Mantaway Upgrade

This week we gave our mobile game a little upgrade...

Firstly and most importantly, for those who have play-tested our mobile game, we have changed the camera angle!

The camera angle now moves linearly. Therefore, the level design of the game has also been updated. Which brings us back to last week, as mentioned before I was making 3D corals. So far I have made two but I will be making a third. Take a look...

I am also testing a water effect in Blender for my Final Year Project.

Apologies for the graininess, its a working progress...

I made the corals in Blender as I am still in the process of getting used to using Blender. So I thought it would be good practice. I made the red one on the left by creating a cube and extruding the faces to make all the branches. I then added subdivisions - not too many though because I know I need to keep the poly count down - to allow the edges to look smoother and moved around the vertices to enhance the shape.

For the second one (yellow on the right), I had a little more fun with. Thanks to the help of Konstantin, I learnt about a skin modifier in Blender. This means that I took a single vertex and extruded it to make all the branches, the key here is to select the now vertex 'mesh' I created and apply scale to it - or else it really wont work (I learnt that the not so fun way). Once I applied scale, I then added the skin modifier and it created cubes that ran along each of the branches I made. I then tried to re-mesh it in Blender, but it made the mesh not very clean geometry. I then exported the cubed mesh as an OBJ file and then took that file and imported it into Maya. Had fun jumping around for a bit.

On a side note, apologies to those of you who do not know what I am talking about. It must sound very confusing to you. For those of you who do, keep up we are moving on!

Once in Maya I then realised that the cubes had decided to attach to some other cube's vertices. I then went about deleting the faces of the cubes that were trying to merge together and began forming proper structure in how they joined. I made sure all faces were quadrilaterals (because with all the cubes wanting to merge into each other they formed some triangles in the process).

When all of that was fixed. I smoothed it in maya. Took a few second to appreciate that I managed to fix it and it actually looked nice. Then began making a UV to texture it. Then I exported that into an OBJ file, imported it into Substance Painter. Initially started painting with an alpha to get nice looking texture. Realised I had made too much detail and started again. I then used the same brush I made with the Alpha and just painted a texture on with a slightly darker colour to the base. Looking back now you most likely wont even see that. However, as an art student even though no one else would most likely see it, I prefer to have some detail.

Now, as we work towards our final deadline, I want to update some of the level select assets. I want to make them more stylised and have a paint effect look to them.

Don't worry, I am still making sure I don't make them too detailed!

Wish me good luck!

I'll update here really soon with images of some - hopefully really artistic looking - assets.

Until next time!

Chanae