INTERACTIVE :: 31/08/16 - Fun with Toon Shading

My moth was chosen for the main character of our game!  We plan to adjust it as needed if it doesn't suit the game aesthetic or needs to fit better within the world.

After our lesson on toon shaders and how we can use them to create models for maya, I made a very hasty model of our moth character minus hair and played around with light sources and colors.

I may need to up the poly count as I don't really like how jagged and blocky everything is at the momoent

INTERACTIVE :: 29/08/16 - Concepts and Justification

Our group is taking a fantasy approach to the puzzle platformer we have been assigned, and our story revolves around the idea of the war between the Seelie and Unseelie - Light and Dark fairies.  I was responsible for coming up with the backstory for our game, which is as follows:

"The Summer Court has long been protected by the enchantment of their home tree, a vast Alder with branches big enough to house a whole colony of Seelies. But the tree has been stricken with blight and its magic is fading. The moth-like Seelie now face invasion from their ancient enemies, the fire-imbued Unseelie. These enemies are biding their time, preparing for war as the Alder's protective field shrinks with every passing day.

The queen of the Summer Court has chosen you for a secret and important mission - you must pass through the heart of the tree and enter the mortal realm in order to find [fey/sage/creature/bard], [name], and bring them back so that they can reinvigorate the Seelie home. The Unseelie have gotten wind of [name]'s location, and their agents are on their way to the human world, ready to do everything in their power to stop you. 

A violent war is about to break out - you and [name] are the court's only hope for peace. Find them, bring them home, and restore balance to the land of the Fey."


In terms of character design we have used models from games such as the Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, and the Animal Crossing series as a starting point.  We want to go for a simplistic approach with a protagonist reminiscent of older console and PC games, but we also want our character to have charm and appeal to the player.  I wanted the character to appear quite androgynous so that both male and female players could get behind using it.

For my concept, I have focused more strongly on the cute/charming aspect of a moth-fairy character and attempted to keep the design reasonably simple with obvious parts to the character.  My results are much more in line with the designs in Zelda and Animal Crossing than the other artistic influences that we looked at.

Conceptual art:

Refinement:

Color tests:

Our environments take place in the human world, but are looked at through the eyes of a non-human character.  While we use landscapes and artifacts that the player would recognize, we want them to feel wide and vast and unfamiliar, and so have adjusted the scale of things in order to achieve this.  We are hoping that this will lead to innovative use of simple household objects for gameplay, such as bouncing on spiderwebs or using large vines to climb or having to swim through snow and not freeze to death.  A lot of moth species hibernate during winter as well, which adds to the alienation factor.

It was proposed that our first level take place in an abandoned attic and that it was winter in the mundane world - because of this, my color palette is rather heavily desaturated in order to make the protagonist stick out.  There are a lot of colder colors used to add to the wintery effect.

With this concept I wanted to try and express some idea of level progression.  There is a raised area to the back of the building with a hole leading outside to where your objective might be.  The character starts at the top of a stack of boxes and it is insinuated that you must go down to the floor and find your way around debris and abandoned furniture before clinbing dead vines to ascend to the upper beams that will lead you to your goal.  I have tried to use dramatic lighting to guide the player to the right spots and create hazard situations with falling snow.

Initial Sketch:

Lighting:

Color Test:

CINEMATIC :: 22/08/16 - Further considerations

After thinking over my choices last week, I am leaning very heavily towards combining the idea of a fashion style and animation.  I would like my brief to state that I am exploring the combinations of these two disciplines and the animation/results I could produce with both of them.

I think in order to keep things simple, I would like to look at the main styles of lolita and potentially narrow my exploration down to a single style in order to prevent spanning out over too much material.  Off the top of my head, I know that there are three main lolita styles - Classical, Gothic and Sweet.

FASHION ELEMENTS:

- The lolita's ensemble consists of a blouse - often with flared/puff sleeves or buttoned cuffs, a mid-length skirt or jumper-skirt (must end just above the knee and not higher), a fluffy/poofy A-line or Bell-shaped petticoat, knee socks or tights, mary janes, chunky heeled, or wedge shoes, and some form of head accessory (from bows to headbands to bonnets).

- These components create a very distinctive silhouette.  Lolita is defined by the fluffy 'cupcake' shape that the skirt and petticoat create.  This creates a potential for shape language for the animated portion of the assignment, which may help if the direction becomes more abstract.

- The lolita's appearance plays on the idea of 'the princess pining for her prince', and has a very 'doll-like' appeal.  These could lend to potential narratives or themes.

- Other features of the lolita style are whimsical prints, color palettes, lace and elegance - all components that I can play around with in order to help create a final imge or product.

- The history of the lolita seems to draw a lot from fashion choices of influential musicians, and may count as a 'copy culture' that held to the ideals and themes of those musicians.

- Dane has suggested that I look into the physical aspect in order to tie the two mediums together.  He has suggested that I look into the physical process of creating an outfit (i.e dressmaking) and perhaps applying the concepts of animation to that, or vice versa.  I have been struggling to find a way to tie both fashion and animation together, so this idea of the physical component could be what I need to look into in order to begin really creating my brief.


I feel at this point that I want to create a bunch of small things, documenting my process and turning my mistakes and experiments into completed pieces for display.  I have also considered exploring things such as the concept of play or emotion or aesthetic in order to tie the mediums together.

RESEARCH TOPICS:

- Dressmaking - there are plenty of tutorials and patterns for the lolita who wants to make her own clothes.
- Kinetic Fashion - What kind of things have people already done with movement/animation and fashion?
- Principles of Lolita and Animation - What kind of rules and guidelines can I set for myself in order to stay true to the fashion style/animation?  What is similar?  What is different?

At this point I feel like it would be best to educate myself on as much as possible before I begin to write up my brief.

INTERACTIVE :: 16/08/16 - Unity Exercises

At the end of last week we begun work with Unity and were asked to build a tower out of basic 3D objects.  I didn't upload it here, but now I'm realizing that I should have, just in case I forget to load my exercises onto a flash drive and bring it to school again.

So here it is:

Our assignment for today was to create a scene from a photograph, and then adjust the lighting to match an inspiration photo.  Admittedly, I did not find an inspiration photo, but I used one of the textures from NoEmotion HDRs and tried to tweak my scene to match the lighting that it displayed.

Here are the results in the form of my work space:

I'm hoping that we'll learn how to put textures onto our materials soon so that I can make my scene look a bit less matte.

INTERACTIVE :: 15/08/16 - Concept development

We were given feedback on all of the designs we had created so far and were expected to take that feedback into stride and improve on our concepts based on it.  It seems that mine were pretty good overall, but there were a few changes I was asked to make

WEAPON
- Make a more polished, cleaner version
- Give it some battle stats

STEAMPUNK ITEM
- The handle is very clunky.  Rethink this object

ENVIRONMENT
- An idea would be to make the monster less visible to add to the horror/surprise elements.
- Add additional concepts
- Tweak the monster's mouth, give it more teeth.
- Adjust the values in the shaded concept.

As we didn't have to fix all of our concepts, I chose to work on my environments since they needed the most adjustment and development.  Below I have created three additional concepts:

An extra concept of the sunflower's head, with more teeth added as per suggestion.

A profile view of the building, in order to gain a better sense of space within the environment

And finally, an exterior shot of the building, as well as a color palette test.  I used a lot of grungy textures to keep in theme with the horror elements.

CINEMATIC :: 15/08/16 - Trans-disciplinary brainstorming

Planning a project for Dane's class reminds me a lot of my earlier course in Creative Technologies at AUT as the process is very similar to the self imposed briefs I spent doing there.  The idea of focusing on the process of the journey rather than the end result is nonetheless still quite difficult to pin down, as it is far simpler to think about an end result and then take steps to gaining it over thinking about how you are going to explore something and different ways to do it and plan for the inevitable unexpected results that will crop up.

We have been tasked with combining the medium of animation with something wholly outside of the animation field and I've been thinking a lot about the kind of thing I want to explore or do.  It was suggested that we look to things that we were already interested in so we would be more familiar with the materials.  These are the following areas I've thought about the most for my medium, though I have yet to settle on a definite subject

• Theology
  Specifically looking for patterns or events in mythologies, but as most of these are narratives that exist to impart a specific teaching or lesson, I'm wondering if this is the best choice.  Other thoughts were to look into the disciplines or rules within a religion such as the ten commandments of christianity, or the path to enlightenment in buddhism.  Particulars that translate into animation could be the kind of symbolism or imagery that a culture uses, along with colors and what kind of art mediums or products are used to convey the culture's idea of holy and sacred.  Things like gold leaf for gilding, five color thread for mala, and the renaissance use of lapis lazuli come to mind.  I also like the idea of taking patterns of a specific religion/culture and finding a way to translate them into animation without using a direct narrative, but these also tend to be rooted in symbolism, and with such a delicate subject, I am rather wary of accidentally appropriating the culture in some way.
  
  
• Fashion
  Lolita, Mori-kei, and Harajuku styles have been an area of interest for me recently, and I have been wondering if I could combine ideas from these fashion movements into animated expression or kinetic sculpture.  Each style has its own set of rules, sub-cultures, themes, colors and motifs that one could carry across to animation, and I feel one could bring it further into the 3D/Mixed media element through use of fabrics and sculpture.  The silhouette of a mori-kei is far different from that of a lolita, so perhaps shapes could play into it as well.  In a way it could be a form of synesthesia on its own, blending the ideals, textures, colors etc. of a fashion movement into a form of animation.  I feel like this would perhaps work best as a sculptural piece, though how or what I would even make is still incredibly up in the air.
  
  
• Psychology
  After watching Dane's test animation a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of the idea of disassociation and the slow desynchronizing sensation that one gets under that kind of influence.  Because of this, I feel like it would be interesting to explore the idea of mental illness and abstract animation further, looking into how such a condition changes the way one feels and behaves, and replicating it in an animated medium.  It brings to mind the works of Bryan Lewis Saunders and his series of pictures he drew while under the influence of various drugs.  While I'm not prepared to go to such extreme measures, I wonder if I could isolate some aspect of conditions like anxiety, depression, disassociation or mania and apply its symptoms in a visual form.

On further inspection, I feel like fashion would be the safest choice of the three, as if I mess up or get something wrong, I'm much less likely to offend someone than accidentally making a statement on their mental illness or insulting their religion.

INTERACTIVE :: 9/08/16 - Environment exercise

For this exercise we had to create a horror environment whilst considering simple texturing, guiding light sources and object placement.  We also had to include a sunflower in some form and a baby's rattle.  My environment ended up consisting of nothing but the sunflower and rattle, tucked comfortably in a corner of a dilapidated and overgrown greenhouse-esque building.

Initial Sketch

+ Lighting/texture

I feel like greyscale suits it a lot and makes it particularly striking, so I have chosen not to add any colors at this time

INTERACTIVE :: 07/08/16 - Hypertext Exercises

We have been asked to create three objects for an in-game world as part of our homework for our lesson on hypertext - A tome, a weapon + flavor text, and a steampunk item + flavor text.

[[Here are the first two and I'll do the third when i'm more awake in the morning]]

1.  Tome

[[A scrap of paper found on the nightstand of a room at a tavern.  The following is scrawled on it in an orderly but still untidy script

"Dearest Brother,
I pray you are well.  Travel has led us to the warm air of the south and Vasili and I are considering settling down.
Five towns ago a man tried to knife me in the night, we found a letter with your script on him and it pains my heart that you continue to pursue us still.  It has been ten years brother, surely you want to rest as much as we do?  We are hale and hearty and we can be swift, should you follow us we will find a way to disappear.
Please take care of yourself and your own family.  Treat us as the ghosts you wish we already were.

You are my blood and I love you still,
Siehlo"]]


2.  Weapon

[[Pokey Blade

A rare and quirky blade, needle thin and razor sharp.  The craftsmanship suggests it hails from the under-earth and the nocturnal folk that live within.  This particular blade is stamped with the seal of the Hedgefolk Queen, and was no doubt a favor bestowed to her champion once upon a kingdom ago.  The hedgehog motif commands loyalty from the hedgefolk court, and brandishing it towards them will cause them to rally to you no matter what your cause.]]


3.  Steampunk Object

[[The Hand Mirror of Madame Banshee

Always eager to entertain the unwary guest, the Madame Banshee kept a series of seven vanities fitted with ecto-suppressing watchwork devices.  Pressurized by steam and sprockets, each device suppressed a spirit that was causing her grief about her graveside home.  The madame was notorious for leaving this particular hand mirror in the rooms of her guests, where the spirit would grow restless and moan if the mirror was left alone, or offer a hearty fright to the unsuspecting victim who peered into its depths.  Each mechanism could be depressurized to release the spirit within but after such cramped confines, one would find it to be loathe to return to its prison.]]

CINEMATIC :: 5/08/16 - Synesthesia exercise

Class today was spent exploring Synesthesia and the idea of translating taste across to a visual medium.  While I ate both a stick of green tea pocky and some strange mandarin peel thing, I only ended up making an animation for the pocky.

I did however, take some visual notes on how the mandarin peel made me feel