# Collaborative Game Studio Practice (1J6Z1017_2324_1F)

### Games Art BA(Hons) L6
### Oliwia Kordalska

## Week 1-2
As a group we picked our favourite theme and created a shared workspace to help us gather our ideas in one place. I contributed to the team by sharing my own suggestions, which are highlighted in red as shown below.

We also allocated each group member different tasks and split our responsibilities equally in a way that utilised each person's strengths and interests.


For this project, I will be handling the character design and production of the woman who is supposed to be the victim to mutation in our game. I will make sure I go through the whole itterating process, 3D modelling, rigging and texturing, which will produce a game ready character that I can put into our game.

**What I know about this character:**
* She is supposed to be a female stripper who worked on the travelling gentleman club train
* She has turned into some sort of lovecraftian monster
* She is stuck twisted to the pole on which she worked before

In my own free time I started looking deeper into the theme we chose. I wanted to first understand what exactly a Lovecraftian aesthetic could look like and what are the main features in achieving it. I also started finding some reference images to reflect the idea I shaped in my head for my character design.


**Reflection:**
I believe my first two weeks were very productive as the idea for the project started circuling in my head, and for these first two weeks I gave myself time to get to know the project before I started any creative work.

## Week 3-4
At the end of week 2, going into week 3 I began sketching silhouettes of characters based on what I learned. My main goal was to get the rough ideas out, not worrying about anatomy or details, I just wanted to understand the general shape and designs I could play with.

While doing so I also took time to research deeper into aquatic themes. I learned of the existence of cephalopod animal family, and I read a lot about the biology of octopuses and squids.

#### Sketches
At some point in week 4, I showed my results to my team who gave me their feedback and thoughts about the designs. We ended up discussing what our expectations for this character were and I moved into encorporating those ideas in my next itteration process.

#### Second Hand Research

**Reflection:**
I thought about conducting first hand research about cephalopods, I could do this by going into the local aquarium for observation of these creatures swiming in water or glocery store for closer inspection. However, I ran into an ethical issue here because I don't believe in keeping animals under captivity and I am also vegeterian. This meant that I was not comfortable supporting and attending such a place, and was even less comfortable buying a dead body of an animal and supporting the demand for them in stores. I thought about any other options I could have to get hands on experience with octopuses or squids but unfortunately I could not think of anything else, so I ended up resorting to nature videos and biological diagrams.

## Week 5-6
These two weeks were slower for me in terms of the quantity of work I produced, however I still managed to draw a Character design Sheet which I redrew and redesigned in week 6. At the end of these two weeks I ended up with two finished concept and character design art pages to include in our group portfolio.

**Moodboard:**

**Concept Art:**

The main two changes I introduced here was swaping the tentacles for real human hands, and redesigning the face. Once I was definitely confident in my final design, I also tested different colour schemes for the character to make sure I was also happy with the colour palette I chose for her. I did not find any of the edited colours to be more appealing so I stuck with my concept as it was.


Towards the end of the week I also drew more technical concepts of certain fetures in my character design, so that I wouldn't forget about them when moving on to modelling.

**Reflection:**
I think that during these two weeks it did not feel like I did a lot, however now looking back I see I actually produced work of very good quality. Most importantly, I finally ended the drawing and sketching part of my work, and I was clear to move to the next stage!

## Week 7-8
I was slightly behind the Gantt Chart milestones that we had set up at the beginning of this project, however I was confident I would finish all my tasks in time.

This week I started modelling my character in Zbrush. To save time I decided to use the body base of a previous character I did for a different project, because they were similar in shape and height. I decided to use a simple work pipeline to creat this model:
ZBrush - Maya - SubstancePainter - Maya
The reason I chose this way of working was because a. I have done it before and felt comfortable with the speed at which I would get things done, but also b. because I knew that each programs has its pros and cons for sculpting my design, and due to having certain skill limitations with each of them, i used both to compelte my 3D model.


I tried to remesh this character using ZBrush's ZRemeszer option, however It had not produced good resyults. I noticed a lot of artecafts and weird square sequences in weird places, so I decided to do it all by hand. While retopologising, just as stated in the image, I wanted to take the opportunity to create my mesh as anatomically correctly as I could. Before and throughout working, I pulled up many references and guides, which ended up being very helpful as I ended up with a very organic mesh resembling the professional images I used.


**Reflection:**
While modelling itself took me only two or three days or work, I have used almost all of my two weeks remeshing this model. I still managed to do everything in time that i set for myself, but I definitely struggled a lot. Throughout remeshing I had stumbled upon so many different issues that caused me to problem solve and tired me out mentally. I had to be very careful where I place my squares, how many I do and few times I also had to resolve some unwanted triangles.

That does not mean my mesh is triangle free, in fact, according to some join references, I created intentional triangles along the elbow, finger and knee joints. This was the first time I allowed triangles so I was very curious to see if they'd help with creating realisting beding movements.

## Week 9-10
I set a goal to complete everything on week 9 as I noticed I had only one more big task to do - rigging.

I spent the first few days of the week following a tutorial and creating a skeleton for my model using Quck Rig feature in Maya. I encountered a lot of strange problems such as my model not skinning properly, my joints locking and being unable to move, or simply Maya crashed. This was very frustrating but I managed to redo the rig again and again until I got it right.


The next few days I spent painting skin weights and detangling the mess it was making. It seemed that each time I painted skin weights for one joint, it would mess up the other ones around it. I had to problem solve once again, spending hours on redoing certain weights and joints until they finally colaborated with each other.



Once I was successful in getting rid of any artefacts that were made during movement, I set my character up in the desired pose and could move on to texturing which I had to do using only Maya's built in material making.


I used plenty of lighting around my scene to achieve the desired ambience in my final renders.


**Reflection:**
Unfortunately, during the time I was modelling my character, I ran into a big issue with Substance Painter because the software had seemingly ran out of my yearly subscription which I could not get back. That meant that I could not paint the textures I had envisioned in my concept art. However, I decided to at least use Maya's material settings to give my character some sort of colour. I was happy with the translucent outcome of the skin and found that it actually added to the alien and gooey themes I was going for.

## Week 11
During this week I mainly focused on updating this document as well as the shared portfolio. I have completed all my artistic work and took the time to describe my work in detail.

I have also helped my team create a contents page and done some final editing.

## Bibliography
* cookandbecker.com. (n.d.). The Last of Us Part II print and notebook collection. [online] Available at: https://www.cookandbecker.com/en/artgallery/2794/the-last-of-us-part-ii-print-and-notebook-collection.html [Accessed 11 Feb. 2024].
* Kjersti, N. (2018). Delilah Jones (Davy jones sister) Ahoy! [online] Stan Winston School of Character Arts Forums. Available at: https://forums.stanwinstonschool.com/discussion/4138/delilah-jones-davy-jones-sister-ahoy [Accessed 20 Feb. 2024].
* LovecraftStories. (n.d.). The complete works of H.P. Lovecraft - Lovecraft Stories. [online] Available at: https://www.lovecraft-stories.com/read [Accessed 25 Feb. 2024].
* Wikipedia. (2020). Cephalopod. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod [Accessed 8 Mar. 2024].
* Wikipedia. (2023a). Davy Jones (Pirates of the Caribbean character). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Jones_(Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_character) [Accessed 16 Feb. 2024].
* Wikipedia. (2023b). Xenomorph. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenomorph [Accessed 16 Feb. 2024].Wikipedia. (2024).
* Lovecraftian horror. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraftian_horror#:~:text=Lovecraftian%20horror%2C%20also%20called%20cosmic [Accessed 6 Mar. 2024].
* Palace, C. (2015). Caravan Palace - Lone Digger. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbQgXeY_zi4 [Accessed 7 Feb. 2024].
* newyorkharborchannel.com. (n.d.). Will We SEA 2020 Fashion Week Make Waves Next Year? - New York Harbor Channel. [online] Available at: https://newyorkharborchannel.com/will-we-sea-2020-fashion-week-make-waves-next-year/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2024].