Thinking Inside The Box – Posters

So that the walls do not look empty on my design I have modeled a couple posters to fill the gaps. These were simple to make, I simply created a cube, and flattened it down and enlarged it till it was roughly the size of a poster; then duplicated it twice. I then created some shaders with the poster images on them and dragged and dropped the shader onto the front faces of the rectangles. I then normalized the UVs so that the picture fit correctly. The reason I chose these posters is because I really like the movies that the posters are based on. Below is the finished product.

Thinking Inside The Box – Ping Pong Table

This model took me a couple attempts to create, the first time I had edges inside each other that could not be deleted which meant I could not unwrap it, the second time Maya crashed but luckily on the third attempt I managed to model and texture a ping pong table. The net and the table were two different meshes that I created and then combined before UV unwrapping. The UVs were not too hard to unwrap however they were slightly distorted even after unfolding. I wanted to the table to be unqiue and modern looking so it will fit with the design of my room, so rather than the standard green I made the table blue and added a black wood texture for the legs. The big red square covered the sides of my design. The reason I have a black square behind the texture is because when I removed the UV layer it left white gaps between some of the sides. Below are the UVs textured and then textured.

When putting my texture onto the model I used the blinn shader as I wanted it to reflect the light a little bit. I made two blinn shaders both with the texture on. This is because I needed one to go on the while table so that I could turn the transparency off, then on the second shader I could leave the transparency on and place that on the net area so that it would look like an actual net and not like a solid block with a net texture on. I also turned the Specular shading off on this so that the net does not reflect light.

Thinking Inside The Box – Television

The next object that I have created for my room is a television, this was not the hardest nor the easiest thing to created. I started off with the a flat rectangle, from here I extruded the shape up to created the base, I then extruded further and the base was complete. Next I selected another face an extruded that out and began to create the actual television screen. I wasn’t sure how big to make the screen so I looked at some images on google to get a rough idea. The image I took reference from can be seen below.

Once I had the correct size for the screen I extruded inwards very slightly so that the frame was separate to the actual screen. Once this was done I UV unwrapped the object, then exported the UVs to Photoshop and I used this to texture the different sides.

Once this was done I once again used the Blinn shader and added the texture file. For the design I just stuck with a gloss black material as most TVs are this colour and I added small detail to the back such as the inputs and a logo. Rather than just leaving the screen black I added a bit of personality to the model and added in an image of one of my favorite games.

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When I originally exported the UVs they were really small, however at the time I did not think much of it and textured them, once I added the texture to my model however it looked very pixelated and strange. Because of this I enlarged all of the shells and gave it a second go. Below is a comparison of the original texture and the final texture.

 

 

Thinking Inside The Box – Coca Cola Can

On Thursday our class was given the task to model a room that has either a realistic interior or an interior with a theme. Everything within the room will be modeled by me; this should help improve my modeling skills in Maya a lot. I wasn’t quite sure what to create first so I started off small and created a Coca Cola can. I got the idea from a can that I had drank from earlier in the day. Below are the images I used to get the basic idea on how to create the shape of the item.

Surprisingly the can itself was very easy to create, I simply added a cylinder, resized it to the size of a can and then began adding edges that I moved the create the shape of the bottom and the lip. Once that was done I used a Blinn shader on the can which had the coca cola texture attached to it through the file option. Once this was done I moved onto the top of the can. I extruded the face on top the be slightly smaller then grabbed the vertices to resize it to be the correct shape, I then extruded the faces inwards to add the detail. I then created a separate cube and resized and modeled that into the shape of the ring itself, I then re-positioned it to be apart of the can. Too add one extra piece of detail at the end I separated  the part of the can that opens from the model and rotated it so that the can looked open. Below is the images of the finished model.

 

Maya – Shaders & Texturing my Spaceship

Today I looked into the different Shaders that Maya has to offer. The most common shaders are; Lambert, Blinn and phong. These all have unique properties and uses. The Lambert is the most standard shader and has a soft texture and does not have a Specular, which means it does not reflect light. Lamberts will tend to only be used in a scenario when someone has quickly modeled something. However most people will tend to use Blinn, the settings can be varied to look a bit like a Lambert or to have a small shine. Phong is a very shiny shader, this allows light to be refracted, whereas PhongE is also shiny however it is more washed out. The Phong and PhongE shader may be used on a textures like plastic.

After learning about the common shaders I opened up my UVs I created last week in Photoshop. I then began to texture my ship using different images from websites such as Textures.com and google Images for more specific textures. I used different tools within Photoshop such as the magic wand tool to make the textures fit with the shape of the UVs. To make sure the UVs were not deleted I locked the layer. Below is the UVs before I textured it and after..

 

Once the textures were placed into the correct I placed I could save the image as a .png then add it to my ship. As it is a grey/silver spaceship I decided that I wanted it to have a little bit of a shine so I chose the Blinn shader. Once the shader was chose I had to select the colour, in this menu I selected file, then this allowed me to select my png file and add it to the ship, this is what it looks like so far.

I think for a starting point the ship looks pretty good however I will focus on adding more detail in the future.

Unity – Adding Door Animation & A Flashlight & New Textures.

Today in unity I learned how to add a completely new feature to my game, this was the player holding a flashlight, doing this was quite simple. Firstly I added a  directional light into the scene, once it was inserted I had to make it a child of the main camera within the player. However this was a simple light source and it could not be deactivated. To implement this I created a new C# Script called Flashlight. This script included the code that was required to make it so the user can activate and deactivate the light using the F button on the keyboard.

Once this new feature was added I returned to look at the door and key feature. This could be improved upon; to this I created three new C# Scripts called DoorController, Inventory and Inventory Item. These scripts allow the key to be picked up by the user, and then the user can walk over to the door, click the door and then it opens. In the previous code the key was clicked and the door was destroyed, this greatly differs as the door is not destroyed, it simple opens and the key is now in the players inventory.

Inventory – This is the code that stores the held items, in this case its the key.

InventoryItem – This is what controls the items. When the mouse is clicked while aiming at the key it is picked up.

DoorController – This is what controls the door, when the key is in the users inventory they can go up to the door and open it. Without the key the user cannot open the door.

The door controller script is a component that needs to be added to the door that I want to open and the Inventory script needs to be added to the player and the InventoryItem script needs to be added to the key. The KeyItemName on the Door controller needs to match the InventoryItems itemName so that the key can only interact with that specific door.

Door Animation – To add a bit more detail into the game a piece of code in the DoorController was replaced, originally the doors rotate command was to simply rotate, so the change was instant. However new plugins were added into the Assets called Tweed. This allowed us to replace the code so that the door more realistically.

Other than just adding new features to the game I also replaced the different textures of the objects. Originally the walls and floor were just a solid white, I improved this by downloading and adding a brick texture for the walls and a wooden texture for the floor. I also changed the texture of the table, chairs and key to make it look more realistic, rather than just  one solid colour. I also added different scenery such as a painting and crates.

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Flash Games Companies Research

Ninja Kiwi –

Ninja Kiwi is a flash games developer most known for the Bloons Tower Defense franchise. This game was very popular and has had numerous sequels and spin off titles. Originally Ninja Kiwi was an online games developer however as technology evolved they went with the trend and began to create games for mobile devices. The company was founded in 2006 by Stephen and Chris Harris and their first browser based game they developed was called Cash Sprint; which was created in Adobe Flash. When they began to develop mobile games they had a merger with another close company called Digital Goldfish, this is because the company wanted to help create the mobile version of Bloons. Currently the company as thirty five employees. The company has received multiple awards and nominations.

Rovio –

This company was created in 2003 and was originally known as Relude. This company is best known for the angry birds franchise and these games were created to be played on mobile devices such as the iPhone. Other than just a games developer this company is also the publisher and distributor of their games. They can easily distribute them as theit games are digital and downloaded. This company is huge and has over 435 employees across the different sectors within.

Adobe Illustrator Introduction

I had a quick introduction to Adobe Illustrator, we learned how to insert different images, how to align them and also how colour them. As it is an adobe product the overall feel of the software is very similar to Photoshop and a lot of the tools work the same. I learned that Adobe Illustrator is a vector based image manipulation software where as Photoshop works with Rasta-graphics. This is the image I created using the different shapes and techniques I learned. Each set of shapes were also grouped together and put in their own layer so that they were nicely sorted so that there inst an overwhelming amount of shapes.

Robot Character Design – Research & Analysis

From my research I have found that robots can come in almost any shape and size and your imagination is the limit. Robots can be designed for almost any concept, if it be for futuristic film or history in an alternate reality of a game. During my research I came across many different iconic characters who are robots such as WALL-E. The simplicity and cuteness of this character make him iconic and memorable; he also hardly talks in the movie and we get a sense of what sort of character he is through his design. Some robots share a similar physical structure to humans such as the cybermen from Doctor Who; where as other may be based on insects or other objects. Robots with human features can also show emotion. Below is a collage of some of the robots that stood out to me for numerous reasons. The colouring of the robots may also differ on what the scheme of the character is. For example the robot may be shiny white to give it a futuristic look or maybe a darker colour and rusted if the robot is in a post apocalyptic reality.  Other than just other robots I took inspiration from other objects such as electronic utensils. 

Adobe Animate -Platform Game Session 1

Last week I created a Halloween scene using numerous vector based images. Using this scene that I created I could insert into a new animate file that had Code within it and this allowed a character to be added so that the scene could be interacted with and the character could be moved around using the arrow keys. Originally the code was incorrect as the controls were inverted, left made the character go right and vice versa. This was a simple fix as in the code left and right had to simply be swapped around. This was not the main focus however, my main focus was to get the character to be able to move around properly and not collide with the different objects that hes not supposed to bump into. To do this I had to shift the parts of the image I wanted the character to collide with into the ground property, and anything else would simply be placed in the background.  The first building was apart of the ground so that the user cannot go backwards. I also added the bottom of the second building into this so the user would not go through it. For the player to get to the other side they have to scale the building and go through the second floor. By making the player bump into some of the objects but not all of them it adds a 3 dimensional feel to the 2 dimensional platformer.