Someone from our modelling team made an alien bug for the map for me to animate. Since it wasn’t rigged I had to learn how to rig myself, I got the hang of the very basics but I couldn’t get the fangs to move without distorting the head unfortunately, I was still happy with the end result though since I’ve never animated four-legged creatures before.
Just like the fans, this cardboard box is being affected by the wind as well. It is already distorted because of the climate and the subtle wind animation helps to further imply this. For this I just rigged the edges of the box with two joints each.
1200 frames
We were adding fans for certain rooms but due to the setting there isn’t any running electricity, so all the movement would have to be based off natural wind. I made these animations of fans being blown by natural gusts of wind, I tried to make the movements inconsistent within the loops due to the unpredictability of wind.
2000 frames
This next fan is supposed to be dirty and jittery because of overgrowing, so I made the way it stops a bit more sudden, but subtle at the same time. I didn’t want to make it too rigid otherwise it would be too noticeable and stand out.
4000 frames
The same concept as the first fan applies to this one.
1200 frames
We wanted to have an alien drone scouring the map, but it would look out of place and static without any animations. The rigging was done for me and then I was able to start animating it.
Before I started I researched jellyfish and octopus tentacle movements to get a feel of what I needed to successfully recreate natural tentacle movement.
I animated the parts of each of the tentacles from the outermost part first (eg. the tip first, then the next joint, then the innermost joint)
This is the collective graph data for each joint:
I made sure every graph line started and ended on the exact same value so that I would get a perfect loop, and it was successful.
Final result:
I think to make this better I would have to learn how to rig it myself and add more joints so the tentacles would flow more naturally, as you can see how it is with the mouth.
I had to create a texture for a tire as part of scenery.
I was unable to export the UV map in high quality because maya kept crashing every time I tried so the final result wasn’t as high quality as I’d hoped it would be.
Looking back on it, I wasn’t too happy with the final result because of the quality, I don’t think this will be used though.
I had to create lamp and PC Monitor textures for objects in an office room.
Lamp:
Instead of just doing the standard lamp texture I decided to create two variants so there was the possibility of having the lamp be able to turn on and off. Since our game was set in a post apocalyptic world it might seem unfitting due to the lack of electricity, but I thought it would be good to do regardless as practice.
Lamp off:
Lamp on:
I added a gradient to the edge of the surrounding faces to make it look more like it’s glowing and the light is bouncing off the sides. Doing this was useful as this is a step towards making my textures look more realistic and believable.
Monitor:
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to apply what I’d previously learnt to this monitor because of the colour of it and the dark environment. I was still happy with the way the screen crack came out though, and it helped me realise I could use highly rendered images and scale them down for texturing purposes, it wouldn’t matter about the quality loss too much for any low resolution models as you wouldn’t normally go directly up to them.
For this brick texture I attempted texturing without using a UV map for experimentation.
After a little bit of trial and error it worked, but it felt very pointless as I just had to do a bit of guesswork which I wouldn’t have to have done if I’d just exported the UV map as usual. Luckily it was a very simple texture so it wasn’t too time consuming.
Final result:
I had to make a texture for a barrel so I made this:
From doing the second texture and applying it, I learned that it would be easier to section out the mesh when exporting to make adjusting and applying the texture easier and to add seamless loops.
Final result:
The crate was quite easy to make as I just had to create one texture and apply it to each side of the cube.
Unfortunately there was an issue with normals on the extruded edges, so I had to report that to the producer for the modelling team to sort out.
These are some sketches of how I wanted jet to look.
I thought the scarf, gloves and shoes were the most important parts of his design as they tie in with his everyday activities.
The scarf is used to cover his mouth most of the time, he’s spray painting a lot while on the move so it’s to prevent his from breathing in the fumes. Plus he’s quite anti-social so it fits him.
His gloves are made of leather and have rubber grip for when he’s doing parkour, also helps him not drop his spray paint can while he’s skating.
The shoes are specially made by his mechanic friend. They have a pressure sensor on the top of the sole that trigger a turbulent movement speed boost using pulse waves. They also have grip too so this is good for running up hills and even walls. It works well for him on his board as well as he can activate it to get a speed boost without pushing.
Basic Character Sheet
Sad –
Angry –
Moodboard:
Boma's CGA Sketchbook 