#ctec605

Concept + Context - Creative Audio

Research - Creative Audio

Practice - Creative Audio

Experimenting and Feedback - Creative Audio

Experimental I

Experimental II - Part One

Experimental II - Part Two

Recording - Creative Audio

Soundbites - Creative Audio

Continuing through - Creative Audio

Editing - Creative Audio

Day Drinking or Experimenting - Creative Audio

More Inspiration - Creative Audio

Preparing for Feedback - Creative Audio

Making Cover Art - Creative Audio

Cover Art - Creative Audio

Ahead of schedule - Creative Audio

Finish Line - Creative Audio

The office did not have any windows, as at some point I removed them all seeing as the outside was just an empty grey void which would take you away from the realism that we were trying to create, so I began creating an outside environment, and I put windows in, which I made have enough transparency to see there’s buildings outside, but not enough you can tell they’re just giant walls. 

Sadly, with the amount of time we have left for our project, and with everything taking a lot more time than we thought it would, we had to get rid of the meeting room and boss’ office, as we didn’t have the tasks completed that were going to involve needing to enter these two spaces. The benefit of being able to delete these, is that our game runs a lot more smooth now without them as there’s less assets taking up space. 

Adding Sanitising Stations

The one room I was the least happy with in the entire office scene was the waiting room, it felt very bland and felt like it served no purpose, as a part of my final touches I went over it again, making it tighter to stress the player out as they have to navigate their way past two judging NPCs who are sitting there watching the player as the player walks past. 

Creating The Players Lock-screen on their Computer

People who tested an early prototype build of ‘The Intern’ complained that they were confused and didn’t know what to do, and although that was what we were aiming for, we decided to add subtle elements to help people understand what to do next. For starters, on photoshop I created two posters, the first poster is advertising fire safety, letting the players know there are three fire extinguishers around the office. The second poster is next to the coffee machine, this poster teaches the players how to make different coloured coffees.

The last few things I created on Blender, these are little sticky notes. There’s three of them for the three different tasks which the player has to do, the first being the passwords for the computer, the second telling the player to microwave their lunch with a picture of what the lunch looks like, and the third being a post-it-note which tells the player to make three different coffees for three different NPCs inside the scene.

The game is all put together, here is some photos that I took of environments early in development and then their final outcomes. 

Waiting Room Prototype:

Final Waiting Room:

Kitchen Prototype:

Final Kitchen:

Office Prototype:

Final Office:

Prototype Gameplay:

DIGITAL DUDES DEVELOPMENT PROCESS JOURNAL

This project was a collaboration between:

Ashton Smith Nathan Gibson Matt Hopwood Ethan Lin

Here is my list of all the process blogs:

1: https://ashtoncreative.tumblr.com/post/612874905474727936/the-digital-dudes

2: https://ashtoncreative.tumblr.com/post/612874910424055808/nailing-down

Since my first NPC, I’ve created two more, each with both of their own unique features to try and give the NPCs more personality by making them different to the others. Here’s the first three unique NPCs created

My favourite NPC I’ve made so far was the one who I went as far as modelling a pair of glasses for, which took some time, but now I’d say i’ve got modelling down pretty good on Blender. 

Here he is, sitting in front of his computer with his funky glasses and sick fade. 

So far I’ve created 9 unique models, each with their own hair styles, and different coloured suits and skin colours. 

                                               NPC MODELS

This is what the office scene currently looks like with all 9 completed NPCs, I currently need to make 8 more, but it’s okay if some of them are the same models just re skinned to be different colours as with the amount of time it takes to create these models I’m not sure If I’d be able to make 8 bran new ones. 

ANIMATING

Now, with 9 unique models, these models had to have their own unique animations, as currently they all shared the same typing animation which meant that if you were to look at them, they were synchronised moving at the same time doing the exact same movements as one another which took you out of the realism of the experience, so I went through and animated five different animations to spread among the NPCs. 

Final Five Typing Animations

Altering The Office Layout

Every-time I walked around the game scene, it didn’t feel ‘real’ enough, it felt off and out of place, like something didn’t belong, so, I tested out changing the office layout around and moving the desks so rather than having them all lined up, with 9 on the left and 9 on the right, I put them all to the same side and made two desks touching facing each other with dividers between theme. The feedback I received was very positive. 

Matt had created code that would make an object follow the player as they’re walking around, which was meant to be attached to the NPCs heads to appear as if they’re always watching the player making them feel uncomfortable, unfortunately due to the heads being attached to an armature (character rig), they were locked in place and would not work with the code. 

Because the code wasn’t working with the heads, I had to go through each NPC one by one, removing the heads from the armature (rig), and then rotating the heads 90 degrees to make sure that the x axis was the way their head was facing as the code needing them to be like that in order for the NPC faces to follow the player, making them feel out of place and uneasy. 

After again going back and fourth between Maya and Blender deciding whether I was to switch or not, getting familiar with modelling on both softwares, I finally decided to stick with Blender, mainly because while using Maya, I learnt lots more about how polys worked. This led me to being able to create specific things on top of the model, using poly cuts and joining vertices together. I applied this new set of information to Blender, as I am much more comfortable with the software after using it for much longer and was able to create eyes, a moustache and eyebrows on my model.

After creating the eyes, eyebrows and moustache, I spent lots of time modelling a suit for the NPCs, this took me a lot of time, as I originally had no clue the way polys worked. Polys always need four vertices at the most, if you have more than four vertices for one poly, it makes the poly invisible when you transfer it into Unity. It took me a long time to figure that out, and just a long time in general modelling on top of the model which I had created. 

Now that I had the face with details, and the body with a suit, I started to experiment and prototype what it would be like when I’m in the process of making different models with hair for future NPCs by making new polys and extruding them out, then fusing vertices together to give a more realistic hair look. 

The next process was to begin to texture the model, by unwrapping the UVs and using the ‘texture paint’ feature in Blender. I assigned a basic skin colour as the base material before I started painting the finer details.

After sometime, I have the model fully textured, although I would have to go back and tweak things. I’ve kept the file saved from this point so I’m able to easily customise the skin and add different looking NPCs to the scene. After creating a few more textures for different NPC, I learnt that you can click on the ‘faces’ of polys, and then directly paint onto those which saved me a lot of time.

It took me a decent amount of time to figure out how to turn the textures from Blender into Materials in Unity, then once it was working I was having issues with the eyes, because of a an issue I couldn’t figure out how to fix, I had to delete what I already had for the eyes and then recreate them from scratch, this meant I also had to r-paint my texture map and re-import all the files back in.

After lots of work, here is my very first fully textured model inside the scene, this model was not rigged as this point, and the next step was to get the rig working as efficiently as can be.

So, once I went through rigging my character all over again, which I luckily had enough experience with now I could do it extremely fast, the automatic weights for the rig were working terribly, every-time I move and arm or leg it would break the model, so I researched how to do some weight painting, in order to chose where certain bones should be putting all their weight when you move the rigged body pieces. I had lots of issues, but eventually had a 100% perfectly rigged character with the correct weight paints for every bone.

   BEFORE WEIGHT PAINT                      AFTER WEIGHT PAINT

After successfully weight painting the model, the rig was 100% ready to go, giving me the ability to start manipulating the character and animating him, giving him the first basic typing animation of five that I was aiming to create.

I went back to Blender to gain some feed back on whether the model should have large eyes or small eyes, over 70% of my respondents said that they prefer the smaller eyes, so I kept them like that. 

Now, I have the ability to smooth down the models, so I sent out photos to get more feedback, whether the modes should be smoothed out or if they should embrace their low polys. Most of the respondents preferred the low-poly look, as the smoothed out models weren’t done well enough to get away with it. 

Evaluation for Podcast