Common Art - Week 10 - Art Style Guides - Metroid Dread

For the second week of our VR immersive experience project, we focused on studying the art style of Metroid Dread which we are going to base our VR experience on. We reviewed playthroughs of the game, boss fights, cinematic sequences, and the art book to get a better understanding of the style the Metroid Dread team developed. I focused on establishing a mood board, researching visual effects, iconography, technical considerations, and special design considerations.

For the mood board, I tried to focus on several big points throughout the game but also showing off the variety of environments and the feelings they were trying to invoke. For visual effects, I tried to list off a large number of effects that you could see throughout the game. There ended up being so many that I started to categorize effects to try and simplify things. With iconography, I realized there wasn't as many icons throughout the game as I thought there would be. It focused on a couple designs to match the alien environment but a lot of it showed through UI.

Technical considerations consisted of a number of challenges that could prove difficult within the pipeline and things they had to watch out for. Special Design Considerations mostly applied to our goal of switching from a console system to VR seeing as VR is the most unique challenge we will face.

Common Art - Week 09 - Art Style Guides (Understanding Story)

This week, we were tasked with creating a side story based off of a pre-approved franchise. Our team decided to dive into the Metroid Dread Universe as part of our larger VR experience that will continue through the end of our 3rd semester. Our side story follows some of the story points of Metroid Dread but also is inspired from Metroid Fusion and reintroduces the SA-X as the main villain. An X parasite was experimented on and Metroid DNA was combined with it, and after failing to take over Samus, becomes a major threat to her and the galaxy.

As for the work that was needed from our teams, we needed to photobash a series of images to explain the different hours of the hero's journey and establish the characters. The images I created for my team were for the final 4 hours: Return, New Life, Resolution, and Status Quo. I used images directly from the Metroid franchise and layered them together to tell a different story.

Metroid Side Story, hour 9, Return

Metroid Side Story, hour 10, New Life

Metroid Side Story, hour 11, Resolution

Metroid Side Story, Status Quo

3D Art - Module 2 - Week 7

So this is the final week working on the cannon project. I touched up the high poly a little but it mostly remained the same. The low poly needed very little adjustments to match some of the detail of the high poly model but it required very little changes. A lot of work was done to get the UVs into a good state. This was difficult due to the high number of objects along with a lot of complexity.

In the end, because of Substance painter being limited to 4k textures which ended up being very pixelated, I had to swap over to UDIMs so that I could essentially get an 8k map spread across 4 UDIMs. This ended up with a decent amount of resolution though if looked at closely can still become noticeable. I also didn't realize just how much the colors changed when exporting to Unreal with a number of textures looking much more saturated in engine. Overall though, while I know the textures could use more work and there is plenty of detail I would like to add, I am fairly happy with the end result.

Cannon Beauty Shot

Cannon UVs

Common Art - Week 6 - Perspective

I decided to create a Warp Gate for this assignment meant to represent transportation and to go over perspective. Originally I was thinking of doing a spaceship and during my searches for references I really liked the idea of doing a futuristic warp gate. I liked the idea of combining the frequently seen series of torus with odd shaped rails. I also liked the extra added details of the cubes randomly sticking out. I played with the idea of having an energy type of field between the different torus' but ended up removing them as they became very distracting.

Reference Board

3D Model Beauty Shot

Final Photoshop Illustration

3D Art - Module 2 Week 6 - Cannon (advanced)

 I fell behind this week and didn't get as much detail as I would have liked. I smoothed, and got panels in various areas. I didn't move into ZBrush as I felt that working in Maya would provide the best tools for hard surface modeling even at high poly counts. There were a number of extra parts of the model that I ended up removing due to adding too many polygon while adding little detail. There are also a number of details I am planning on adding to the normal/bump map inside of substance instead of trying to model and then bake down. Overall though I will need to play a bit of catch up as UVs are far from done.

High Poly Cannon with smoothing and paneling, 11.6 million tris

Low Poly Cannon, 19794 tris