Christmas Time and Hand in.

As expected working over Christmas has been a difficult and at times, sluggish process. However I've completed what I needed to complete, and managed to do a bit extra, not all of it, but a bit. It's a project that I think I'll end up working on later down the line, to make it truly portfolio worthy. For the moment my priority is the hand in, and later it will be my portfolio.

So I've managed to create my cartridge and muzzle flash particle systems. I did this in a similar way to how I created my fire for the projectile. I used engine's existing 'explosion' particle system as a guideline for the muzzle flash, and I used 'lit steam' for my cartridge. Deciding what to do for my guns cartridge was a bit tricky as my gun shoots fireballs, so in reality it wouldn't have any shells ejected from it. However it would probably emit steam from the vents I added to part of the gun barrel, and so I decided that having steam come out of the barrel would be the best course of action.

I had a bit of an issue initially with my gun's cartridge system ejecting properly. I made a socket for the barrel where I wanted the steam to emit from, and changed the blueprints accordingly. However at first all that was happening was the steam was coming out from the ground, or so it seemed. I tried adding a basic square mesh to my ejector blueprint and saw that the issue was that the cartridge would come out of the barrel, fall to the floor and then the particle system would come into effect. The fix was relatively simple however, I simply changed gravity on the blueprint to 0, and this resulted in my steam coming out of the vents and moving up and away from the gun as it should. It still isn't perfect and I would have liked to tweak the particle system or blueprints a bit more to make the steam clump together into clouds a bit less, however for the time being I have to call it done, because, deadlines.

Here are all three particle systems used for my projectile, cartridge and gun flash:

Something I realised over Christmas was that I'd also missed out a few essential parts of my model (for functionality). I hadn't modelled the anode and cathode inside the beakers, or the wires connecting from inside the beaker to the ones outside. This was a pretty easy fix though as modelling those elements didn't take me outside the tri limit, and I could share texture space with my existing wires and copper pipes. Changing the gun-pitch in engine initially stopped the cartridge blueprint from working properly, however as always, removing collision and re-compiling blueprints did the trick.

Finally in regards to engine work I managed to get the liquid in the beakers moving (as you can sort of see above with the waves I captured in the screenshot). Initially I had a bit of trouble with them, as I used vertex paint in max to colour only the top vertexes white so they should be the only ones moving, however for some reason the whole mesh was moving rather than just the top layer. It was also moving up and down rather than rippling, which is another thing I wanted to fix. Unfortunetely I actually fixed this after the dead-line, but at least I got it done for my portfolio. It was simply a matter of re-uploading the gun pitch in engine but changing one of the settings when I imported it. Frustratingly simple as always.

So the final material for them looks like this:

In regards to the visual aspect of this project then, I spent Christmas cleaning up my concepts for hand-in, and creating a few promo concepts to boot.

I tried to go for a consistent style with my concepts, and keep them clean and professional looking. Building off of one of our previous lectures I also wanted to have a go at starting to create a brand for myself. As my blog name is AtomicArtist, and as someone that wants to keep my love of science reflected in my work as an artist, I decided to create a simple logo of an atom with a paintbrush through It, to represent my love of the two subjects. I also made the font a bit worn and faded to stick to an 'atomic' theme (playing off atomic as in atoms, and apocalyptic).

So here are my cleaned up concepts:

And here is my annotated process for the initial stages of concepting:

The first promo concept I wanted to complete was blueprints. This is because as I mentioned previously, I want my gun to be inspired by the video game portal. Blueprints matches that technical feel to aperture laboratories, and when searching for portal promotional art, I came across quite a few blueprints of the famous portal gun, and sentry turrets.

I wanted to do blueprints, a science poster and a more 'beauty shot' concept for my turret, so I collected all three on the first moodboard, and the second is more aperture specific.

To create the blueprints then, I did clay renders from max using the quickline silver renderer as this gave me the cleanest results. I initially tried to use the tech render but it didn't catch all the lines that I needed it to, so I got a better result doing that in Photoshop. In photoshop then I used 'filter-stylise-find edges to get my gun outlined. This did most of the work for me, but I did have to go in and clean up/add a few of the edges by hand. I also added 'stroke' to the layer to get more of a variation in line depth.

I was following this tutorial for the blueprints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZC_aHeVKAk -blueprints

I used the tape measure tool in max to get the measurements for my gun, in response to feedback that adding some technical measurements would help sell the gun as something created for manufacturing purposes.

So here are the final blueprints I ended up with:

To make my retro science paper I used a screenshot from marmoset as my base.

I then played around with layer effects in photoshop and used the old paper base I've used for all my concepts for consistency. I played around with various brushes, and created a lab wall background for the poster to be pinned to. The text I added to it to keep with the humour of the game, adding in subtle insults and so on.

I spent a lot of time considering the layout of my poster which I referenced from various pieces of science illustration I'd gathered that inspired me. I also cleaned up my illustration of how the gun works and added it in as a nice bit of 'science info' to make the poster feel more informative and less purely aesthetic.

Anyway here it is:

I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out. It's the first time I've actually done some promotional artwork for a project and despite the stress I am glad it's getting pushed this year, as it really prepares me for creating a proper portfolio. Plus it's always nice to see your design presented as you envisioned it, rather than as the messy concepts I start out with. All in all despite the utter stress this project has caused me, it's been a huge learning curve (as always) and I'm proud of the outcome. It's certainly the best work I've produced in a long time (design and execution wise). I also really enjoyed learning engine more, and am looking forward to working in it more in the future. I'd really like to learn how to do more work with visual effects and blueprints!

Finally I spent a bit of time as I always do at the end of a project, just making sure everything was neat and clean ready for hand in, and checking my project against the brief one last time.

I also did my renders in both max and marmoset. The Marmoset renders were more for my portfolio, and the ones in Max were for hand in. They will be on the next blog post.

I'm going to do a blog post after this one with all the work for this project laid out in one place. To make things easier for marking.

But hey, phew, at least this project is over and I made the deadline. University victories!