ONE-WEEK CHALLENGE #2: Artist's Garden

Week #15: Artist Garden Challenge

Hello, Welcome to another lovley topic. This Monday brief was all around the collaboration between us (3D Animation&Games student) and the our counterpart (3D Game Design students), our tutor showed us few artists that are mind blowing and after that she revealed the twist and it was shocking, our weekly task it was set from the collaboration between two courses to deliver a game enviorment asset on Unity or Unreal engine, we've been paired randomly with an artist from the brief and randomly assigned to a group of 5 people (2 from game design and 3 from our course). after the brief was ended I jumped right after to have a second meeting with my partners to get ready to meet the other guys and have a briefing in order to get ready to start the project as soon as possible since we have one week to delivery a final product. The actual briefing was really productive, my team (me, Andru and Chandan) was very creative and we did some research first from the artist and watched some works and luckly watched some Youtube videos of her animations and we realised that we had to follow her crazy stylised style and came up with some ideas for our artist garden. I lead the team because we never met in person and I do not have a problem to expose myself and guide my team for a nice pipeline, I make sure that everyone were comfortble with each other in order to smooth the preassure and get to work with a smile on the face instead of worrying about the tight shedule. We came up and we agreed to create a stylised world with bold outlines and crazy assets. I put together some references and from there we left the briefing with a small task and set the next meeting next day, the task it was to prepare some skatches ready to discuss together what to use for the world and show some quick concept even for the other guys.

The next day we had another meeting as planned and I kinda hunted down our partners from game design because since we are working remotly for the first time it was a little bit hard for everyone scheduling everything in time. Thanks for this collaboration and thanks for our tutor's effort and support we had the chance to have a private and public channel on discord where we got the chance to chat, virtually meet all together and get the right support from the SLAs and tutors, to me I got the actual "studio workplace" vibe where all the people form this industry that are working in 3D are in the same spot to help each other to working for a final project, I liked that a lot. We scheduled a late afternoon briefing to understand what we can offer to each other, our part it was focused on the actual assets's creations with all the related pipeline (modelling,sculpting,UV,texturing and so on) meanwhile our partners had to work on the engine (Unity in this case, because they are more familiar with it). Me, Andru and Chandan prepared really cool sketches to look at it and work on it, in the end we opted to create a floating world where everything is possible.

The next day Ejiro showed us is little game enviorment/testing ground to work on it.

After Ejiroghene's game enviorment, we had the chance to see what was possible and what was not so we had to arrange that on our ideas, we ended up to adding more personality on the project and experimenting with 3D modelling and dynamics, we were close to set a nice enviorment with clear ideas, that was possible thanks for the first briefing and the game design knowledge, so we knew what we were aiming for.

We went straiht forward into Maya or Blender or Zbrush to having ready the models asap. I worked on simple assets between Blender and Maya, following the standard pipeline and came up with some trees, mushrooms and an odd house.

During the production we found some obstacles and issues due part-time jobs schedules and private problems so we had to optmize the workflow and help each other as possible, I took the lead once again to make sure to lowering down the stress and the pressure off the shoulder and make sure that everyone were fine and comforble. I directly planned some 1o1 meeting with Ejiroghene to work and help him to fix the issues on Unity and we figured out that it is possible to share the same project on two separate computer, basically work remotley on the same project, that allowed me to directly be part of the project, learn something new and challenge myself on somethin different. Meanwhile Ejiroghene was working I whatched some tutorials on Unity and learnt a lot, so I started to get the grip of it and experimenting with the assets and how they relate in the engine, I discovered a lot of new cool things and I was so excited and curious to learn more so I continued to watch more tutorials, have some feedback here and there, discuss with ejiroghene and work hard on Unity. I started from importing the assets on the engine and texture them as well, I learn from my mistakes and experimenting a lot, I want to thanks Lucian that give us the missing key for the game, the toon shader, that helped a lot, the toon shader it creates the illusion for a bold outline on the objects like they were from an illustration, so cool. I had the opportunity to play with stuff and actually play, so all the effort paid off. I learned how to put together a game enviorment with the help of all the people that I asked for help and get their feedback, my team worked really hard on this and put a lot of effort inside the game, ejiroghene helped me a lot to have a basic understanding of scripts and how they interact with the asset. sadly, working remotly it's fun but has its cons and I contributed assembling the rest of the game in order to deliver the project in time. I'm sorry if I didn't took more screenshot for the workflow but it was a really intense experience that gave me the opportunity to learn, to explore and to do something new that I definitely enjoyed and be proud of, as a first experience in Unity I had a lot of fun and I was happy to lead the team to this end result (final video down below).

I want to thanks personally everyone to be part of this (stressfull/fun) experience, I have a lot to say to each one of my team mate but I'm just grateful for your collaboration and I want to say THANK YOU!