Alpha
Roles: 3D Technical Artist & Cinematics Director
My responsibilities as a 3D Technical Artist included:
- High to low-poly workflow of organic creatures.
- Coordinating with Design, 2-D Art and Tech departments.
- Rigging & Animations.
- Engine implementation.
My responsibilities as a Cinematics Director included:
- Coordinating with storyboard artists, 3-D artists, and sound designers to deliver engaging stories.
- Production of 2-D & 3-D Cutscenes.
- Reaching out and assisting in solving production roadblocks
- Video Editing.
Devlog
As I was assigned to the role of a creature artist, I began sculpting creatures based on a concept art developed by one our 2-D artists, Meagan Philbin, using Zbrush.
Once the scupt met the standards of the project, I began the retopology process in Maya.
After retopology, then UVs came into the mix. Texturing came right after.
By using Substance Painter I was able to bake the high poly version of a model to the low poly version to maintain few details in, for the sake of rigging & animations.
Back in Maya, I began developing the rig for the creatures, by placing joints, and nurves which I use to create animation controllers.
With some weight painting adjustments, the rig was completed, then I procedeed to produce animations.
With the way I have the rigs set- up, I began keyframing joints separately by 1 frame apart from each other. This allowed me to create fluidity in the animations.
Once a set of animations were done, it was time to implement them inside of the engine.
After importing the animations to Unreal Engine, I began using the engine’s Animation blend trees, correctly, Blendspace 1D. I was able to blend movement animations.
This was the creature production pipeline. After all creatures, I was assigned to do had been completed, I began working on Cutscenes for the project.
As I had some background in video editing, I was assigned to put together cutscenes for the project.
Working alongside Meagan Philbin, & Brennen Cruz, we developed the intro and end game cutscenes using 2-D illustrations, audio and video editing.
With the aid of Lais Marques, who was also a creature artist for this project, we had a clear direction of presenting 3-D Cutscenes that would appear at the beginning and the end of the experiences through storyboarding and Mitchel Chanthasone in making the main character’s animations for matching what the storyboard represents.
After obtaining all these resources, I went inside of the engine. I developed cutscenes using Unreal’s level sequence tools, by keyframing actor locations, rendering in the engine, and video edit the renders to put together a cutscene!
Post-mortem
There was a significant amount of hardships related to mental health at the time of Alpha, so this time taught me how to overcome some insecurities, and support those in need.
I felt that I was a lot closer to the production of the game this time around, as I was working alongside individuals with similar skillsets and supporting each other to achieve our goals.
Despite COVID-19 affecting the overall progress of the project, being in constant calls with the team helped morale and managed not only me but many more to complete our tasks.
This project opened my eyes to overall game production. It made me understand the responsibilities of a game producer, game designer, and game artist firsthand, with a moderate team size. It showed me which tasks I can excel at, and tasks that I need to improve on. It is an experience that I’ll be looking back, as I was able to complete many production obstacles that I was not sure I could have done.
I want to thank the following people: Daniel Antezana, Mitchel Chanthasone, Brennen Cruz, Allyson Foley, Tyler Gonzalez, Emily Liberaski, Sunny Mallard, Lais Marques, Katelyn McConnel, Cameron Ogbourne, Federico Pagani Gonzalez, Megan Parise, Meagan Philbin, Quan Nghitran, Thomas Pring, Nabil Sekirime, Jess Withers and Tyler Yungmann, for believing in me, as well as allowing me to become better in producing content for the digital world!