Jake Brooks: Games Art 2024-25

 Toolkit 3D - Curve Brushes This session we looked at using curve brushes. These are brushes that can be used to develop secondary details and accessories, and can be used to create hair geometry. They can be made in other software like Maya or Blender, and then brought into Zbrush, or just used in Zbrush on it's own. Curve brushes are made up of multiple sections. The beginning element of the brush, the middle element (which can be replicated to increase its length), and the end element. To start, I went into Blender, and made something I could use for creating a Curve IMM - I kept in mind that the middle part will repeat, and that I should keep the vertices separate. For this, I used a base point to snap things together in Blender. I kept things low-poly so that it's easy to showcase. I then brought this into ZBrush. I made polygroups out of each separate section of the model. I did this by masking each separate sub-tool and pressing control and W to turn them into a polygrou...

 Industry Practice: Case Study Before talking about the audience profile, we all picked games to do short case studies on. For myself, I picked  Little Nightmares  (Tarsier Studios 2017), and how they make the non playable characters in the game that oppose the player seem monstrous. As I go through each section, I will highlight the parts that we could possibly bring into our own game, and explain why. It is very important in industry to have reasons for decisions, and doing case studies is a very in-depth reason for our design decisions. There is a lot of things I want to avoid for my own character design in terms of monstrous qualities, so this case study will also help with that. Before going into individual elements of enemies within Little Nightmares (Tarsier Studios 2017), it is important to know what the game is about and what makes the enemies within it so unsettling. Little Nightmares is a puzzle/platformer game within a 3D side-view environment, where the play...

 Industry Practice: Market Research This week we went through different categories of visual novel games, looking for trends in art styles, narrative subjects etc. Even though I made the market research slide for the pitch presentation for a few weeks ago, It is good for me to look more in depth for trends in the market to make our game more successful in the niche that we are going for.  To cover the most subjects, we completed both qualitative and quantitative research relating to the market. Most Popular In terms of the top games in the Popular tab for visual novels on Itch.io , these are the games that show up. We can immediately see the use of more saturated colours in all but the top game in this category to make the games stand out. We can see that there are themes of romance and horror in some of these games, and that the primary art style seems to stem from anime/manga. The main standout in this category is the top game, you're just imagining it (npckc 2024), which u...

 Industry Practice: Labour market information This week we started by looking at the labour market - the supply of and demand for labour in an economy. We looked at several different charts highlighting the growth of the games economy globally and in the UK too.  I looked into some of the most recent analysis into the UK Games Industry. The first website I looked at was Newzoo, with an article titled Key Insights into UK Gamers | Newzoo Gamer Insights Report (Newzoo 2022), which shows off different aspects of the UK game industry. Firstly, the United Kingdom was the world's sixth largest market judged by game revenues alone as recently as 2022. with nearly "three quarters of the UK online population being game enthusiasts." A blog from Newzoo titled  These video games sold the most units in the US and UK in 2023 | Newzoo data spotlight (Max Otten 2024) highlights which games sold the best in 2023. Fortnite (Epic Games 2017) had the most most monthly average users, w...

  Toolkit 2D - Values In this session, I experimented with values in an image to understand the composition of images more. I am not very confident with environment art at all, so I wanted to try this out until I understood it properly. Before anything else, I turned the image black and white. I then took the values, and contrasted them more to make them more noticeable from each other. I didn't want to end up with a mess of different shades of grey that are all close to each other. I then painted over the image using the same values. I was really unhappy with this attempt at studying values within an image, so I tried again. This time I found photos I took from a hike, which would be great for studying values. I did the exact same method of working - changing the image to black and white, and extracting the values before painting over the image. I honestly found this lesson really helpful. I feel this way of understanding values helps with understand how elements of a photo or com...

 Clothes Creation Today we started by looking at ZModeler. We access this via pressing B>Z>M. It gives us access to polygonal modelling tools, which are useful for hard surface objects. We will be able to use extrude, crease, offset, bridge and divide. I started with a cube, and by going into the geometry menu, I decreased the subdivision count to two and clicked deleted higher and deleted lower. This is to remove the other layers of subdivisions. After this I froze the subdivisions to allow me to use the Zmodeler, and I also clicked Line Fill (Shift + F) to see the lines and subdivisions to make it easier to use the Zmodeler tool. I also turned symmetry off by pressing X. After this, I hold Alt and drag to select a group of subdivisions to work with. This acts like a grouping function normally does, and can be used to work with multiple subdivisions at once. If we hold spacebar, its a contextual action so hovering over the model, we can see what poly-modelling tools we have ...

 Industry Practice: Jester Thumbnails Following on from the feedback, I created some thumbnails to try different styles of the mask and the hands. Starting with the hands. After asking my group, the majority seemed to like style 2 the most for the monster design. Going forward, this is the design I plan to use for the character sheet and sprites. Moving onto the mask designs. After asking my group, everyone preferred pattern 1, since it is the most visually interesting and matches the pattern on the coat. For the eye designs, everyone preferred design 3 but most said to make the spins in the eyes less visible, so that the eyes aren't completely blacked out, but not fully visible either. Overall, I feel like I'm improving my workflow and skillset as someone working as a character art lead, with processes that are used in industry often.

 Industry Practice: Character Design Feedback This week we had a lengthy group meeting surrounding our character designs. One of the reasons we did this is because one of our greatest strengths is our character design, and we feel that if we focus on reflecting upon our design decisions, we can make them even better than they already were. Also linking back to one of the issues that I want to be aware of going forward is the fact that we want to avoid stereotyping these conditions. One way to do this is by having real world roots in parts of our character designs. Therefore we all looked at each others characters critically and gave feedback on what we think would be good to change or look into. I think this is a great process to follow, linking in with the real game industry, as we can justify our own decisions and make our designs the best they can be. First impressions can be everything to players, so this is a highly important process. Giving the character multiple masks that c...

 Toolkit 3D - ZRemesher and Project Before we got into todays session, we got given the information for the next submission due in January. Submission Sunday 26th of January 23:59 ● Your blogs should include evidence of the following: ● Concept work, Thumbnails, rough sketches, character sheets, orthographs etc. ● Research ● Style research: find evidence and influence for the style that you wish to embody in your final sculpt ● Benchmarking: Find artists and products that will exemplify your final concept and sculpt ● Step by step progress of your sculpting process ● Your final sculpt, rendered as a turnaround from ZBrush Session Aims ● Understand the differences between Divide versus Dynamesh ● Utilise ZRemesher for cleaner topology ● Utilise Divide to create to toggle between levels of detail for organic objects ● Utilise Dynamic Subdiv for hard surface objects ● Project Dynamesh Sculpt onto cleaner geometry first we had a go at sculpting a hard surface model. This was to have so...

 Toolkit 2D - Hands Practice  This week, we looked at how to construct hands. To simplify the construction method, it was separated into the dorsal and palmar side of the hand. First I looked at the dorsal side of the hand, which is the top side, where the knuckles are. On the left side is how I normally go about constructing a hand. On the right I looked at the general bone placements in the hand. I tried to quickly draw them from memory. In red are the carpal bones (these are one shape here since its easier and much more time efficient this way when drawing), in blue are the metacarpals and in green are the phalanges. One thing I need to remember is that the thumb has two phalanges (No intermediate phalanges bone) bones compared to all other fingers having three. Next I looked at the palmar side of the hand. This is how I quickly construct the palmar side of the hand. I always find it hard to construct the thumb on this side of the hand because its harder to find where to pu...

 Building Alliances - Research and Powerpoint Work For our project as UM UM UM UM studios, I made a lot of the slides for the pitch presentation and also referenced most things (Including everything I did). Below are all the slides as well as the logo design I made. As the director, I put a green/red square on each slide to show  As the director, I gave myself the task of designing an eye-catching logo. I wanted it to stand out, so I immediately started tweaking fonts and skewing letters until I ended up with this, which I was happy with for our logo. To give the right impression to those watching our pitch presentation, I wanted the first slide to convey the overall mood of the game, whilst not clashing with art styles. I made this, with only the title of the game, the name of our studio, and a piece of concept art from our 2D Lead: Rosie. I designed this slide as an introduction to our team. I used a Picrew for the pictures (HendiTheHen 2024) and sent it to my team, asking a...