A fictional game character announcement trailer that Jimmy Kitto and I made for our second team production at Yoobee: School of Design 2017.
For this project we were given four weeks to do whatever we wanted (with in reason) with only one catch, you must be in a team. Thankfully I found that Jimmy Kitto had a similar idea as me for what we wanted to do and so we formed a two man team.
We both wanted to do something game related and in a realistic style, so after having a good think on it we decided to make a character announcement trailer for a fictional game. Basing the idea on Paragon announcement trailers, as we're both interested in Unreal Engine and both played the game, along with a few cinematics from Dota 2 and other games that were of a similar online brawler genre we developed our idea further and got to work.
Since we really wanted to play with each others strengths and improve our abilities where ever we could. As both of us are pretty generalist this meant making a good plan to make sure that we both got to do a bit of everything, or at least most things. I'm more of a 2D artist than Jimmy I handled a lot more of the design work along with drawing up the storyboard. He specifically wanted to make the character as well so he modelled, textured and rigged character while I worked on the environment. Then I animated everything.
We both wanted to do something game related and in a realistic style, so after having a good think on it we decided to make a character announcement trailer for a fictional game. Basing the idea on Paragon announcement trailers, as we're both interested in Unreal Engine and both played the game, along with a few cinematics from Dota 2 and other games that were of a similar online brawler genre we developed our idea further and got to work.
Since we really wanted to play with each others strengths and improve our abilities where ever we could. As both of us are pretty generalist this meant making a good plan to make sure that we both got to do a bit of everything, or at least most things. I'm more of a 2D artist than Jimmy I handled a lot more of the design work along with drawing up the storyboard. He specifically wanted to make the character as well so he modelled, textured and rigged character while I worked on the environment. Then I animated everything.
Renegade Logo Design
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Similar to the Paragon character trailers, we decided that we were going to have a full render of the character at the end with his name along with the game name and logo. This last shot would also double up as a credits.
We decided to call our fictional game Renegade and with looking at various games that were also aimed at our target demographic (18 to 25 year old males) are interested in, I got a good idea of where we needed to go with the logo. Thing is I'm really not experienced with logo's, only having made one before. So there was a lot of trial and error in this area but I found it really interesting and different from what I usually draw. |
Environment Design
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Character Design
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I haven't done that much environment design in the past so I wasn't the most confident when going into this one, I used what we had sketched out for the storyboard as reference along with looking at Utah and the Mojave desert as real world references. We knew that we wanted a rockier desert with some more futuristic looking rubble.
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Right from the beginning we knew we wanted a character that had some sort of interesting scars along with being an older so that he could have really nice wrinkles when animated. As we developed the idea of what we were doing we also decided that he was going to have a military background and carries a sniper rifle but his primary weapon is a pistol.
With these base ideas in place I went and started concepting, looking at actors Tommy Flanagan and Clint Eastwood as references for the face. For the clothing I mostly looked at current and past military uniforms and tried to bring them into the science fiction world that we were wanting to create. I was a little out of my comfort zone with designing this character as I usually don't draw men and when I do they're far more stylized then this. So I had to use a lot of reference to get these looking right. Halfway through doing the colours I decided to go back to the fundamentals with it and spent a lot of time reading and rereading this Dota 2 article which was designed to help people create the marketplace skins. I found it very helpful and I really need to remember to have a good read over it before doing more character designs in the future until I'm far more confident with using colour. |
Modelling
I modeled all of the lower poly assets for the environment. Thankfully I didn't come into much trouble when modelling these except perhaps wanting to take a break from modelling rocks and the odd UV troubles. On the whole they took a lot longer than I thought it was going to but I definitely started speeding up to the end and am a lot more confident at modelling rocks now which I think is a pretty useful skill as there are rocks everywhere.
For the rocks I used a lot of reference images from Utah. For the scrap metal I looked at a few different plane crashes and tried to make a few of them rather un-unique to help with them not looking as repeated when they're in the scene. I also tried to make them all look a little bit more science fiction to help with setting the scene.
For the rocks I used a lot of reference images from Utah. For the scrap metal I looked at a few different plane crashes and tried to make a few of them rather un-unique to help with them not looking as repeated when they're in the scene. I also tried to make them all look a little bit more science fiction to help with setting the scene.
Animation
I was tasked with doing all of the animation for the character and the cameras. Jimmy made me a really nice rig to use. I decided to go with the video game route and made two cycles, a walk cycle and an idle for two of the shots. The rest of the shots were animated specifically for that shot. I didn't have many problems when it came to animating other than the odd camera going haywire or graphics card drivers crashing. Other than the time constraints that I had there wasn't anything that was all that challenging.
I did make my first human walk and idle cycle but I had previously done the same on a little far more cartoony character. I just made sure to have a lot of reference and away I went for these ones.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the animations, there are a few clipping problems and out of a couple of the shots his arms are completely broken to accommodate the massive scale of the rifle but on the most part it turned out pretty good. I know that if I had more time on it I would have definitely fixed the clipping more along with making the left hand slide less.
For his cloak Jimmy simulated in Engine.
I did make my first human walk and idle cycle but I had previously done the same on a little far more cartoony character. I just made sure to have a lot of reference and away I went for these ones.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the animations, there are a few clipping problems and out of a couple of the shots his arms are completely broken to accommodate the massive scale of the rifle but on the most part it turned out pretty good. I know that if I had more time on it I would have definitely fixed the clipping more along with making the left hand slide less.
For his cloak Jimmy simulated in Engine.
Texturing
I didn't do a whole lot of texturing due to working on the animations but I did do all of the rubble along with the foliage. While the rubble was very much with in my comfort zone the foliage really was not. Jimmy and the internet helped a lot with that one. I modeled the grass before baking it down to a plane with opacity which should have been easy to do but it felt like something completely new and SO out of my comfort zone, everything that I did was something that I had done before so really it was just applying my skills in a new way. Even though they are pretty simplistic I still can't help but be rather proud of these grasses.
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Finished Product
Jimmy did the compositing and I did the editing to finish the whole thing off. Below are two stills and a screen cap of the environment all set up.