Atomic Garden Interactive

Covid-19 2 : Electric Boogaloo The Pandas here Represent Covid This project ended with me being sick the week of the hand in and so I requested and obtained an extension of a week. Because of this, I had the same amount of time to complete this project as I would have done had I not been ill so I will not mention that again but it did have a small effect on my final product. The first couple of weeks of this project went well I think, I formed a strong sense of the theme and mood I wanted to achieve through collage and image mashes and set myself some clear and achievable goals. The trouble began as I tried to create concept art to formalise my ideas into more precise images. I really struggled to create any kind of concept art, the fear of the blank page got the better of me more often than not and as a result, I ended up avoiding working on the project at times when I should have been pressing forward. I now know a good way around this would have been to grey box out my ideas using t...

Mise-en-scène Using the objects I had created I tried to create miniature scenes or vignette that utilise an amount of environmental storytelling.  For instance, see above there is a cigarette but in the foundation and only one of the people is obviously a smoker implying that they put it there. Also, there is a table set out in such a way as to imply that the three NPCs all sit together sometimes. Had I more time I would like to add the dialogue that I had planned but these vignettes will surfice.

Pro Bricklaying Using Pro Builder I created the larger shapes of the level like the building that he level takes place on and the slightly smaller but still bigger than the player objects such as the shed and the lift buildings and walls.

Silent hill 2.0 Using Maya I created a selection of small scatter objects to fill my scene and tell a story through the environment. I really enjoyed creating these and while UVing the chairs, for instance, was like pulling teeth the overall experience was very enjoyable.

London Fog is back! I used the fog setting in unity to create a linear gradient that obscures the distant building and the horizon this adds a great amount of atmosphere instantly and really helps set the mood I'm going for.

Map Take 2 This is the revised layout for the map. This map has better sightlines from each point and gives a better view of the city. It is also a lot more doable in the time I have I feel, it also has the benefit of allowing some freedom to create different spaces within it using the objects, such as a tip or rubbish area or a construction zone somewhere where the pieces for building are laid out.

London Upsidedown I imported the blender file into Maya and duplicated and flipped it to create the greater overhang of the city that the text mentions. 

Now in Orange I used the unity package Pro Builder I grey boxed out my level concept. By doing this I realised that the vertical nature of the level I had chosen would not work the way I wanted to. The sightlines from this level were severely obscured and the nature of being in buildings like this would mean I would need to create a whole bunch of objects I am not currently prepared to. So I will redraw my level.

  Licking the walls to access the quality of the textures I made some test images by combining images together to get different effects such as adding water damage to concrete and rust lines etc. I'm going to use this to create the textures ill use for the wall and floors of my environment.

Moody Boards I created a series of images to help conceptual the look and feel I want to capture from the text. Each image is inspired by some element of the text either a line or two or the greater setting of future London. The above image is inspired by ground-level London and the aesthetics of the streets and the below is the inspiration for the skyline and the horizon. This image is the 'overwhelming architecture' and 'aisle of Titanic buildings' from the text. I wanted to capture the emotion of looking up at towing buildings that loom over you in cities with skyscrapers. I was trying to create 'Gigantic globes of cool white light' hanging overhead. Combined with some of the other parts of the text it made me think of these street lights and stalactites. This image is 'a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky'. I tried to think of what London would have as a roof if it were to have one and this style of victoria glass and steel construction...

  Not drawn on actual thumbnails. I made a series of thumbnail drawing to get ideas and to practise creating original concepts. For the top drawing, I relied too much on the line function of photoshop so I tried to create without using straight lines in the later images. Even here I can see the improvement from the first image to the later one.

There Be Monsters This is the first version of the walkable layout for my game. Each image is stacked on top of each other going from the top right to bottom left, with the first as the lowest level and the last being the highest. The gradient indicates slopes/how you access the other levels. the player moves in roughly a spiral going up hopefully reducing the chances of the player getting lost. The Green dot is the players start position and the orange dots indicate the NPC the player can talk to. The Grey Blocks indicate impassible walls or fences. My Goal with this layout is to give the player an interesting route through the level spiralling upwards. Allowing the player ample opportunity to view the surrounding areas from a high vantage point and experience a sense of danger from being so high up. There are also a few places for the player to backtrack or go into deadends, these should deepen the feeling of exploration. This route should also force the player to pass the NPCs, mean...

Blender GIS BlenderGIS GitHub I found this video about Blender GIS which allows you to easily import map data from google bing and OSM into Blender. This creates not only the basic shapes of buildings and the layout of the map but also things like the elevation. With this, I hope I can create a large cityscape the player can see from the place space without the need for me to go in and individually model a bunch of building then place them. this should both save me a bunch of time but also create a far more interesting horizon than I could create using simple cubes.  The Building come in without any textures or UVs so I'm going to have to find a way you texture them that is quick and makes sense but given the distance from the player and the high chance, ill add fog or some effect that obscures the players view that should be relatively easy to accomplish.

How to Make Retro-Style RPG Portraits Using AI This is a video about making pixelated portraits from pictures in the style of old RPGs like Daggerfall . I definitely want to try using this technique to create portraits to illustrate who is speaking in speech bubbles or textboxes, as I feel this would greatly help with player comprehension and be a quick and easy way to make a bunch of very visually striking images. I'm thinking of using pictures of Victorians rather than fantasy characters to see if that creates an interesting aesthetic difference from what is normally associated with pixel art.  

Do the Monster Mash! I photoshopped together a variety of images I was inspired by and this was the result. I love the overall feel of this image the textures it contains, the colours and the tones all do a great job of capturing the look of decay and retro-futurism. I'm going to section this image into smaller panels and construct thumbnails to give myself a jumping-off point for this project.

It's all a matter of perspective We did some perspective exercises by drawing a horizon line then adding a vanishing point. Connecting points to the vanishing point gives clear guides for creating perspective in the image.  To prevent distortion Simon suggested putting the vanishing points outside the borders of the image as this extra space would prevent you from getting to close to the vanishing point while still allowing you to fill the image completely. 

Somebody forgot to set their alarm... The Text I have chosen to adapt, for the Art and Design Unit is When The Sleeper Wakes (WTSW), by H. G. Wells. I chose this based on the texts descriptions of large edifices and gossamer suspension bridges. This really got my imagination going and I have quite a few ideas I want to explore.  When The Sleeper Wakes, H. G. Wells  His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and th...

Don't Nouveau and drive, kids. I created influence maps for Art Nouveau and Megalithic Architecture to show the hierarchy of influence different pieces in their respective genres have on the work I create. I'm going to create one for the When the Sleeper Wakes project to show the different places that 

The Poäng of Art Glastonbury Dam, By Tyler Edlin, can be broken down into one large cube for the central building of the castle with another rotated and reduced for the roof. The wall is comprised of 4 cylinders with cones on top for the rooves. The tunnel section of the wall could be constructed from rectangles and cylinders using the difference boolean. For the details on the turrets themselves such as the wooden beams, I would use rectangles sunken into the surface to create the depth present in the facade. Alot of the surface detail is heavily repeated on a micro-scale and then on a macro-scale so I would probably try to create a detailed wall for example by creating the largest parts first then cut to get the tunnel, then add the rectangles to make up the supports on one small section and copy that across its breadth. Finally, I would then copy the whole thing for the other walls and make any changes that need to be made to distinguish them. using the same technique I would make t...