Final test environments semester 1

I think the two versions of the environment turned out fairly successful. The projects were kept small and concise  to achieve better results in each category. Unfortunately I personally feel like the scene didn't have enough objects - the scene needed more clutter to look lived in. I feel though that the horror version, created more of an effective atmosphere, (this might be just to personal taste, but I felt better on edge walking past blood & seeing knifes everywhere rather than a room which seemed golden & sparkled).

Updated schedule

Here is a more improved version of the schedule, which goes more into detail about all the area I will be covering.

Progress of test level /s

Sorry I haven't posted much in a while, due to the fact of just having to tweak a few sections in my dissertation proposal, and it taking an awfully long time. Here is the progress so far, just establishing  the overall eastern feel of the interior. It is looking good so far but still need to be filled with a little more than what is already there, as it is still looking a little empty on the inside, also the outside will be built soon but probably wont be any bigger than the space of the interior as it is only a test piece.

Rethinking Title

Upon receiving feedback from my lecturers, about my project, for the last week I have been thinking over and over what could I re-name it to? and is a similar subject too what I had previously thought of. After some brainstorming, I remembered one of the lecturers mentioning the possibility of involving the subject of presence within my project and I came upon the fact that presence within a game environment is closely related to immersion, but rather focuses specifically on all the elements of the pipeline e.g. story , lighting, theme, style and sounds etc. Taking all this into account, I decided to tweak the research title slightly to, "The creation of presence within an environment and how it is achieved".

Presentation 1

Today I have just done my first pitch presentation, where I have started to introduce the main concept of my project and which direction I would like to go.

Slide 1 - Introduction

Slide 2 - Research aim

Slide 3 - As seen near the start of this project, this thought process is what helped me through thinking of an ideas for my research question base on what I type of area I wanted to go into. It also made the thought process easier for thinking of all the individual sub-topics that went along with immersion.

Slide 4 - Here I went further into detail as to what my subject area actually meant, talking about the various read materials I researched into to acquire the information, and from that, saying in my own words what I thought it meant, e.g (immersion - when the primary focus of an individual is towards what is on the screen, (virtual world), rather than their own surroundings and they become engrossed)

Sub topics included what is needed to create an immersive experience, such as sound, lighting story, theme etc.

Slide 5 -  Creating an environment that actually makes the player feel like they are in the game or living through the character.

why? - I am trying to find out how I could include immersion because in creating a game, an immersive experience is key to portraying a believable environment and successful game.

Slide 6 - Here are some examples of one of the projects I have done in the past for my third year. This projects influences took root from the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley but had a sort of futuristic interpretation of it.

Slide 7 -  In this section, I explained what I aimed to create for the test levels, that being a Murder mystery/ horror level which is intended provoke anxiety and fear within the player and for the other test I want create an environment which gives the right representation of a zen garden, ( giving the emotions of peacefulness and tranquillity).

Slide 8 - I chose these games as influences for the zen garden test level, because the depict the direction I would like to go if I went forward with this type of environment. Why I chose these two examples at the top ( Far cry 4 - left, Metal gear rising - right), was because one of them is a good example of what I would probably looking for in the garden. Also the other is an influence because of the dream like scenery.

Slide 9 - Typically there are not alot of games in this genre especially to do with eastern influences, but I think these two examples, probably best describe what I intend to do with the project if I go for this theme or at least how I would like the environment to look similar to.

Slide 10 - For these two test levels, I have created a very rough floor plan to give a slight idea to how this level is going to look. Since the level will follow eastern themes, I will be going for the intent of creating a traditional Japanese house, but when it comes to creating the final level next semester, I may move to a more modern style approach, for the house.

Slide 11 - This is how far I have gotten for creating the Japanese style house.

Slide 12 -  Over the next few weeks, once I finished adding the objects to the test environments I will be exploring into what colour schemes & lighting position will be best effective for the two separate themes I have chosen. I also intend to find out what music and sounds best create the mood for these levels.  

(same timeline as in the post below)

Feedback

Overall I think the presentation went fairly well, although I felt a little nervous throughout the duration of it. Although I felt nervous it was a little bit of a relief that I was on of the last people to give my presentation, but seeing other peoples projects I felt at the time the practice based work on my part was possibly a bit lacking. The feedback from the lecturers was ok, there was some good points about my project and a few bad ones too. They all generally said the same thing, that it was good the amount of research I had done, but the project research question that I chose to do, "The creation of immersive 3D environments and how it keeps the player engaged" would be too much for just a one year project, and it is really hard to measure what is immersive and what is not, so they said about renaming the project to something more specific, focusing on a area like engagement etc and suggested maybe something to do with presence.

eastern environmental research - Traditional japanese home

Although I had already started making props for the environment, I hadn't really seen much of what a traditional Japanese would possible look like, and if certain objects were made, where would they be positioned on the environment?. In these first two examples below, they both show the natural look of the interior of these homes through real- life. 

http://www.foymall.com/japanese-interior-design/japanese-interior-design-ideas-grosvenor-house-museum/

http://tonost.com/2013/08/15/%E8%87%AA%E5%88%86%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A1%E3%81%AE%E3%82%AA%E3%83%95%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%92%E4%BD%9C%E3%82%8B%E3%81%AA%E3%82%89%E3%80%81%E3%81%93%E3%82%93%E3%81%AA%E3%83%87%E3%82%B6%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3/

These other three picture are prime examples of traditional homes in Japanese environments, but the difference here is these environments are built for game use /architecture/ advertisement by a 3D environment artist. As you can see the use of furniture is kept to a minimum, but still keeps you immersed from its realistic stand-point .

http://gnuarch.org/japanese-living-room-ideas-and-main-principles-of-its-design/interior-design-of-a-japanese-style-living-room/

https://www.thefhd.co/japanese-style-living-room-design/living-room-concept-using-traditional-japanese-style-interior-result/

Schedule

Here is a general schedule, for keeping track of what dates I will start and Finnish these individual tasks. Other tasks may be added and dates may change, so I will keep you updated on my progress.

Test 1 - lightmaps

Developmental process

In the end the tutorial process worked. The lightmap/second UV s were generated through the process in Maya and were successful when imported into the unreal 4 engine, as you can see through the image above you, ( the shadows are in the right positions and the light is reflected off the object in the places expected). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJsR0y7R8U

This tutorial will show the process of how to create your lightmaps in Maya, once you have created and textured the object/s, then integrate those objects into engine to provide real life lighting on them.

Final pattern created on photoshop

Reference for floral patterns

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-decorative-oriental-floral-pattern-arabic-style-image30927773

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-oriental-floral-bird-patterns-image12336111

Since my theme for this project was eastern/oriental based I wanted to stick to patterns that were mostly used in this region, e.g. floral patterns. 

For starting off developing this vase, from a cylinder, I wanted to slowly morph off the shape into something similar to what you see below. As you can see by the mid-stage the vase object was starting to take shape, I wanted to add in more geometry so that it gave the illusion of spherical roundness.

References

Here are some examples I took from various sites, for reference in the making of my vase, (For these particular two vases, I wanted to look at oriental patterning and various shapes).

In the previous post, on my jellyfish I asked the question "How would I create lightmaps in a 3D package and then apply it to a game engine". As I have never acquired this knowledge before, and the fact that I feel doing this would improve the look of my objects, giving them the correct shadows and lighting, I felt it was necessary to learn this process. 

Psychology

Over the past few weeks I have been researching into my main subject area of immersion to get an idea of what it fundamentally means. And from this study, looking at various articles, books and websites I felt I had figured out the meaning of the term Immersion, when it comes to game environments. What is immersion?, "It is when the primary focus of an individual is towards what's on screen rather than the surrounding world i.e. they become engrossed within their virtual surroundings".


Several elements need to come into play, for what is described as immersion, when it comes to games. You have to be able to create an atmosphere to envelope the player.To do this you first need to think about what themes and styles you will incorporate into the level and stick to them, (it is no good if you use too many themes/styles otherwise this will break the immersion and make it less believable e.g. (Having a demonic castle next to a Greek temple).

The next thing to which needs to be involved is the story of the game level. If you can somehow include the history of the environment or something to do with a character even a emotional attachment to something this can add depth to the story (objects in the environment). To create a successful story all these things are needed, but you need to be able to either relate to the player or find something new/ unexpected.


 Here is a process of how immersion and atmosphere of a game are achieved.
http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2013/09/why-gone-home-is-so-immersive/

Theme

Because in most of my previous projects being more so related to western culture, I wanted to change it up a little bit, going to the other side of the world and moving to eastern culture. In the past I have been very inspired by eastern culture, but never really properly looked into it. I want to create a level to which would probably contain a house and a garden, but I am undecided to either go for something like a zen garden or a murder scene, (yeah two opposite ends of the scale), both involving the factor of eastern culture. But up until I decide upon which theme I will choose for the final piece,  I will be doing studies on which type of level will be more effective with immersion ( and creating mini environmental pieces to test the themes).

Here are some of the games to which inspire me to head towards a murder scene level.

(Silent hills)

http://viewy.ru/search/norman%20reedus

(Murdered: soul suspect)

http://www.gamecrate.com/review-murdered-soul-suspect-tells-interesting-story-uninteresting-gameplay/8314

http://guitarpornography.tumblr.com/

Here are some examples of influences for the zen garden environment map

(Far cry 4)

http://www.gizorama.com/2014/review/far-cry-4-review-characters-welcome

http://www.gamer.no/artikler/anmeldelse-far-cry-4/165494

(Metal gear rising)

http://www.trueachievements.com/n12890/metal-gear-rising-revengeance-hits-the-jetstream.htm

http://www.imore.com/epic-games-releases-unreal-engine-4-based-epic-zen-garden-demo-ios-8

Inspirations

Here are some examples of artists to which so far have inspired me in which direction/s I could possibly take for my 3D environment project.

Tim Spanjer - 3D Environment Artist

http://timspanjer.com/index.html

 Currently works at on environments for a commercial company called TRICK 3D and has been featured in 3D world magazine.

http://www.trick3d.com/#home

Scott Homer - 3D Environment Artist

http://scotthomer.co.uk/

Currently works for Cryteck and has made some of the environments for Crysis 3. Also has been featured on online articles, from sites such as ’Kotaku’, ’IGN’, ’Joystiq’, ’Eurogamer’ because of his inspirational Bioshock artwork.

http://www.crytek.com/

Christoffer Radsby - 3D Environment Artist

http://christofferradsby.com/

Has worked on titles such as Far cry 3 (Ubisoft) and Motorstorm apocalypse (Evolution Studios).