Name: Jonah Holden-Maillard

P Number: P13193617

Email: p13193617@myemail.dmu.ac.uk

Project Title: Gravity Kart

Overview: This is a set of gravity karts, based on concepts for project yellow. Project yellow is a brief provided by Exient, the developers of Angry Birds GO. The karts were modelled and unwrapped using 3DS Max and then textured in substance painter and photoshop. The final, game-ready models use a 512 x 512 texture and no more than 3000 tris.

Unwrap: Unwrapping was completed in 3DS Max.

Textures: The models were textured using a combination of substance painter for the base PBR values and photoshop to add hand-painted details. The in-game karts use (from left to right) 1x 512x512 albedo, roughness and metalness. For the 'stylised PBR test', a normal map was also used.

Final Renders: Rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 2.0.

Conclusion: Unfortunately I've only been able to fully complete 1 of the 3 karts. This is for a couple of reasons. First of all, I lost nearly half of the three weeks allocated to this project to starting over. I also misunderstood the brief on my first attempt and approached this project with a realistic, hard surface workflow. This limited the amount of UV space I could share between componenets, costing me texture space and making hand-painting much more dificult.

The 'stylised PBR test' kart is OK but it doesn't meet the brief and I realised to late that I shouldn't have wasted time with a high-poly to low-poly workflow. For this reason, I decided to re-unwrap the first kart and complete the remaining karts in the final week. While it's a shame I wasn't able to create final textures for the karts, atleast I learned a lot from these turbulent few weeks.

​After starting over last week, I’m aware that there’s no way I’m going have time to finish this before the hand-in. Despite that, I’m still happy with my decision to switch projects, because now I’m at least getting something done and I’m enjoying my work.

Currently, I’m polishing off the textures on the first kart and modelling the second. By Friday I’d ideally have both finished, but that’s probably a bit optimistic as I’m working at the UCAS fair in London on Wednesday. It’s a shame I lost over a week on this project, but at least I can finish it off for my portfolio in my own time. The first kart took a whole week to make because this is where a lot of the problem solving has to happen. As it says in the brief, a lot of the work should carry forward into the 2nd and 3rd karts so it’s useful to take care and plan this first kart well.
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The first major hurdle I encountered was figuring out the dimensions and proportions of the kart. There are no orthographic concepts for this project, only one perspective shot per kart. And the perspective…leaves a lot open to interpretation. So I created a few block-out variations and settled on the middle ‘averaged-out’ version.

​The second hurdle was the technical limitations. I’m used to modelling realistic assets so I found 3000 triangles and a 512 x 512 map set quite limiting, particularly on areas like the rope. At my baking resolution of 2048 x 2048, everything looks crispy and nice but once it’s scaled down, it turns into an unrecognisable blobby mess.

​An advantage of using automatic packing software is being able to re-scale, re-pack and re-bake relatively quickly. After a few tests, I found that to retain the rope detail, the UV’s had to be scaled up by a minimum of 100%. In hindsight, I’m not sure this was wise as the rest of my texture is now quite pixelated. 

,I went ahead with it because in the game this is theoretically designed for, Angry Birds GO, the main gameplay angle focuses on the rear of the kart. I’ll try and find a better solution for dealing with the limited texture space with the 2nd and 3rd karts but for now this’ll have to do. 

​Last week, I started the New York ‘noir-esque’ rooftop, concept project. An odd choice for me, as I don’t aspire to be a concept artist, but it was my intention to combine it with the equivalent game production brief, turning a 3 week project into a 6 week project with 2 outcomes.

Until now, I’ve been drifting between 2D and 3D, with the notion that I should remain a generalist, but focus on the realistic spectrum of the style matrix. But I went all in on 3D a long time ago, because that’s what I enjoy doing from day to day. Trying to incorporate a realistic concept brief into my portfolio projects seemed like a good idea, but in practice it’s a recipe for disaster and grumpiness.

So I’m starting over. Instead of trying to bend the realistic briefs to my will, I’m going to diversify my portfolio and complete the game production briefs across the full range of styles. While it may result in a less targeted portfolio, at least I’ll know what I’m doing and I (probably) won’t hate my life. I’m off to model some go-karts!