Eric Murray's Blog

May's Assets

2010-05-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

Here are the last of the assets for this project so far. We are aiming to work on this project throughout the summer to the goal of gamecity in october. You may notice an unfinished chair to the right of the "hell room" chair, this was the original attempt but I got fustrated with it, so started again to a better result.

For the development and a downloadable version of the game as it stands, visit:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/portrait

May's Assets

2010-05-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

April's Assets

2010-04-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

This month saw some of my favourite models to date, including the grand piano and the grandfather clock. I spent quite a while trying to get the piano just right. the clock is one of only a few objects in the house that move, with the pendulem swinging.

April's Assets

2010-04-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

2010-03-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

This month I had time to focus on more specific items of furniture such as the Dollhouse for the nursery. the tables were a must though so that we could plac e them around the house to gauge obsticle distances from doors etc. Spatial awareness is a key factor in the composition of the house overall, as with each room on it's own.

March's Assets

2010-03-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

Assets from February

2010-02-28T03:07:00.000-08:00

Now that production has started, I will be modelling, ambient occluding and texturing assets for my final project. There is a long list of assets that I have to create, so I might batch a few assets in pictures together at the end of each month. With the design document as a guide, creating assets should be fluid and straight-forward with technical hiccups to be expected!

This month was dedicated to creating infrastructure and the house in its roughest stage. Priority went on assets such as doors, doorframes, pillars and columns. These will populate the walls and fill the gaps where the doors need to go on the early stage of the build so we have a better “feel” for the house rather than just a bunch of walls with holes in.
To further aid spatial awareness and room layout, this month has been a bit table mad, I have also dedicated a bit more time to focus on the ornate fireplace, with several different sections being merged into the one asset. I wanted to add a consistent feel to the design of the assets as shown in the orthographics; this also meant that I could lift parts of other assets to build new ones. You can see this in the fireplace that is surrounded by a truncated and slightly edited ornate doorframe model from last month. This made for efficient time usage whilst maintaining quality.

February's Assets

2010-02-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

Last but not least...

2010-01-13T14:02:00.000-08:00

Upon designing the drawing room, I discovered that a writing desk had to be designed, so last of the assets to be made for my section of pre-production is this table. Tomorrow, all the group's work will be compiled together for the design and development documents and the blog will continue to follow into the flurry of production. Make sure your eyes are over 1 meter high, becuase it's going to be a hell of a rollercoaster!

Rooms 11 and 13

2010-01-13T09:31:00.001-08:00

Room 12

2010-01-13T05:03:00.000-08:00

Room 12 is the only one out of the following rooms to be scanned, due to the fact the rooms are all pretty standard in layout, so shall just have the doors moved around.

Room 20

2010-01-13T03:57:00.000-08:00

When doing the initial plans, room 20 doesn't have any key features other than being small and intrusive, but essentially juts a box room joining three rooms. This room shall have inclining walls creating uneasiness.

Room 22

2010-01-13T02:25:00.001-08:00

Room 8c

2010-01-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

Room 21

2010-01-12T04:34:00.001-08:00

Rough Painting

2010-01-11T10:25:00.000-08:00

This is a painting to go at the end of a dark and atmoshperic corridor, it is intended to look like a character to interact or learn from, but will just be a painting. I tried to distort the water colour paint with water and bleach, but I think the paper had absorbed the original picture and locked it pretty tight. This might get redone during production but for now is fit for purpose.

Vase

2010-01-09T04:39:00.001-08:00

For now, that is it in regards to my assets, stay tuned for room plans and dynamics.

Architraves

2010-01-08T03:26:00.000-08:00

Room Allocation

2010-01-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

On the site we have a house plan and room list numerically linked, as you can see. i have chosen rooms: 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22 and 8c.

The rooms have been drawn out seperately and are awaiting the A3 scanner ready for photoshop. With each room will come a set of wall panel orthographics, birdseye view and list of relevant assets plus a dynamic picture.

Update

2010-01-04T15:21:00.000-08:00

In the group we have all set about with doing assets from a list and likewise with rooms. I originally opted to do the faceless servants that loom around the house but upon started initial designs, thought it too weak to do the project justice. This being the case, i swapped the servants for Vases with Pat. I am currently part way though the initial sketches for the Vase design and all is good. I think that it was the right thing to swap.
Characters were never my strongest skill and, although i shall need to hone my expertise in the area, with the deadline catching us up, now is not the time.

Door Frame

2009-12-30T07:16:00.000-08:00

To keep the interior design consistant, I have based the door frames on the fire place design.

Banisters

2009-12-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

Completed banisters for the stairs and balcony areas.

The House And It's Family

2009-12-23T05:52:00.000-08:00

The Scandal is a working title for this game, but here is a section lifted from the concept document (found on the googlesite) to explain very basically what's going on.

The Scandal is an explorative narrative-driven interactive experience that unearths the far from glamorous life of Regency Britain. You play a wife of a successful public figure, but the relationship is stale, the children you bore are looked on as inferior and you yearn to break away from the social constraints of high aristocracy.

The Scandal doesn’t fall easily into a set genre; it is not technically a typical game as it has no profound mechanic or objective. It does however have a conclusion that you reach through play. The game play is passive, and very player art and character led, there are no enemies forcing you to make quick decisions under heavy gunfire. This game is intended to break many conventions of commercial games practice in order to create something that uses games in an engaging manner.

The game is set entirely indoors, in a large house. The game is being aimed in the direction of atmosphere and feeling, with reference to the artist Hammershoi, so things will look basic but on purpose. We have compiled a list of assets, characters and rooms that need designing or thinking through. I shall be posting development and finished designs as and when they have been completed or scanned.

The pillars and columns were all based off the same design in terms of pattern, but one set will be rounded and the other will be sqaured to go onto walls.

Pillars:

Columns:

Here are some fireplace designs:

Third Year And The World Of Tomorrow

2009-12-23T03:13:00.000-08:00

This year, we have been set free from closed breifs and given an open one. We got to choose our groups, our ideas and the engine we would like to work in. Just make a game. Before breaking for summer, my group had formed with all of us working with at least one other member before, we have four members making us the biggy of the class.
Over the summer we set up a google site to help us network, bounce around ideas and show what we had done. It is purely a workplace up to the piont where it is not needed, then it will be tidied and polished. Here it is for those who want to see the working outs of the group, it is not by far the show reel of the group effort. (excuse the group name as well! working title)

http://sites.google.com/site/teamawsomesummerconceptblog/

It doesn't show it, but the initial ideas were quite different to where the project is now.
At the start, we decided that we wanted to use sound and colour in a very different way to most things and went with an investigative environment which is deep in darkness bar distant patches of light or colour. The environment would be reminiscent of a deep sea canyon, with darkness shattered by bioluminescent orbs that, when activated, shake them shelves from the ground and attached by ropes of light to the centre piont of the world float up into the sky.
There would be three or four different zones within this bigger area where something would be alterered, such as camera, gravity or sound; these would have been the more interactive areas.

Here are some of the creatures that created some of my ideas into the project:

There were further ideas of a distopian society controlled by medication, but the idea was dissmissed after being too much like equilibrium. The main productive riff from the initial idea was the a character's design. As a group we thought once the glowing floating orbs had all collected in the centre of the environment the player could use them to float up out of the world, but in order to do this, they would have had to find a lady in a jellyfish like bell dress, similar to those in the georgian era. The dress would have gone over the orbs, making a giant hot air ballon kind of event.
Anyway, this borught along the idea of making a game set in the georgian time frame. Our game as it stands.

It has been a while....

2009-10-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since I have uploaded and a whole project has slipped through the net and a new project has started to grow.

After the After Effects project, we were split into groups and set breifs. We set up a google site as a comminication platform as well as weekly group meetings. It was a very strong learning experience for me and the team as not only did we have forced teams, we also had to work with programmers from the programming course. luckily, the chemistry of the group saw that everyone got on and buckled down with the work.
Our group made a family racing puzzle game, where one player drove, whilst the others would complete puzzles on an overlay then had the choice to help or hinder the driver.

My part in the project was to design the prince for whom you are racing to crown, some royal advisors, various other assets, including a cow lion and the terraforming of the racecourse that was done directly into the torque engine. This included placing all of the assets once they had been collected.

here are some images from the project:

here are an assortment of in game footage from the development stage:

After effects

2009-02-25T05:36:00.000-08:00

Here is a small group project we worked in a three for. It was a short project and is a mock teaser trailer for an imaginary wii game.

Washing women and the pantastic adventure

2009-02-25T04:51:00.000-08:00

Another scene from our project envolved making four washer women by a river. I took the approach of making the women in multiple parts, so that they could be fully animated in five or six frames . The end result was successful and here is one of the frames. I was rather fond of the liquify tool on photoshop.

The grand finale of our project was a silent tracking shot out side of the dome followed by a pan up to look at the research area around the dome. The pan was made up of 60 frames that were taken from Maya, printed off, traced by hand, scanned in and then painted on Photoshop. This was a very repeatative process which cost a little bit of sanity. here is a rough video of the pan, before it was finished off and neatened up.

Here are just some shots from the outside world.

But wait, there's more...

2009-02-25T04:02:00.000-08:00

One of the scenes we animated was a kitchen with a pot boiling over. Here are the maya to Photoshop pictures. The technique was primitive but worked well enough, I printed off a screen shot from Maya, traced it into a line drawing and then scanned it into Photoshop. This was also done for a rotascope that I shall show further on.

long needed update

2009-02-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

Hello all,
It's been a good five months since the last updates...
The project that we started over the summer has long been completed and marked.
here are some key pictures and descriptions of what happened. I shall talk to my work partner to see if he managed to get the finished flash file on the internet and post a link if he has.

The basic idea behind our concept came from a seed storage bunker somewhere cold....where they are gathering every seed on the Earth to store for future things.
Our concept is on a bigger scale. A long time before the flash is set, a civilization has set up a bio-dome to preserve and maintain a small village of primative people who live off the dome, un aware that they were being watched by a long gone race.

Here are the stages that the village took to be made. I was in charge of the 3D side of production. Although a 2D animation, we decided to make it accurate by modelling out the world in MAYA. The work here was modelled by me but the finished article was by Rhys Thomas, put in to show how it looked.

work in progress

2008-09-29T05:51:00.001-07:00

Second Year Level Design Concepts

2008-09-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

First brief:
Produce a series of drawings for the design of a virtual environment, inspired by forms in nature.
The design should pay particular attention to differences in scale, from small to large, macro to micro.

I started forming ideas of a straight clash between nature and industry but soon reflected on the brief to discover this wasn't what was being asked for. regardless, here is an image that was manipulated in photoshop.

After the rethink, i started afresh.
My approach to this has been to take forms of nature such as toadstools, trees and flowers to transform into structures. I have made some initial sketches of ideas which will be uploaded shortly.