WEEK 1: Beginning of the End

And so starts the my final academic year studying game art design. As a welcoming back present us third years were presented with a dozen industry briefs, of which we had to choose 3 to undertake. having worked quite a bit over the summer the transition from holiday to term time was quite an easy one. This being said, out of the several briefs that I could have worked on I thought it would be wise to go with something in my comfort zone. Sorry for not being adventurous.

To start of the year I decided to go with the partly styalised prop brief. This 3 week project asks us to model an already concepted post apocalyptic weapon that could be altered using our own artistic licence . Today marks the end of the first week of the project, I am pleased to say that so far I have completed what I set out to do. As the weapon had already been concepted I didn't need to spend that long altering the design. however, I did make a few changes that would help me visualise the weapon in a 3d space and also make sense of how the weapon would operate if it were a real life tool. to do this a drew up a mind up displaying the different objects that the weapon could be made from, I then photobashed what the final outcome could look like.

After making a few alterations to the already concepted idea I began modelling the weapon in 3ds max. within the brief were several limitation that I would need to follow, one of which is to keep the models triangle count below 10000. with this in mind I began modelling a relatively low poly weapon that I could then add to at the end. the modelling stage is also the stage I do most of my own concepting. having the main shapes blocked out I can the rearrange the overall shape of the model. this took up the majority of the week to complete On Friday I was visited by my tutors that gave me critique on the weapon. I was told what looked good what worked and what I could do to improve the design. below is an action plan I set myself, 1. The main focus of a gun in a first person shooter is the sights. Add character (variety of shapes, noise to make it stand out)

2. In most FPSs the left side of the gun is always in the players field of vision. Remove tries from the right side to add to the left (e.g. the wire is quite angular, take tris from the right side to round it off a little more

3. The project is 'partly styalised'. go back into the mesh and alter a few shapes to follow in this style. The plan is to start texturing the gun early next week. finding the modelling side to this project quite easy I hope to explore the texturing side a lot further. one way I plan on doing this is getting to grips with the texturing software substance painter.