Exteriors Devlog Week 9

This week started without a Sprint meeting and task assignment was relatively sporadic. I feel like this approach which carried into later Weeks made our last few sprints needlessly stressful (they would have been even without this). If we had done Sprint meetings these weeks, we could have laid out specific requirements for everybody in the team in a more calm and organised manner.

This week I took the grass tuft animations made by another Designer and added some subtle animation to it to add the illusion of wind. This makes the garden look less static and more alive without the need for simulating wind physics which we didn’t have time for.

The Project Lead tasked me and two other designers with building the in-game days in Unity. However- only one of us could work on the project at once to avoid problems on Github.

However, over the week we received little to no communication from the designer and programmer primarily working on this, so me and another designer were left without much to do which dampened our ability to contribute. I spent this week honing my skills on Blender further as I had been doing whenever I had no work to do previously in the project to expand my skills as a designer.

Looking back at our project with my new art knowledge, both mine and a lot of the other designers’ and artists’ assets had really missed the mark for the ‘low poly PS1/2 esque’ art style. For some of my assets which used cylindrical shapes I should have used bevelling on a cuboid so it fit the style better. My mistakes here weren’t as bad as some others’ assets- for example in the house there is a potted plant which is FAR too detailed to be considered low-poly OR PS1/2-esque, as well as the window cleaner which has a similar issue.

Furthermore, our UV Maps should have used more low-res images to emulate the style of graphics we wanted to. For example; the Blender plugin, Pribambase, could have been utilised to easily create pixel-art UV maps to give it that crunchy look for a more distinct artstyle more in line with what we originally envisioned.

As one of the artists heavily struggled to model and rig the NPC, I decided to turn my focus onto learning character modelling and animating in my free time. I had learned how to rig and animate in Blender in previous weeks so I focussed on low-poly character modelling by researching Devlogs on youtube and practising in Blender with some of my own original characters.

Something I learned doing lots of art on this project is that there is far more than I thought that goes into creating a stylised look for a game. My work was incredibly basic and not much had been done to emulate the desired style- that goes for all of us who did art. We should have done research beforehand into the types of games that use this style and how it is done so we could have more professionally and accurately emulated it.