This week I made final details and changes to my sword includiing minor colour changes, and specular and reflection tweaks.
I then decided I had time to add more animation elements. This was my first time trying particle simulation on Maya.
I selected the blade and added a fire effect to the surface of the mesh.
After tweaking the settings a lot, such as the density and spread of fire, and the radius and roundness of the particles, I changed the colour of my fire to the appropriate colouring of my pallette for my sword.
I then realised to render it out I needed to use Maya software instead of arnold which I was using for my sword. To get around this I decided to render the sword and fire out seperately and merge them in Nuke after.
I had made a simple animation of a camera turning 360 degrees around the sword to ensure all lighting and shadowing would be seen. I copy and pasted this camera to the fire scene so that they would merge perfectly at the same position and timing as each other when rendered.
I then rendered out my sword and merged these in Nuke.
I re-did these in HD and then wanted to show off more of the textures in my final video, so I made another camera animation zooming into parts of my sword all over, and repeated the rendering process of the fire with the copied camera, and the sword and then merged these.
I put all of these videos together in Da Vinci Resolve and rendered out my final project including development of my model.
This week I developed my thesis proposal more by defining what the chapters in my thesis would be, and writing the general outline for each chapter:
General outline of each chapter
Introduction
For my introduction, I will introduce my topic and argument, and briefly explain the main factors of my thesis. I will explain visual effects and introduce some topics of how it is involved in video games, and how I will be exploring its implementation within games.
Literature review
My literature review will be introducing some of my sources, how I found these, and how they really help me develop my thesis discussions. I will also be explaining how they link to my topic, and how they have helped me delve into the appropriate research and data needed to back up points in my thesis.
Common game mechanics in combat-led games
This chapter will look at common game mechanics used in games such as progression bars, achievements, levelling up, and experience points, in accordance with how these are used during combat in games, and visual effects’ part in creating these.
Weapon design
This chapter will be more looking at 3D modelling, a huge part of visual effects, and how the design of certain weapons in different genres affects the game’s combat experience. For example, different sword designs could be linked to certain specialities in combat, meaning the character and player feels more of a link to the combat they are playing, with the aesthetics they are seeing.
Damage and healing
This chapter will look at how visual effects helps create motifs of damage, healing, or death in a game. For example, in most games, a player knows when they are near death, whether that be due to blood appearing on the screen, or a pulsating effect on the screen. I will be exploring visual effects within these elements and how this adds to a gaming experience.
Designing dynamic combat sequences
This chapter will be looking at design elements in combat scenes that are crucial to games and their experience for the player. For example, how chase sequences are made in a way the player knows attacking isn’t an option and a chase sequence is coming. For example, visual effects use specific creature design to indicate a threat that no weapons can solve, sometimes using only visual aesthetics of the creatures themselves, whilst initiating a chase sequence. I will also be looking at the combat design itself when a wand or sword emits magical spells, or lightning is conjured, and how these sequences are visually produced.
Ethical issues surrounding visual effects in video games
This chapter will be focusing if visual effects in games, making the combat more realistic, etc. is an ethical concern or not, in accordance with the psychology the player experiences, especially targeted at children who play games aimed primarily focused on combat gameplay.
Conclusion
My conclusion will be gathering up all my findings and concluding about everything discussed and rounding up my thesis as a whole.
Our project is now on the phase in which extra details are being polished and compositers are putting the scene all together with the CGI leads.
We had a meeting with one of the course teachers and our feedback was that we needed to play with the lighting to get more of a dramatic feel to the room. I helped alongside the compositers and CGI members to get more of a feel for how this should look.
In the meantime, I also worked on another set of assets to help fill the room up with ‘clutter’. Me and the CGI lead figured it would be good to have something like barrels around the room to fill empty space.
I also had to re upload my light model shorter, so I made some adjustments to it and uploaded my final design.
I began by creating a basic barrel shape, again keeping it simple to not increase the heaviness of the scene. I added details with sizing and extrusion.
I then sorted the UVs ready for substance painter.
For the texturing, I did two designs. I did one with a toxic waste stamp and oil spilling out of it using the particle effect oil brush, which made realistic oil spills. I
I then did one with a warning sign and biohazzard stamp on.
Both had rough steel on as a material, and scratched edges, to look more realistic and resemble wear on the barrel.
This was one of the barrels rendered on maya:
After this week, the team managed to fix the lighting and add all these details in for a more progressed look in the room. Here are examples of the development stage we are at:
This week I made huge progress on texturing my sword. I went through multiple design changes this week, but at the end settled on what I thought fit the design most.
After texturing my blade, I next turned to texturing the top piece of my sword. For the first half of this week, my plan was to try out an ‘arcane’ type of design plan, and colour pallete. Here was my design inspiration for this:
The colours exude purples, oranges and blues. I used substance painter to create the textures. My normal method was to add a copper under material, and after baking the meshes I would add a mask of steel rough edge scratches to add some wear to the material. I would then add details by hand if needed. First, I textured the second ring around the orb.
I then textured the inner diamond, adding a celtic cross with the stamp tool for an extra essence of magic and medevil aesthetic to the sword.
I then did the same method for the inner ring, using the same colours.
Next, I started on the dragon wings. I had some issues with the mesh and UVs for these, The topology needed fixing as there were n-gons, as well ans the UVs needed to be more accurate to the flow of the mesh. After going back and forth with these issues, my texturing was finally working and I could open them in substance painter and texture them. I chose a purple hue for these,
I then worked on the little spikes under the wings, giving them a more lilac tone this time.
The spcae between my blade and top piece seemed like too much of a clean contrast, almost unnatural, so I created a simple indent ring and textured this.
I then worked on the horns. I made these the same colour and wear amount as the wings for consistency. I also textured the moon more of a light blue colour, with some wear around the edges.
I then made a simple surface shader for my orb. I increased the glow to max capcity and made it a turqouise colour as a temporary texture.
I checked my overall sword in rendering to see how the design ws going:
It was then time to move onto the handle. I needed to again go back and fix UVs on this too. I gave it a more rough steel material and added stamps of blood and cracks in various places, as my sword looked too clean.
I then decided to make a proper texture for my orb. I created a glowing orb in subsatnce painter using the glow tool and glass texture.
This didn’t look right in maya, and didn’t give the effect I wanted. What actually worked better was using the ai standard surface preset of glass, and adjusting the specular and transmission effects to create a glowing blue texture.
I then checked my overall sword again in render:
About halfway into this week, I had a change of heart on design for my sword. I loved this design, but something about it wasn’t as eye opening as I originally wanted. I decided to take direct references from a game which inspired this sword design to begin with: World of warcraft.
One of my favourite classes to be on WoW is a death knight, with a speciality of ‘blood’ damage. This is a certain aesthetic which is very satifying to the eye especially to me in fantasy games, here are some inspiration photos:
The colour pallete and theme is full of reds and blues, a really interesting colour mix due to the contrast of warm and cold colours. I really wanted to explore this design as well as the arcane theme, and make my desicion from there.
Before changing the textures, you may have realised I had an issue with my texturing on my dragon wing mesh in previous renders. There were a select few faces around the models that were darker or lighter, the opposite to the rest.
I went through a day of solving issues with this topoligy, and found it was due to overlapping faces and holes in my mesh. I then had to re-do Uvs and then I was able to continue.
I re textured some of my materials with a darker red colour. I also sized in the top piece such as the rings, as I felt there was too much empty space. I made minor changes such as making things more or less worn, adding more details and blood to certain areas, but here is the development of re-texturing my model:
Wings lit up in light
Not against black
I tried this out on my original HDRI to see if the lighting was better, as some of the details you can’t see in these. I also made the blade match colours with the metal on the handle, and made the horns slighly lighter to see the details better.
When I was happy with this progress, I started animating the orb. I got it to turn 360 degrees and bob slightly up and down, to indicate it is floating.
This week I had a meeting with my thesis advisor, and got some feedback on my draft introduction.
My articulation was seen to be off in describing what I was talking about. I was told I had to explain what my argument was the way I described it in words to my advisor. I editied my introduction accordingly:
Draft Introduction
Video games offer a unique experience to players through interactivity within a digitally created environment, playing characters with fictional backstories and motives, and in most cases, combat scenes with strategies and methods taught to progress the game and provide immersive gameplay.
This thesis will be looking at combat within video games, and more specifically, how visual effects enhance this part of the experience in video games. Visual effects are most known to bring to life action and magic in films and TV that can’t be filmed or to enhance scenes that have in fact been filmed. In worlds that are completely digital, and nothing is real, visual effects are included seamlessly in history within video games. Choices made by the game’s creators such as weapon designs, creature design, game mechanics, chase sequences, and bodily damage all arguably lean on visual effects to enhance the combat experience. For example, “combat designers will work on the player’s experience when the player meets enemies” (Killick, 2022), or even work on signifying to the player they are about to die and require health. These are common in genres such as survival horror and fantasy games, both of which we will be delving into with game examples, and conducting research on the effective visual changes some of these methods bring to games. Moreover, if visual effects in some modern games provide too much of an overcooked scene; the comparison with older games, and why these are still favoured over hyper-realism.
There is an ethical side to look at when any mention of violence is made to seem more realistic or immersive in video games, specifically linked to psychology when playing a game, and the development of psychology within children, who are the main target audience for many games revolved purely around combat. Whether visual effects’ implementation affects these issues will be discussed and researched.
–
I was then told my keywords were too vauge and some of them not needed. I removed ones such as ‘guns’ and ‘meele’ as my advisor said these wouldn’t really bring up the academic sources I was looking for.
I then worked on my research method design and coming up with the names of chapters I would be using to write my brief outline of each. My advisor said that conducting my own research wouldn’t be a great idea, and to stick to getting data from other researchers online:
Research design methods
My research will consist of gathering data and information from sources online that other researchers have identified. Using my keywords, I have and will find papers, other theses and articles that agree with or contradict my argument, and implement them into my thesis to back up my statements throughout. I will conduct this research using academic online search engines and library resources at my University. With these academic papers I will compare and contrast them, and use these findings to aid my thesis.
This week, i sat down with the CGI lead to help with layout of the room, and sizing of certain objects. After many layout options, we decided on the following layout.
Render test / layout
I was then asked to create the light to hang from the pipes. I tried to keep this asset simple as we did not want to add more heaviness to the rendered scene.
I used a sized down pipe, and beveled it very slighly.
I then created beams and made sure they all met at the top at an angle.
I then created another beveled pipe for the top of the light, with details using edge loops and extrustion.
I then duplicated the light and sized it down to add a detail and shading the the top of the lighting. I made the beams a rubber material, the light an irredescent bulb material, anf the rest black plastic.
On feedback, I was told to make the light shorter, so I resized the elements of the light to be more short, and uploaded this to google drive.
Next week I will keep improving on this light and also start on making barrels for the corner of the room.
This week I sorted out UVs on my sword, and started texturing.
To sort out my UVs, I used a variety of ways to make sure they were working well and ready for texturing. I went through each part of my sword individually and did this. In some cases, I used a planar UV tile, some I used a camera based on some faces. I cut some parts of the UVs so that I could lay them out differently, as they did not follow the UVs correctly. I also used the unfold and straighten UVs tool a lot to work these out correctly.
The most difficult part of the sword to UV was the dragon wings. The topology on these were the most complex to I had to play around with the different tools until I had UVs I could work with.
I then was able to start texturing on Substance Painter. I started with the blade. After trying multiple metal bases, I found a material I liked for the blade.
First two metal materials I tried
I then added scratches by hand using a paint layer.
After creating multiple scratches, and details, I exported these textures to maya, and sorted them out on the hypershade editor, putting all the correct nodes into the right inputs.
I then added a hdri to view this texture with the right lighting I wanted. To match the texture in adobe substance painter, I had to export the triangulated mesh model.
I checked these textures on the render window.
One thing that stood out to me is that I felt like the indents were too harsh. I selected faces and brought them up to a closer level, so that these were more subtle.
I was happy with my blade, and ready to texture the rest of my model next week.
This week I conducted more research for sources (bottom of page) and made a draft of my first 3 parts of my Thesis proposal – my key words, contents page and Draft introduction:
Contents
Page
3 – Key words
4 – Draft Introduction
5 – Research design methods
6 – General outline of each chapter
7 – Draft Literature review
8 – A draft chapter
9 – Indicative bibliography
Keywords
• Combat
• Visual effects
• Video games
• Spells
• Weapon design
• Melee
• Swords
• Guns
• Creatures
• Survival Horror
• Fantasy
• Game mechanics
• Health
Draft Introduction
Video games offer a unique experience to players through interactivity within a digitally created environment, playing characters with fictional backstories and motives, and in the majority of cases, intense and riveting combat scenes, with strategies and methods taught to progress the game and provide immersive gameplay.
This thesis will be looking at the latter, combat within video games, and more specifically, how visual effects aid this part of the experience in video games, negatively or positively. Visual effects are most known to bring to life action and magic in films and TV that can’t be filmed or to enhance scenes that have in fact been filmed. In worlds that are completely digital, and nothing is real, visual effects are included seamlessly in history within video games. Choices made by the creators of the game such as weapon designs, creature design, even game mechanics, chase sequences, and bodily damage all arguably lean on visual effects to enhance the combat experience. For example, “combat designers will work on the player’s experience when the player meets enemies” (Killick, 2022), or even work on signifying to the player they are about to die and require health. These are common in genres such as survival horror and fantasy games, both of which we will be delving into, with game examples, and conducting research on the effective visual changes some of these methods bring to games, and how people react to these.
There is an ethical side to look at when any mention of violence is made to seem more realistic or immersive in video games, specifically linked to psychology when playing a game, and the development of psychology within children, who are the main target audience for many games revolved purely around combat. Whether visual effects’ implementation affects these issues that are debated will be discussed and researched.
–
I also conducted more research of sources and quotes I will be able to use in my thesis proposal and maybe even my thesis:
“the concept of “reported realism” as an alternate analytical tool to account for the impression of truth and authenticity produced by specific stylistic components of these representations of combat violence.”
– Bender, S.M., 2014. Blood splats and bodily collapse: Reported realism and the perception of violence in combat films and video games. Projections, 8(2)
“Combat designers will work on the player’s experience when the player meets enemies.
– Killick, M., 2022. Video Games: Under the Hood. In The Way We Play: Theory of Game Design (pp. 27-45). Berkeley, CA: Apress.
Game Mechanics –
“games involving war, combat, or adventures may provide opportunities for psychological satisfactions that are irrespective of the violent elements within the games.”
“opportunities for mastery, achievement, heroism, and self-directed action.”
“players often “like” the act of killing in games primarily because it represents feedback of progress or advancement through the game.”
– Przybylski, A.K., Ryan, R.M. and Rigby, C.S., 2009. The motivating role of violence in video games. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 35(2)
This week I worked on optimising my models, getting them approved by teachers and my group, especially my CGI Lead, and making sure it was uploaded to the group drive to put into the scene.
First, I decided to change my HDRI, as feedback from my last upload on Ftrack for my terminal was that my model had too much gleam coming from the highlights. I picked a simple studio to ensure lighting wasn’t too powerful and there was no hues of other colours.
I then made sure specular and transmission was lowered slightly on my materials, and dropped the intensity slighly on the lighting.
More feedback recieved was that my models included too much noise, and the render quality needed to be increased. I solved this by increading the resolution of my render, and importing this to Nuke, where I then used the denoise node to ensure all noise possible would be improved.
I then uploaded this render to Ftrack.
This was then approved.
I then made a 360 degrees render of my control desk, which was my second asset I had been working on alongside the terminal, and uploaded this on ftrack for feedback.
This was also approved.
I then decided to check in with my CGI Lead to ensure there were not any more changes needed before I started on my third asset, and uploaded these to the drive. My feedback from the group was that my model needed to be optimised as some meshes were too heavy. Especially the type meshes for the letters on the keyboard which I though may be a problem we run into.
I first worked on reducing the topology on the mini screens as these were quite heavy too. With deleting the unessesary edges and making sure there were no n-gons, these were way less heavy for the model and scene.
Next, we decided it would be best if my keyboard was textured instead of having type meshes for each letter. After fixing the UVs on my keyboard by deleting unsessesary faces and changing the UVs to planar view so they weren’t slanted, I turned to adobe substance to create a plastic grainy texture, and used the font stamp to create every individual letter printed on the texture.
I then exported this texture, and made sure all of the height, metalness, normal and base colour files were uploaded to the right places using the nodes on the hypershade tab.
This lowered the heaviness greatly. I then uploaded all my textures and models to google drive. However, I discovered selecting ’embed media’ this imported the models with some textures ready for opeing in maya. I informed the CGI lead as this would mean he may not have to link every png file to every part of people’s models and this would reduce tiime speant doing this.
I then requested to see my model in the pre vis of the room, to see lighting and placement in the scene. This is my model in the draft room:
With these models approved, I can move onto modelling my third asset next week.
This week I finished the handle, details and overall base model of my sword.
I first had to finish adding simple shapes to complete the handle. I created a diamond shape coming from the ring I had created reviously, with multiple faces so it would be three dimensional when extruded.
I created a simple handle stick from a cylinder, adding edge loops and sizing in some edges to create a handle shape. I then created horn like shapes potruding from the handle stick. I did this by making the basic shape with a planar polygon in 2D side view like usual, and then extruded this, and flipped it round to create the symmetry on the other side of the handle.
I then rotated these to follow more of the angle the other spiked elements on the sword followed.
Next I wanted to add an arrow effect on the top of the handle. I did this by using the edge loops inserted previously, and extruded these side faces upwards at an angle for the slanted effect similar to an arroow.
I then added small details to the handle stick using edge loops and inward extrusion. This is the wireframe after all these changes were added or made:
Next, I made a simple moon shape in 2D view, to placce at the top of the handle for extra creative fantasy style.
I was finally ready to extrude the whole blade, and follow my edge lines and faces I had set up for the added details using the extrusion tool. I would extrude some faces inwards and some out for depth in the blade. I also extruded outwards the main shapes of my dragon wings.
I fixed the ring on my sword as it was quite jaggedy. I did this by simply creating a new pipe with more subdivision faces and sixing it down.
I checked how my model looked so far on arnold render:
I then worked on the details on my dragon wings. In the topology, again, I had already mapped out the details on the 3D shape I had created, so used the same technique I did on the blade with extruding the paths of certain faces to create the details.
The base model for my sword is completed, meaning I can move onto texturing and animation elements next week.
