FMP (Week 1) - Final Major Project Introduction

I have decided to keep the same blog for my FMP, as I like to keep everything together and organised, I have had this blog since second year now and it is nice to see my journey in one place and may be useful for others too. I will add a FMP tag to new blog posts so that they are easy to see altogether if needed.

Just before returning to University after Christmas, I was lucky enough to travel to New York with my University course. Over the 5 days I spent there I used my time visiting tourist attractions and museums looking for inspiration for my final major project. Whilst at the Natural History Museum, I found this diorama of a traditional Japanese house and thought it was beautiful and full of many interesting assets. From this I decided that I wanted to make a Japanese hot springs environment, called a Onsen or sometimes Onsen Ryokan.

This week we have been brainstorming ideas in preparation for pitching them to our tutors, and this is a copy of the sheet I filled out to demonstrate my ideas for the project.

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• A key image.

• What is your area of specialism?

• Stylised environment art. I aim to create a stylised environment using an art style similar to that of Blizzard’s Overwatch, using hand painted texturing and PBR.

• What form of hand in would the project take (determined by above)

• Concepting for the level and a final and complete game level that is able to be explored by the player.

• What do you want to be the focus of the assessment

• I would aim for it to be a finished piece which also includes a few experiments but is overall very polished and portfolio worthy.

• How long will it take to complete, the time-scale?

• I would aim to spend around 12 weeks on this project, with lots of time to spare in case anything goes wrong or unpredictable happens causing me to have to restart or change the project. This is also a very fair time scale for polish. I would expect to spend around 2 weeks on the original concepts and block outs, then 8 weeks modelling and texturing, and 2 weeks split out over the duration of the project ensuring everything is correct in engine.

• Are there any stretch goals?

• If I were to finish the project in the desired time scale I would aim to move on to creating a smaller project using the same style, to demonstrate that I am able to create many environments and stick to one style suitable to use in a game.

• Is there anything else you think is relevant to consider at this stage?

• How stylised I want to make the environment, Overwatch uses a very specific style where the buildings still look believable and realistic but have a somewhat cartoony feeling which will be difficult to replicate.

• Risk Factors!

• Water and particles! I have no idea how to do either of these, but when is a better time to learn…

• Fun Factor!

• Lots of interesting and different elements, from outside terrain to furniture pieces and walls, the variety in assets will keep the project varied and more fun.

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Following on from this, I decided to start collecting images and references to fill my ideas and to show to my tutors. I have decided that I want the scene to have both interior and exterior areas (the outside hot springs and inside rooms), and I want it to be in the winter time. In the winter time the onsen are visited by monkeys who are famous for sitting in the springs to keep warm, and I want to add some of these monkeys to the scene.

After I had put together a huge image of inspiration I narrowed it down to a smaller which include my main ideas, as it can be quite easy to get lost looking at my original moodboard so I will check this smaller one for immediate reference and then the larger one second.

I pitched my ideas to my tutor and luckily they were all approved and I was given the go ahead for this project!