason is the just wore the popular flat caps of the era, known as peaky's. They were formed in the slums of Birmingham by the youth who lived their because they were bored as they had very little form of entertainment. These games died out with the popularisation of Cinema, Youth clubs and street Football. There is a popular BBC series based on them so they are becoming more famous to a wider audience.

Mini

Is a car model created by the British Motor Corporation. Production started in 1959 at the Cowley Plant in Oxford and the Longbridge Plant in Birmingham. It was voted as the second most influential car of the 20th century. It was a large part of Birmingham's export in the years and employed a large workforce.

Birmingham Canals 

Are a Network of canals that travel from Birmingham to Wolverhampton and to the east side of the Black Country. At peak there were 160 miles of canals now there are only 100 miles of canal you can travel in. The first canal was built in 1768, which traveled from the then edge of Birmingham to connect to the Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal. 

Spitfire

The Spitfire was a fighter aircraft used in WWII by the allied forces. main production took place in the Castle Bromwich Aircraft factory, by the end of 1940 the factory were producing 60 a month. Production ended in June 1945 at that point a total of 12,129 Spitfire's had been made by the factory. This was a major part of Birmingham's contribution to the war effort.

BSA

Birmingham Small Arms Company was a group of businesses manufacturing Bicycles and Motorcycles. At their peak BSA was the biggest Motorcycle manufacturer in the world, with their leading business Triumph Motorcycles. During WWII they created BSA M20 as the preferred Motorcycle for the allied forces and .303 Browning machine guns. In March 1939 they were creating 600 guns per week. This made a large impact on Birmingham's work force.

Concept

To start off I created silhouette, it was a very basic looking but I feel like it clearly conveyed the major assets for the stage. The Canal Boat, the Mini, and the Spitfire, I feel like these make up the heart of the scene and the other smaller things I plan on adding are less pertinent to the stage overall and therefore don't need to be shown in the Silhouette.

After completing my silhouette I imported pictures and blocked out my idea and how it would look when completed. This was to give myself a base for how my final concept piece would look. I kept the main aspects of the silhouette but I shrunk the plane as it looked to close and was out of proportion. I also made the Canal boat taller and the mini shorter as this made sense in context to the scene as a whole.

Asset List

Mini - Modelling - 2 Weeks

          Texturing - 1 Week

Canal Boat - Modelling- 1 Week

                     Texturing - 1 Week

Spitfire - Modelling and Texturing - 1 Week
Canal - Modelling and Texturing - 1 Week

Differences Between Software

Zbrush is a modelling software similar to Mudbox, Zbrush has mesh creating features whereas Mudbox meshes need to be created in Maya or 3DSMax. Zbrush has more brush features than Mudbox, so I would have to either not add those features or use alternate features to get it as close to that Zbrush would offer. There are a lot of other features that are shared by both, using Mudbox shouldn't be such a problem as it produces the same end model.  

Modelling

When I started Modelling the Mini I thought it would be rather easy, but what I tried didn't work so i was quite stumped on how to model. So then I looked at how other people model cars on Youtube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEmjAr2xyyg) this showed me that I should have created a circular 2D plane over the wheel and extrude out following the geometry of the car to give it the best look possible.

I found this method a lot easier than modifying a 3D cube. This method took longer and there were some problems when extruding, such as some of the faces inverting. But overall it ended up with better looking geometry and was easier to understand how it would look. Overall I found modelling the car hard and oftentimes intimidating, but Instead of modelling the whole car in high detail we decided to keep it rather simple as the perspective was going to be far away and the texturing would make the car look better. 



I came to the decision to do the whole scene in low detail after talking to my Tutor and experimenting with doing the mini in high detail but we found that with the time frame left to complete the project I wouldn't have the time to do the whole Mini.


After completing the Mini I carried on to model the canal boat that was in my final scene. This model was a lot easier to create as I had already had practice with the method of just modelling the 2D faces to create the overall model. It also helped that a canal boat is a lot easier to model than a Mini as there is less detail and not as many exterior parts. It didn't take me long to create the boat, only a lesson, I now need to UV and Texture both models before I go on to create the floor and canal.

Painting textures in Photoshop was a lot harder than last project because this time I had to follow the UV's of a model and the texture was a lot more complicated than the bricks I did last time. At first it was hard to try and translate the 2D UV's to the 3D model they would be applied to. 

I have finished painting the base of the car and Boat now I need to add details such as wing mirrors and lights. It was hard to get an idea on how to make the car look, in the end i just tried to think of it like if I was trying to traditionally paint a car, it was awkward and made harder by having to follow the net. I had to make sure that it looked good on a 3D model.

Texturing the mini took longer than expected because I haven't hand painted a texture before, it wasn't hard to do but was difficult to understand at first. It took 2 and half weeks to to texture the mini so I had to take a bit longer for texturing than I had expected but I took time out of evaluation and cleaning up blog because I can do that quick enough so that I don't need a whole week to finish it.

My finished Boat and Car are not to a quality I had hoped they would be, but I had to make compromises as the time I had left to finish the project and the amount of things I had planned to model. I decided to only block out the models instead of doing it in high detail as I didn't have time and they would be further away in the scene. 

I didn't manage to stay to my timeline modelling the car took a week longer than expected but I made up time with the shorter modelling time the boat took. Finishing textures took me longer than I had expected because I had to learn a new texturing method which was easier than I expected but a lot more time consuming. Overall I am unhappy with what I have accomplished in the time I have had but I can take the processes I have learned in later projects.

I imported my scene into Unreal Engine 4 to get an idea of how it would look but seeing as though I hadn't created a floor or the water so it didn't look complete or as good as it looked in Maya. If I had time to create water or the canal I feel as though it feel more like a finished scene than a work in progress.
 

Evaluation

This project was an audience based project where I completed a 3D model and fully texture it in the style of a game company of my own choosing. I chose Capcom, the creators of Resident Evil and Street Fighter among many others; I am focusing on Street Fighter. My Idea was to create a Street Fighter stage in the same art style as Capcom.

To come up with my idea I researched a few different companies such as the Coalition, Capcom and Naughty Dog. After looking at their art styles I felt that I preferred Street Fighter’s art style. The background style of Street Fighter V is colourful in a graphic art style but the colours are muted because the characters are the focus, so the background is meant to look good but not to draw the eye.

To create the same look as Street Fighter I used Photoshop for my concept piece, Maya to build my model, Photoshop to texture it and Unreal Engine 4 to put it together when it is finished. I used this process as I think it is the closest to the process that Capcom uses but I had to make an educated guess about that because there isn’t much information on their process because Japanese companies can be very secretive. I looked at different western companies and followed their workflow because most likely their workflow is very similar. I used new techniques to me such as hand painting textures following a net of my 3D model; I have made a tiled hand painted texture last project but not a unique texture that had to fit on a net. I found this to be a difficult technique to learn but quite easy after I had learned. I also used a new modelling technique which uses just 2D plains than 3D objects. This was difficult to learn and use but I got used to it after a little while.

I researched the audience by looking into the demographic results that Capcom released and I also studied the art style and if you take into account the difficulty of the game it is clear why young adults are the biggest fans of the series. This research affected my outcome because if the demographic were younger I would have planned a simpler stage but instead I felt the age that the main customers were it would be okay to be ambitious in the scene complexity. This worked against me as I was too ambitious and had unrealistic expectations on what I could make.

One of the biggest decisions I had to make was deciding which company to create my scene in the style of, this was a difficult decision because I like the look of all the companies I had researched but I felt at the time that Street Fighter’s art style would suit me. I think that in hindsight I was wrong to make that decision as I am not at all happy with the outcome.

A big influence on my ideas was the city I decided to base my stage in, Birmingham. This influenced me by wanting to look at different aspects of the city, like what it is most famous for historically. So it has a large canal system throughout the city and one of our most famous exports is the Mini. I also wanted to include things like Spitfire’s, BSA and Metal music but I wouldn’t have had the time to incorporate it into my stage. My design process was heavily influenced heavily by what the brief told me I needed to include in my project and the time I had to complete the project was a large factor. I had to plan for both of those factors seeing as though I knew what I had to complete from my brief and the time I had to complete it. This is why my plan was important in helping make sure I had enough time to complete what I had planned.

When designing my stage I decided to make my stage bright and colourful as it fits the style of Street Fighter which has always been a colourful game, this helped make my scene look like it would fit in the game as a whole. The style of the game is also a cartoony style so the only way to get that style would be to hand paint my textures in Photoshop.

A big problem that I had to solve was my original unrealistic view of what I could accomplish in the time I had coupled with my bad time keeping skills meant that some parts of my project were taking longer than I had suspected, for example modelling. So to solve this problem I had to take time out of the last week I had blocked out to evaluate and clean up my blog.

In conclusion I am unhappy with my finished project as I fell that it doesn’t fit the look of Street Fighter and it feels like it is unfinished at the end. I would have liked to have a full stage but I don’t think the time I had would have permitted that. I feel like if I could do this project again I wouldn’t be so ambitious and instead concentrate on just one asset. I didn’t enjoy hand painting the textures because it didn’t give the art style that I wanted my stage to have. In the whole project the parts I enjoyed were researching the companies and modelling the Mini, though it was difficult I enjoyed learning a new technique and it is my favourite 3D modelling technique I have used yet. Whereas I am usually confuse about how to model something I feel like I understood how to go about using this technique to create the car and boat. I feel that when it came closer to the end of the project I managed my time better, I think that in my next project I need to manage my time more like I am now which is more efficiently.

This project has shown that I need to value time management more and need to approach each project with a more realistic outlook on what I can accomplish. I also discovered that I don’t enjoy hand painting textures so maybe I should try to avoid them in future projects.