planning, production & practical

Roadmap

To begin my project I've created this roadmap so I can measure where I am along the timeline. This is similar to my gant chart but more specifically for practical work so I can track my practical progress throughout the project. The project is highly modular and the scope can change based on how much time have or other circumstances. The tier one project would essentially be finished whereas everything else would be additional work. This allows me to pace myself and regardless of how much I do I'll have a 'completed' piece.

Asset List ideas

For the items inside the cabinet I wanted a mixture of both weaponry and items found in different games as well as a mixture between simplistic and complex assets. This was both for my work flow but also to make sure the space inside the cabinet itself was filled up I came up with a large list of a mixture of weapons and items to display, I wanted to go for Varity however for my brainstorm I wanted to get everything down on a page and then make as I went. I would have a general asset list to pull from and as my ideas changed in scope either getting larger or smaller I could choose or scrap ideas from the list several of these assets vary as some contain either unique particle effects complex geometry and others have simplistic geometry and no effects my choice on what I include is purely based on stress and time. I do want to include some with complex geometry or particle effects however to reiterate depending on time and stress the complexity of what I include will greatly change regardless of what I want to include. I also want to include that although I am making these items I don't necessarily intend to replicate them 1:1 as i may want to put a piece of my own interpretation into the design while still paying homage to the original.

•Fairy in a bottle (Legend of Zelda franchise)

•Mario powerups (general)

•Master sword (legend of Zelda franchise)

•Buster sword (final fantasy franchise)

•Blade of the ruined king (League of legends)

•Spartan laser (Halo franchise)

•Bfg (Doom Series)

•Blades of chaos (God of war franchise)

•The mega buster (Mega man franchise)

•Portal gun (Portal franchise)

•Gravity gun (Half life franchise)

•Hidden blade (Assassins creed franchise)

•Energy sword (Halo franchise)

•Pokeballs (Pokemon franchise)

•The ocarina of time (The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time)

•Potions (general)

•Gaster blaster (Undertale)

•Freddy suit head (Five Nights at Freddie's series)

•Slender page (slender franchise)

•Sonic rings (sonic franchise)

•Samus helmet (metroid franchise)

•The golden gun (007 nightfire)

•diamond sword (Minecraft)

•The companion cube (portal franchise)

•Pyramid head (great knife)

•Red exploding barrel

•Tetris blocks

•Crowbar (half life)

•Carboard box (metal gear)

•Dagger of time (prince of Persia)

•Glados potato (Portal 2)

•Awp (Counter strike)

•Hookshot (Legend of Zelda franchise)

•bomb (bomberman franchise)

•Smash ball (Super smash bros franchise)

Yamato (devil may cry franchise)

large sword of moonlight (demon souls)

meis ice ray (overwatch franchise)

Witcher eyes (The witcher franchise)

Morning star (castlevania franchise)

frostmourn (warcraft franchise)

Theoretical Research

For my final project idea I have several franchise objects stored and this in itself means I don't have much control of the tone of the interior of the cabinet however I do have my original asset of the cabinet itself. For the project I wanted the cabinet to give a tone of mystically without being overly intimidating and for this I decided to look at three specific theories that would assist with the creation of my project these three being colour theory, shape theory & audience theory.

For my cabinet I looked at several different types of design both using primary research and secondary research for my primary research I looked at my own wardrobe for inspiration for the outside structure of my wardrobe as well as the interior. My secondary research was for several different cabinets and wardrobes turned into a mood board to try and get a final style for my project. I Investigated shape theory in which I learned the importance of certain geometrical shapes and usage of techniques like the golden ration and symmetrical design. These kind of design choices are seen as less important in an eastern audience as they tend to like asymmetrical designs more than the west. I wanted to utilise the concept of the golden ratio to make the viewers eye lead into the door which would give them a sense of anticipation making them want to see what's inside. This was another component of shape theory I researched as the rectangle is more representative of both strength and utilises the golden ratio whereas a rounder object may come across as too soft or childish which is not what I was going for with this piece however I also didn't want to incorporate to many harsh edges into the piece as triangles are seen as hostile and although the cabinet is supposed to be mysterious but not overtly dangerous. For this I created a mood board of different wardrobes to combine for my final idea. In which i participated in some primary research taking photographs of my own wardrobe for first hand reference images.

Another theory I included in this process was audience theory, audience theory is more of an umbrella term for several different theories about how people interreact with the entertainment and art presented to them however for this particular case I focus on a specific piece of the theory while referencing it using the umbrella term for simplicity, The specific part being passive and active audiences and who my project would appeal to. For cabinet arcane I believe a passive audience would be the main recipient for the piece as most of the work I display is based of existing media which already as their messages started in the original pieces. therefore any point of contestation about these pieces would be referring to them rather than my artwork which merely displays them in a vacuum.

Other theories I was interested in was colour theory as I already knew the basics of colour theory and wanted to expand on my knowledge and so I looked at a few different websites and eventually found a really good video about why the colour purple is utilised in such a way that it usually represents unnatural things and rot. This means it usually takes the appearance of magic or poison due to its lack of abundance in nature and inversely green is often the colour of health in games because of its overabundance in nature. I used this concept for my cabinet. I wanted to have a colour that wouldn't be too light but also not too dark for this. I ended up going with the colour below, I chose a light yellow colour and added some cell shading, I decided during production that it could be reminiscent of the borderlands series and this fit with the general theme of what I was doing.

Survey results

As I had previously taken sociology I was already familiar with the concept of surveys and I was aware that people don't like having their time wasted or answering long winded questions. So I made my survey four questions with two one answer questions and two more open questions that could be answers with short sentences. I did this so somebody could quickly answer the survey or if they wanted to spent more time on it they could have a more complex answer. The Microsoft account system didn't seem to work for everyone however as people outside the college had trouble logging in so I decided as an alternative I would have my Microsoft data set and a screenshot based data set that I would collect myself using a screenshot of my original survey that can be seen below alongside my screenshot data and my Microsoft data. the screenshot data does come with the disadvantage of myself knoowing some of the information about the participants and lack of data about things that the Microsoft data set comes with like time spent on the survey which I why I decided to make them separate data sets but still take into account all the information collectively.

Microsoft data set

The Microsoft data set ended with eleven participants, although I had to partially discount one of these responses as it was a 'troll' response and did not yield useful data for two of the questions making the true amount closer to ten point five, and took them an average of five minutes and fifteen seconds for completion which was longer than I had expected.

question one had a multitude of different answers with various ranges and that was the point, it allowed me to pool different gamers experience with different genres and games that would give me weapons and ideas I would not have considered since I wouldn't have experience with said games as I wouldn't have played them an example being from participant one who mentioned Genjis katana from overwatch a game I had not played and therefore not considered.

Question two was more differed than I had expected some like participant four wanted to know the actual stats of the weapon and its in game abilities whereas others like participant six wanted to know the lore of the item like what faction it belonged to and a short history of the item in that lore. The answer from participant four actually surprised me as I had assumed most people would only care about the lore and not the actual in game statistics so this gave me another potential aspect to include in the information inspection section.

In question three the general consensus between the Microsoft group was that they preferred the right weapons locker more than the fantasy based cabinet with a fifty-five percent majority this however was more a fault of myself as I feel I had not made the question specific enough but it did provide a good indicator that people would like the layout of the weapons.

Question four was open ended and gave me a multitude of different answers. I had structured this question in a way that it mirrored the first question but with more detail and made the participant continue to think through questions two and three about their answer. In essence question one was a primer of sorts for question fours answer.

In conclusion the survey allowed me to gain feedback from my target audience and change my piece to better suit the interests of the participants I gathered data from

Substance painter

Substance painter has many perks and features. One of the primary reasons to use substance painter is that like 3ds max it's the industry standard program therefore usage of the program is a generally excepted. The program has smart tools which allow the user to make more realistic things like skin. The program records all strokes and actions used as well as allowing you to change the resolution of the project without decreasing the quality of the project. The service allows you to use material behaviours like subservice scattering and sheen as well as allowing you to preserving these properties when you export it. The exportation process is also streamlined to use these painted models in other programs like unreal engine. These features are included in the substance painter 3D app however what about the other ones? well the Designer app allows you to make procedural models and textures as well as other things like image textures.

Practical

For my practical I had to decided how I was going to have the cabinet open, obviously it would always open with both doors, I would have to choose between having a pre-set animation in blender which would then transfer over or rigging the cabinet and making the animation in unreal engine.

An unfortunate roadblock and a return to progress

After doing pieces of work both at home and at college as well as in my own personal time I began to notice that I was feeling reality weak and tired, my appetite was going and I began to cough and sneeze as well as some other symptoms. I did a pcr test and since it said I was fine I brushed off this illness and got back to work however my illness did not go away and instead steadily got worse I did another two pcr tests both coming up negative but finally on the second of April 2022 I got a positive covid test. I took the next week as recovery time which essentially put a roadblock in my work however I decided that I needed time to recover. This delayed my practical work by quite a margin but I didn't have much choice in the matter. I referred back to my Threat assessment and found myself brainstorming ideas as sitting down, concentrating & working for long periods of was difficult. If I had to take time off from college to recover it would mean work would have to eat into my holidays which although wasn't the nicest thing to happen as it limited my free time however that didn't really matter and so I pressed on with my list of assets. I already knew one of my harder ones had been modelled which was the Castlevania Morningstar as well as the pokeball which could be retextured for the other balls so that was two assets complete

Asset modeling

Getting back on track I began modelling the various assets I would need for my cabinet deciding for a specific process for each. If its highly simplistic like the slenderman page then I would model and texture it in one session, if it had simple geometry but complicated textures like clouds buster sword I would model in one session and texture in another and finally if it was a highly complex asset like the blade of the ruined king which would require complex texturing and odd/complex geometry I would have this asset serve as its own mini project that I would space out over the course of days to prevent burnout. I however ran into some problems. Before the holidays I had decided to spent my time on research, one simple asset and one complex asset, the morning star, However due to the hard drives being wiped I had lost the pokeball in its entirety and the more complex upper portion of morning star was also gone. This was extremely disheartening but I continued. Below are some progress screenshots from the original models.

I quickly moved on from this as the data was unrecoverable and made my slender page. As mentioned previously this was essentially a flat plane with a self made texture on it that utilised the node system inside blender. The final version came out slightly browner than i had initially wanted it to but I could adjust that later so it didn't bother me too much.

As the slender page was finished I decided to move onto a larger model which would take up more space in cabinet. This would be an iconic weapon which was cloud strife's buster sword. This weapon isn't overly complicated even its later iterations however I decided to go for a sort of composite version mixing the older version from the original final fantasy and the newer remake to create a lower poly but more realistic design. Due to the highly geometric nature of the sword in the original version the main blade doesn't have much fancy geometry to it so I stuck with that and made the main and outer blade two different meshes then used the Boolean tool and another rectangle to create the materia slots (which are the circular holes in the sword) the handle was just a cylinder that had the top and bottom extruded to form the handle and the main geometry of the sword was completed.

My workflow and how it changed.

Over the course of the project the way I made assets and conducted research was based on creating the geometry for the model and then moving on to texture it later however I found that this creates a certain level of stress as it causes me to constantly by revisiting old work this as well as the loss of my two initial models caused my work flow to change from now on as I would texture or attempt to texture the models the day I created them and so in my design process you can see I added in the texture process.

Remote batarang Arkham knight

The remote batarang required a decent amount of custom geometry as the blade wings couldn't be easily made out of anything with hard geometry like a cube and so I custom sculpted it from a plane and morphing the edges and vertices to make it fit.

I then textured the batarang using the reference image I had found this caused a problem however as I hadn't boolined the batarang first and so the texture would warp in an odd manor and also the back of the batarang shouldn't have the glowing blue circle which it did my next asset however would give me an idea of how to fix this problem as it would require some unique texturing.

The companion cube

This was a interesting asset to make as its comprised of a cube with an outer mantle which is where the main interesting geometry which separates the item from a default cube is. That along with the texture.

To make this I put a lot of loop cuts into the cube to separate out the main cube and textured the corners to create the outer squares. I then selected the outer mantle with the L hotkey which select the geometry that is directly connected to it and hid the rest of the inner cube after insetting and moving the geometry around until I was happy I then used the Boolean tool the cube to put the circular holes into the cube. from there I replaced the inner cube using the companion cube texture below to create the inner portion and then applying the firmament unwrap to the white corner to create the full textured cube. I ran into a couple of issues however when trying to initially unwrap the cube and apply the textures to all the faces. the texture would bug out and not apply across the faces so I decided to work around it applying the texture to one face and then cloning that face into a full cube. I then reapplied the textured firmament and got my final render.

Going back and retexturing

Getting the idea from my companion cube I went back and changed the texturing of the batarang by playing the faces in the black portion fixing the texturing for this model.

Next i began work on my bigger assets which would be the swords. The great knife, the weapon wielded by pyramid head in the Silent hill franchise. the blade of the ruined king, the weapon wielded by Veigo from the game league of legends, the buster sword from final fantast, which work can already be seen completed on and finally the moonlight greatsword from demon souls. Something I didn't particularly anticipate is that although these swords would be the larger objects that wouldn't necessarily mean that they were the most geometrically complex and they varied by quite a large margin. This can be seen comparing Viegos' blade of the ruined king to the great knife both of which are large but the blade of the ruined king is significantly more geometrically complex compared to the great knife. Learning from my previous mistake I textured this sword as I went using my reference image as a wrap in order to get my knife accurate.

The geometry isn't all that complex a cylinder composes the handle and the blade of the knife is just a box. The pummel is just the end of the sphere that has been bevelled and as I wanted to be accurate the texture process for this knife was a shrink wrap style that I implement with several of my other models that can be seen both before and after this sword.

In stark contrast to both the buster sword and clouds buster sword came ruined king viegos sword and this was difficult. I was originally planning on making an enterally different weapon in its place being Gwens scissors, who happens to be the enemy of Viego, Where the geometry of gwens scissors is highly geometric and simplistic Viegos has far more curves and other finicky pieces. This can be seen below.

As you can see that even though both weapons share curves Gwen's scissors while intricate are geometrically simple with a few S curves forming various patterns for the scissors veigos sword on the other hand shows several small curves on not only the hilt but the blades themselves appear to curve upwards. This makes a large difference as the amount of faces required goes up as well as the intricacy of the geometry.

The simplistic solution would be to stick to the plan and just make gwens scissors instead however Viego as a character and his story has had quite an effect on the jokes and conversations of myself and my friends to the point that they prompted me to change my initial decision and instead try to tackle veigos sword and it would be the hardest part of my entire project topping the now deleted morning star for the most complex model I had to handle.

The blade of the ruined king has a several different different variations the one I displayed in my Gwens scissor comparison is just one of many designs and at first I used the image above as a reference modelling the blade after the refence above however this came with a large set of problems primarily that my reference image was off centre as well as the sword itself not being central. Another huge issue I was having was that I couldn't decide on which sword I wanted to make as their is the physical version that Viego wielded when he was alive and the phantom construction he summons when he became the ruined king. At this point I decided to start from scratch using the valorant blade of the ruined king as a reference for my, now decided, combination blade which could take the ephemeral colours off the phantom sword and the more corporal smaller features from the physical sword that he used to have.

As you can see I began with the blade and gems using a simple plane extrusion technique to create the blade. The gems were originally spheres however they had their poly counts reduced to create this gem like structure. This would be the easiest portion of the swords creation.

Next I had to decide how I wanted to make the hilt and this is where the main problems began the hilt is where the majority of the complex geometry is located with the strange snaking curves and they way everything seems to be bevelled and overlapped its quite obvious that this original model was sculpted if not fully at least partially. and unfortunately for me I have no experience in sculpting and was not about to begin in the half way point of my gant chart. I chose the ignore the more refined details like the snaking curves going over the gems however even the more basic features were proving to be n issue. I spent a large amount of time just experimenting and deciding how to approach the hand trying cylinders and curves and bevelled squares. Making it out of several meshes or just one. It was a nightmare off a mesh to work with that had constant clipping and overlapping vertices and I constantly had to spend time cleaning up Ngons (faces with more than five edges/vertices) which took up even more of my time. Below you can see one of my initial ideas of using a mirrors curve for the hilt while using separate mesh's for the end portions of the hilt but it just looked to out of place having the meshes being separated like it was so I again went back too the drawing board with the hilt.

blade of the ruined king screenshot 2.png

blade of the ruined king screenshot 1.png

After using curves and other meshes to experiment with the hilt I moved on to making the blade out of a singular mesh and in fact I used one of the gems to do it. By extruding the sides out but leaving the centre the same I could have the gem be the centre piece of the sword without having to use any other additional meshes to do it. Then I could simply use the mirror modifier to make the end pieces and have it show up on both sides.

After finishing the cross guard of the sword I did the side pieces again by extruding out the sides and making it fit the reference similar to how the blade was made with a plane but I just used the original extruded mesh to keep it all as one model after this I moved onto the other difficult portion which is the wrap on the handle

because the handle was wrapped in cloth or leather I knew I would have to use different meshes to achieve a similar effect and this also went through some trial and error however I decided in the end to use the screw modifier and literally wrap the hilt with this plane.

at the end of this process I discovered that my hilt was not actually symmetrical so I straightened out the edges and mirrored it so it would be and at this point my geometry was completed.

I then moved onto the texturing process which was a simple colour ramp node to change the colour to a ruination green and from there the blade was finished the entire process took around four days which was the most I had worked on an asset in this entire project.

Next was the cabinet the process for the cabinet was very simple I used a half of a box and bevelled some edges to create the wardrove structure and then used the mirror modifier to turn that half into a whole I then applied a wood texture that fit the colour theme I was looking for and the cabinet was done. I imported my models and began construction of my scene.

After I began compiling my project I decided now was the time to make the large sword of moonlight so I began. I started with a simple diamond shape but realised I that I was unsure of how to curve it to match the reference images curve so I experimented with a few ideas I was going to use the curve tool however I found out that an addon existed called looptools which would allow me to designate the curve by scaling in part of the shape and then the program would generate the curve for me I could then replicate this for the other sides.

After some simple scaling I was happy with it so I extruded the parts I needed to and then made the blade using the mirror modifier on the model

After this I made the handle of the sword with some extrusions and bevels and I was finished with the greatblade of moonlight.

The golden eye 64 golden gun was a classic weapon and I did want to include a firearm in the cabinet. Nothing to complex just some simple extrusions on a cube and a cylinder as well as a gold texture