Legal constraints

My video game character was inspired by a variety of different assets and actual characters. However when creating my character I include my own ideas as if they are the same as another companies then legal actions could be taken. for example if my character was the same as a robot out of I am Legend then it would be classed as copyright. My character took inspiration from a film called Robots and the character was Bigweld who moves around via a big circle wheel and is very fluid with his movements.

However my robot has clear difference as mine has guns on and can fly, however the way that he moves with the spherical bottom is what I took from that and so I had to make sure that when designing it was different. Where as in the film Rodney is a kind famous robot who loves to have fun! The reason I based my robot around him is because he is different from what you would normally expect and as a side kick I wanted It to be fast, powerful and actually useful which is why he can fly, has a map on him and also can store treasure collectibles. The way I imagined him to move was fast like Droidekas from Star-wars as they are different from the stereotypical futuristic robot with legs and human like abilities however in relation to Droidekas, mine is not similar but it helped me when thinking about my robot. Finally, all my assets on the robot such as the guns and the propeller ears were made from scratch and were original ideas.

Proposal

The assignment brief is to create a futuristic environment using a 3D software called Maya. I have decided on a Utopian time square feel which is very slick and refined. I came to this idea from my researching future set games, movies and models.

My project will be a section of a city based in the future about 600 odd years. In it I will include a shop front, assets such as a bin, bench and street lamp which I have designed myself to create and fit my future virtual reality. My centre piece however will be my skyscraper which will be mainly glass top which will contrast to the advertisements on the other buildings and the main road/ path way will run through the middle of the building indicating a CBD. I will use games such as Mirrors Edge and their environment design to help get ideas and I will find/ create my own textures to show my Maya skills.

However, because I have looked at a lot of different trademarked and copyrighted games obviously I cannot copy. I will not be using any downloads and my city will be made from scratch so I will not be plagiarising. However just to be safe and give credit to my inspirations I will reference all of my inspirations in pre-production to consider the legal side. But if I happen to use any templates I will have to double check that they are not trademarked. One problem I know that I wont have is ethical issues as all of my buildings are fairly recognisable and doesn't link to anything that could be untoward.

My target audience for my assignment and future will be 16+ as I feel younger audiences would have been interested in bright colours where as mine is organised but also dense at the same time, additionally there will be small details that will appeal and be quite amusing/ cool for older audiences to understand. The glass and the billboards will communicate the future feel that will appeal to my target audience. Additionally, my environment will fit into an open world game type and an action game due to its openness and gamers would be able to scale great heights and also interact with the future environment and the world would interact and adjust to you such as bilboards changing as you get closer. 

In order to make my project I will have to use various skills in order to complete my 3D city model. For example when creating the skyscraper I will have to extrude and alter my shape which will likely be a rectangle, and then use shapes and the co-ordinates to get the correct positioning and alignment. One of the main skills I will have to demonstrate is texturing which will be a key aspect to make it futuristic and realistic. Finally, I will show the skill of adding more edge loops which will refine my objects to make them more realistic and refined (rendering).

In order to successfully complete my project I will need a wider range of resources. for example I will need specific software programmes such as Maya and Photoshop for obvious reasons such as to actually be able to create a 3D environment. I will also need High speed computers or at least reliable computers such as a Mac so that it can store my project and run Maya. I will also need a scanner to scan in my drawings which I will need paper and utensils for.

This project is not going to be completed in one day and so I will have to spread it out over a longer period of time and try not to fall behind on any work be it on blogger or practical, but I will also have to take my time and don't take short cuts in case they prove problematic in the long run. To make sure I don't fall back I will set myself marginal goals that I hope to achieve by the end of each session.



The proposal allowed us to evaluate our brief and collect all that we need to do to lay it out in my head. This was extremely useful as I was able to really visually see and plan out in my head what I needed to achieve. I was also able to explore a lot of the limits I could take for example looking at legal constraints meant that I knew my limits. Furthermore it allowed me to be more efficient by making sure I was on task at all times and I could always refer back here. Here I also reviewed how long it would take along with what I needed to complete it meaning I could once again get sorted. Another thing you evaluate in this is your target audience as its almost like a pitch and so from this I decided on a set idea and so I wasn't messing around between ideas once again wasting time and in the real world money.

Planning Document Design Pack

Production Log

Road to my Maya creation!


15/10/15) In the first lesson in which we started our Maya Creation, I started to draw a few rough sketches to get a wide range of robot ideas and listed some of their key characteristics, I liked or that they all had in common. I then decided on my final idea and went for a spherical based robot that could fly, act as a guide and also a storage space for this game.

20/10/15) Because I didn't complete my drawings the first lesson I had to finish them off here by drawing them on *special graph paper* and because my creation model was going to be 3 dimensions I had to draw a front, side, top, bottom and back view all drawn to the same scale so that I could scan them into Photoshop and realign where necessary. Then once I was happy with the size and rough design/ plan of my robot I opened Maya and made a horizontal plane by creating a turnaround which I could import my designs onto to act as guide lines when modelling.











22/10/15) in order to make everything to scale and give me the best visuals for my design I had to calculate the resolution of my image back in Photoshop and then transferring this into a set size in Maya by doing a simple calculation.


03/11/15-05/11/15) I lesson 4 and 5 I began to start making my sketches have a body by adding built in polygons such as a sphere to act as the main support for my creation. After having implemented more of a structure to my character I was able to rasterise my image by adding more edges and vertexes to give it a more spherical aesthetic and I began to start adding minor details by using the extrude tool and duplicating various layers and adjusting                                                         them slightly to make it look more realistic and complex.




10/11/15) I went in

to even more detail this lesson by looking at key limbs and connectors for my robot and added more edge loops which made it a more futuristic as it looks like welds and seals that keep my robot together and have various




17/11/15)  In this lesson I attempted to make my own shape being a wire, this proved quite difficult to get the right shape for it as it didn't look realistic due to its random bends. I also re did my neck for my robot as it didn't seem to fit in with my robots feel. I did this by adding in lots of rectangles and rotated them which I found to be particularly effective. in my neck there is an opening behind and this is where I wanted to add in wires to show my attention to detail!

01/12/15)   this lesson I focused on finding out and figuring out what purpose if any my robots arms should have and I thought that because my sidekick acts as storage and a map/ advice in where to go and as a result doesn't fight as much apart from the ray gun which I also added that lesson, I gave him speakers which is where not only sound comes out but also an imaginary hologram for when in the campaign you would get sent a video message.

Last lesson I had to attempt to try an UV map my model and by doing this I had to use a texture that helped piece bits together. This proved to be very hard and so you have to cut you model into sections such as the body, head and arms. You can then either use UV Shell where it selects the whole shape and you can distort it and change the UV pattern that way, or for more detail I had to just use the UV and its almost like changing the vertexes.

Asset planning / Research

Asset research from 10metzm

Here are a few ideas for what will hopefully make up my futuristic city, a common theme is that a lot of things are reflective and smooth however, at the bottom on the buildings and shop fronts I want it to be seen as a futuristic NYC Time Square with all of the advertisement and billboards.

Task 2 - Game Environment Planning (Moodboard)

 

By creating moodboards I was able to collect a wide array of ideas and research around my topic. I looked at all different types of futuristic medias and by having them all in one place with a colour shceme it meant that I could refer back to this when creating my environment and therefore stay on track with my target audience and reliant ideas. This is a way of saving money as I didn't have to test my target group or find out my audiences by doing my own primary research and rather I can utilise other research and media that has already been done and therefore allowing me to save money on creating my own.

Initial Research

From my research i have discovered that the medias portrays the future as being very dystopian and dangerous, Everyone seems to have machines connected to them at all time that are used for fighting or they are all barely surviving in a dangerous environment with either humans killing each other or aliens/ robots have sided against them. Examples of this can be seen above in examples such as terminator, oblivion, GI JOE or After Earth however there are few exceptions such as  WALL-E where even then it tries to teach us a lesson. They all seem to be engrossed in technology that will assist them when in combat. There are also 2 ends to the colour spectrum which is either very bright with a lot of blue to highlight the technology or in contrast they are dark and simple take the Matrix or Men in Black as an example where black is a costume theme or the lighting is dark to create shadows and indicate how the future is dark and sinister. I found that what works particularly well in future based films or games is this violent world as there are clear missions and intrigues the audience as there is an interest in new 'cool' or outrageous weapons, this also allows for the audiences imagination to come to life with gadgets that allow flight and memory loss which there is likely hood we wont be around to actually see happen although there are only a few Utopian based futures, they are also good as they allow for cool technology to be used so what they all have in common is their aim to please the audience with exciting action.

Task 2 - Displaying 3D Polygon Animation

TASK 2 from 10metzm

Task 6 - 3D Constraints

Constraints are like set backs or limitations for real time games that the developers need to keep in mind or else their 3D creation might be too good or ahead of the Hardware needed to run it. The 3 examples I will be discussing are Hardware based these are Polygon Count, Render Time and File Size.

Polygon Count

The number of polygons in a model often runs parallel with the level of detail or realism of the model. So the more polygons used to construct a model the 'better it will look' as there is a higher level of detail attributed to the model. For example, the left image is very rectangular in comparison to the high polygonal which is spherical and looks more realistic on the right, However this comes with a cost. This is a constraint as the more polygons there are that appear in render view the longer it will take to render and this means that there needs to be a balance for graphics to playability because other wise they could make the most realistic 3D model but it will take ages to render and so the game will not run smoothly and this effects the gamers experience. 

For the PS3 it alone could manage 275,000,000 but with everything else it drops to just 9,100,000 which dramatically effects the experience if there needs to be more rendered.

 

Render Time

This is very self explanatory as it is the time taken for each frame to render. What is seen as a minimum FPS is 30 frames per second so 30 frames need to be rendered in the space of one second. This can be a huge constraint for 3D animations epically when you look at Toy Story 3 where for some frames it took around 16 hours to render! where as games such as Flappy bird which have very simple graphics and can therefore run easily and quickly on most devices as it has a low polygon count. This can also be a constraint not just from the drop in the noticeable performance of the game and thus giving the player an un-enjoyable experience but also the fact that if it takes a long time to render each frame onto a first copy then it will continue to increase the price of electricity used to run the computers or resources needed.



                             







                                               
File Size
3D modelling often takes up lots of storage and so one reason file size is a constraint is that the models need to be saved somewhere and if the 3D art is not kept efficient then it may have to be spread across multiple discs or downloads. An example of this could be GTA 5 on the XBOX 360 and this was to split the file size up and the file was too big for digital download alone.
Secondly,  it also depends on the amount of RAM available. within everything, at the point when playing the game it needs to read the disc and store it for very fast accessibility. this includes everything from textures to game play instructions. this is why the polygon count and textures need to be efficient to allow space for RAM to store other wise the experience will be very disappointing. this is noticeable in games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the game would lag so to speak when moving. 

Task 5 - 3D Development Software

new 3D sofwares from 10metzm

Task 4 - Mesh Construction

3D modelling often starts off by inserting a primitive, this is a pre made shape such as a cube, sphere or a pyramid cone as shown above. These shapes act as the start or main building block for more complex models. and their preterites can easily be changed in order to get the desired shape or look.

Here you can see i have added another primitive and rotated the first one to get it into a position I wanted. 

The mesh of a structure acts as the wire frame and the faces on them like the ones on the sphere acts as blocks to either take away or add to the shape by again using either other primitives or more subdivisions. The polygon mesh is made of edges. vertices and faces

After i resized the sphere to my liking, i copy and pasted the sphere to make multiple and placed them into the cone to appear like an ice cream and the slightly re sizing them so they are are not all perfect so that if i came to actually taking this to a rendering stage then it would be more realistic.

Box modelling is when you start off with a set primitive and you refine the image by adding more subdivisions to the primitive to made it more detailed and can be structured in the way you want. This make the shape more complex and this process can clearly be shown below.

Here you can clearly see how by adding sub divisions and then moving them and modelling them you can go from a box to a complex visual such as a head.

Finally, extrusion is another way in starting with a primitive and then transforming it into something with a high level of detail or just to make the design of something. It is done by adding more geometry to the original primitive by either pulling away at the subdivisions or pushing into them to give it indents. For example, my screenshots show how i started off with just a rectangle and by using "ctrl E" or the extrusion tool, i could pull away at the faces subdivisions to make a frame that it was coming out of the shape. although my example doesn't show it being exactly effective in a design idea way, it shows the use of this tool and how you can use it.

Maybe a more easy way to view it is simple on a primitive like the one below in which i just pulled out every other subdivision in one row creating a block to come out of the tube (doughnut) primitive.

Task 3 - Geometric Theory

3D modelling is where a shape placed in a 3D space by various methods and is made up of different shapes. 2 main types of 3D models are called polygonal models and NURBS surfacing which are main ways 3D modelling is achieved in films or the gaming industry.

                                                                    

This is an example of a low resolution polygonal model.                             This is an example of a NURBS model.

             


NURBS is an anagram which stands for Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline and this type of modelling is more versatility used in automotive design and engineering as they are extremely mathematically accurate which is what is needed in these means of work.
Polygonal Models are made up of Vertices's, Edges and faces which all come together to make the wire mesh of a model.

Polygonal models are more commonly used in the film industry. these are made up of vertices's which are like the corners of a shape, edges which are lines that connect the vertices's together and faces.
Vertices's are the 3D points in a XYZ space and by changing these you alter the shape of the model all together.

Edges are what connect the vertexes together and act as the wire mesh and in-between are faces and the number of these are the polygon count. These edges are the outline of the model and are naturally straight however you can use a tool which curves them.

3D coordinates space and axes, this is where the vertexes are placed to look 3D and changing the coordinates will change the shape. The Z axis is what makes the model 3D by the optical illusion of giving it depth.

Task 1 - Applications of 3D

3D is becoming more and more popular within media as it is almost the next step in to the technological future by making things more realistic and all round experience enhancing. It has been almost 100 years since the first 3D film was made and still there are many technical problems with it and so it is not perfect however weather it be in games, film or tech; 3D is becoming more popular for people who want new exciting experience. It requires specialist equipment for making and watching which is why it is deemed to be so expensive.

3D used in Film

Film uses 3D in order to entice the viewer into the film itself and to feel more involved with it as they are almost part of it, this also in many cases makes it shocking and more realistic. Having said this, it comes with a price and costs more for the experience. However Avatar being one of the most successful film of its kind using 3D to connect the viewer into the fantasy world and be at one with the action. 3D is made by using models which doesn't need to be textured as that is done somewhere else, what makes it 3D is actually an illusion when wearing the glasses as the filters allow each eye to see the object/ 2D image at different angles making it appear to have a structure. This is known as stereoscopic vision. so when filming they film using 2 different lenses next to each other like the positioning of our eyes giving he same effect. It wasn't always done like that though, 'the adventures of shark boy and lava girl' was a 3D film that came out in 2005 and was filmed using one red filtered lens and another blue filtered lens that when 2 projectors were merged together and the filter glasses were worn, the images appeared 3D.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

3D used in TV

TV has also incorporated the 3rd dimension but with these smart TVs you also have to buy specialised glasses. How it is achieved is similar to film as there are real life actors and so the TVs polarise the original in order to get separate images and again each of the lenses are directed to one of the images and the other focuses on the other one so essentially looking at 2 different screens with slightly different angles. One show that was premiered on sky and was available in 3D was David Attenborough's natural history museum alive, in which prehistoric animals came to life by 3D modelling which is an example of a slightly more complex 3D but the realist were amazing with the museum practically coming to life. Finally Darren Brown's 3D specular was on channel 4 available to watch in 3D but many people found that wearing the glasses can become irritating and give them headaches.
A new way of improving 3D TVs is their curvature which isolates the central image and acts as though what they are seeing is through their actual eyes.

 

3D used in Games

Games it is all constructed starting from a mesh which acts as the outline and a skeleton for the object. this is because they need to be intractable and nothing is worse than bad glitches where something just is 'ant down to grasps with everything else making it either un accessible or just annoying. additionally, the only 3D assets within games have to be closed polygons where as how many polygons are used depends on the gaming console or hardware rather than, than the game engine. having too many polygons will make the game hard to run and that is why new ways of making the environment graphics look ascetically pleasing and possibly intractable ie- grass that when u walk sways and adjusts to your footsteps whilst maintaining a low polygon count.

 

3D used in Design

3D design within the production of products is extremely useful as it means that 3D virtual models can be tampered with and even virtually tested which means that when it comes to physically making or building them, time isn't wasted as they already know the specs online, they can also examine any faults within the product or change it if it doesn’t look like they initially wanted it to, for example, when making a model they can see areas of weakness which can be adjusted so that either more material is there so that it is less likely to be damaged. Additionally, the models can be seen in a 360 degree world without spending money on resource in real life which they may not be able to use again. Finally, it means that the 3D model can be printed out, yes printed out with a special 3D printer which saves money as it doesn't take many people to operate a computer to send it to a printer and make sure everything goes smoothly! 

3D used in Medicine

3D is also now being used for medical purposes, for example in Spain a man who was suffering from cancer got treatment by having some of his body replaced with perfect fitting titanium sternum, this was achieved by them scanning his body to get the right dimensions and then re scanning where needed and thus they could see what was needed and reconstructed it. Along with this full prosthetic limbs are being made which is quicker and in the long run cheaper than the lengthy process it used to be. Finally when proceeding which surgery, they can use 3D technology to actually know how far away they are from something via the cameras inserted.

      

Displaying polygon animations from 10metzm