Wasted Youth - Week 3 Progress Report

This week one of the main tasks the art team had was to create textures and high-poly sculpts of a few props so that we can test out our pipeline and try to nail down our style. The props given to most of our team were the lawn mower, power pole, trash bin, wheelbarrow, mailbox and mailbin. Each artist was told to get as many done as possible and return with the results so we could compare techniques.

Aleksei, our environment artist, came back with the mailbox, sculpted in Mudbox. He didn't get to do many others, however, as he spent most of his time working on other models. I'll post those in a moment.

I had the time to work on a number of props. The first one I did was the mail bin.

High-poly sculpt made in ZBrush

Render in Unity of the model with the first pass at the diffuse, normal and specular maps. Not very happy with the  diffuse, it needs more detail, but it was just a first attempt.

I also worked on the mail box.

Profile view of the sculpt.

Detail view of the mailbox - I used a very stylized alpha image for the wood grain and tried to exaggerate the main details like the rivets and the number stickers so they'd show up well in the normal map.

Render of the mail box in Unity with normal, specular and diffuse. The specular here is WAY too strong.

I also worked on the garbage bin and the lawn mower, but wasn't able to get diffuse maps painted for them, as I ran into some problems with the models once I had started sculpting - a benefit of doing this test is it gave us a chance to look for these sorts of problems and make sure they aren't repeated later in the project.

Detail of the wheel and body of the mower - mainly focused on adding the primary details to the wheel and damage and scratches to the mower.

Another detail of the mower. We only modelled one wheel, which will be duplicated and added to the mower in-engine, making for fewer resources to work on in the production phase.

High-poly sculpt of the trash bin.

Detail of the wheel and damage on the trash bin.

Our lead artist, Beau, did a test of the look and feel of the game levels themselves.

First he created rough models of the houses and laid them out in perspective.

Then he took that image and did a quick paintover, adding in the lanes for gameplay.

Then he focused on creating the levels of detail needed for each row of houses, simplifying and reducing contrast each row.

More detail and content added, giving us a good feel for how the game layers might look.

Alexei, our environment artist, started the first pass at creating models for our modular house system.

This process of building the house in parts then assembling them later will allow us to create a tremendous amount of assets in-game without having to make each of them by hand, giving us the ability to adapt to game testing and build tons of levels in a minimum amount of time and effort.

Alexei also created a new set of props, including a newspaper, a couch, a tire, a fire hydrant and a wood pallet.

Finally, our character artist Zach got the first pass at color comps done for our first character, Jenny. We critiqued these comps and he's working on a revised pass at them, as well as about halfway done with her base model.

Our designers and programmer did a bunch of other great work this week, getting multiple lanes functioning, as well as location-based lane-restrictions. They've also got character abilities started, keyboard and controller input working and the first basic level ready for testing. Next week we're moving forward with menus, creating a complete list of sfx and our robot characters, getting object throwing, pause and quit menus and researching how to add sounds and checkpoints in Unity.

For the art team, our goals for next week are to add texture work to the style guide, finish the comps and model for the Jenny character, complete the concepts for our tank and keep working on new houses, props and texture work.