#synergydigital

This index is in a chronological order.

We wanted to create a story-driven adventure game with meaningful character interaction. We wanted to market a commercial release of the game, however, as the project turned out to be quite ambitious and multifaceted, we decided to reduce the scope of the game and focus on what was realistically achievable in the semester. 

We wanted a core theme of Aeronautica to be innovation, as a form of the discovery aesthetic, where players would iteratively build different vehicles, revealing new game mechanics, however, the aforementioned scope reduction lead to us focus on the narrative aesthetics of the project, specifically, developing meaningful player interaction with our characters. 

Our agile design methodology has enabled us to easily pivot the design direction of the project and consequently produce the current version of Aeronautica, which playtesting has revealed to be well-received.

My main role while working on Aeronautica has been to develop and create 3D models for the Characters who will be present in Aeronautica. Due to the very practical nature of this task most of my semester will be spent with my head down working on those models. The first Character that the player meets in Aeronautica will be the golden retriever named Kevin. Kevins design has gone through a few different iterations as we developed a further art style and plan for how the story would be laid out. 

We decided early on that Kevin would be a golden retriever as we wanted to embody the happy and friendly nature often associated with golden retrievers. The first island that players would see you be occupied by different dog breeds and they would be considered one ‘nation’.

Initially Stuart (Art Director) gave me the reference of Isabella from Animal Crossing to work off of however after completing the first version of Kevin it was clear we needed to make some changes and define our own style. This lead to us taking on a more realistic look to the characters while still keeping the body proportions in a more cartoon style. 

The issues that I mainly had with this model were separating each individual body part made for difficult animations and weight painting. The reason this was done initially was to ease Stuarts method of texturing by giving him smaller chunks of UVs to work on at a time. Eventually we moved on to using Substance painter to paint directly on to the model, making this process obsolete. Another huge issue that came with this model was weight painting and correctly rigging the character to work with motion capture data. We were quite fortunate to be able to use the mocap lab for this project, allowing us to record the Characters movements to be mapped on to the meshs at a later date. This also meant that our rigging needed to be up to scratch. Unfortunately I had never done and rigging before so this was a lot of crash course learning in the space of about 3 weeks. 

Over the course of this semester we have been constantly testing and improving Areonautica. Starting early in the project we made paper prototypes of our project within the first week, running through the over arching game play loop with members of the team and our BCT peers. This helped lay the ground work for constant testing. Being the modeler for the team the majority of my testing was done internally by creating a model and getting feedback from all members of the group however mainly Stuart (Art Director) and Max (Project Lead). I would be making changes constantly and asking fro feedback whenever possible. This helped form the characters in a way we wanted and gave me valuable experience in having others critique your work. I have also received expert feedback from our lecturer Laurent in specific directions we could take the characters style such as having a mixture of animals in order to give individuality to the characters. Being a part of a BCT studio space also lends itself to peer play testing as peers will constantly be around you giving feedback on your work. This is very relevant to our project as many of the BCT students would fall into our target audience of VR game players.

We have also been doing external testing. This has come in the form of a trip to New Caledonia which Jack took our project to play test and showcase at the University of New Caledonia. Over the course of a few days he was able to gather feedback data from an entirely new culture of people and therefore has helped our project appeal to a wider audience. We also had the opportunity to display our project for visitors from Vietnam who play tested and were very interested in where our project was going. They were impressed with the work we had done in such a short time and provided us with useful feedback on our user interface, helping us to make it more clear for users who haven't VR before.

In terms of external feedback solely regarding modelling I have been posting progress on the r/Maya subreddit, asking for feedback and methods to improve my workflow. The feedback that I receive there is highly technical and helped me to learn about edge flows and optimizing topology.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Maya/comments/dbld7g/looking_for_modelling_feedback_on_a_character_im/