Week 7 - Easter Break
During Easter Break I tried to do a little more project work to keep the ideas fresh in my mind as well as adjusting a couple of elements without having the pressure of term-time schedules. Firstly I finished all of the 2D assets available for journal collectibles and quest items. These were all made in Procreate with the same process as was used to design the 2D character assets previously (sketch, line art, flat colours, multiply layers for shading).
Next I looked into making different shaders for the project, as we now have a crystal ball holder asset but no crystal ball. I found a dragon glass shader tutorial online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtFQeYWShEA&t=2s&ab_channel=DCPWebDesigners) and followed this to make the shader below. I adjusted a few elements and experimented with colours, which gives us an interesting effect to add to our game when we have all of our assets made:
I posted this image on Twitter and Instagram (without the annotations) to gather feedback on which colours our audience engage with the most and why. The overwhelming winner was the bottom right version with the pink and red tones - one responder said "There's something really rich about the colours that's really drawing me in". The gold version in the top left was the second favourite. The Instagram poll showed that version 4 had 12 votes, version 1 had 8, version 3 had 4 and version 2 had 0. We now know for the future of The Inked Ladies that the warmer tones are drawing our audience into the space we have created and we want to cultivate that feeling of curiosity.
I also attempted to make a clay shader, in case we wanted to add a hand-sculpted texture to any 3D modelled assets if the objects looked too different in style. I followed another tutorial on Youtube for this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTu3Xssw67Q&t=640s&ab_channel=SouthernShotty), however the outcome didn't quite have the right effect for what I would like to see in The Inked Ladies (the texture is more like wet clay which will not fit with our darker lighting and hand-sculpted objects). We shouldn't need this anyway as the styling should be fine but I have also sourced a clay shader that we can purchase which would be much more effective (https://blendermarket.com/products/claydoh).
We also booked the film studio at university for an afternoon, so we did some experimentation with scanning in objects for our scenes. We set up our sculpts on a fully white paper background and took 50+ photos of the object with an HDR camera. We then loaded these into Meshroom to render a series of points which would construct the image digitally to then take into Blender for mesh fixing. We had to make some adjustments to the exposure (shadows cause extra points in the photogrammetry which disjoints the mesh) and the number of photos taken but we managed to get a good scan of our first asset. Hopefully we will book the studio again soon to scan in the rest of the physical assets.
James has said he will fix all of the meshes in blender after the scans so that we will be able to add these assets into the game. Based on these adjustments, I re-painted the dreamcatcher so as to make the surface colour darker and therefore easier to scan with brighter lighting. We have decided that once these are scanned in, we will then use Blender to hand-paint flat colours onto the model, instead of trying to adjust the colour before scanning in the objects.
The final task we started working on was the assets for the game. We have tried to prioritise gameplay and practical elements of getting the environment working before but now we need to make our environment explorable. I have limited 3D modelling skills so James is taking a lead on this part of the project using the asset boards I created before, however using various Youtube tutorials I did attempt to make some background filler objects (the kind that will make the environment look full but won't be in the foreground for people to see the mistakes!)
