Ascension Games

So the last post I had was about my initial forays into the Max to Unity3d pipeline.

When I left it, I had some feedback on my basic mesh, and before I get into the second part of this post, I’d like to say a thing or two about feedback.

Feedback, is one of those things that helps an artist, or maybe even programmers get better. When someone asks for feedback on anything they’ve done, they’re asking for your perspective, your expertise. If you dont have any expertise in the area, and the request still comes in, then feel free to offer just your unique perspective.

As an artist, feedback is one of the first things I learned to give, and more importantly take. Its that crucial to development. Heres how this lesson unfolded.

First day of Figure Construction (basically anatomy.). I heard the rumors about the class, having live models. Naked ones.  Not only that but I think i also heard that my instructor was a complete bastard about criticism, dishing out harsh criticism, and also being a slave driver when it comes to drawing, 20 pages, front, back, no spaces between drawings.

Minimum.

Do this, and receive a D.

Walked into class, was thrown off balance by the nude male model, and the fact that the only drawing position was right in front of him, and on a drawing horse! Anyways, after about 30 minutes of posing, drawing, and our instructor barking orders “Draw like you mean it! Stop masturbating the pencil! ” etc, we have to put up our works on the wall, walk around the room, then give other fellow students criticism.  Then we got feedback from the instructor.

My dread was so thick it was running down my pants-leg. As an artist, I’m fairly humble. I don’t think my work is any good, I see all my mistakes. Foreshortening, perspective, gesture, balance, each of this mistakes on the page mocking me…and now the entire class is going to see them, and I’m going to be a running joke. In my first trip around the class, I was thunder-struck. All these guys and girls drew so well. They didn’t need this class! Oh crap.

So I was worried, humbled, embarrassed when it came to my drawings, but the instructor gave clear instruction. “What do you like about this drawing? What do you think doesn’t work?”  2 very clear questions, and almost a structure for feedback. Amazing. Its important for people to hear that you can see something good, or ok, or that you like about the work you’re giving feedback on. Even if its minor, otherwise your feedback comes off as petty, inconsiderate, and has the opposite effect that good feedback has. Then you can state what you dont like. And the key here is to communicate that in a respectful way that doesn’t alienate. Giving poor feedback to anyone never helps. Don’t sugar-coat it, and don’t wield it like you would a chainsaw in a zombie infested mall.  I could probably write another post on it, but I’ve already written too much. Lets dive into the changes I made, based on the feedback from my team.

Here’s my second attempt:

So a few changes. Believe it or not, as easy as this was to put together, I learned quite a bit about how to pull this stuff together.

First of all, the skybox. This was rendered out of a 3d package Vue, which, is expensive but luckily I have friends who don’t have the financial constraints that I do, and I was able to poke around for a little while and get this lovely skybox rendered. After a few tweaks and getting this imported as the unity3d skybox, I noticed that my geometry felt very out of place, and that was due to the specular or “teh shiney” wasn’t in the range of the rest of the environment, and I needed to figure out how to make the scene feel more cohesive. Thats when I added the fog color.

The fog color I pulled directly from the skybox. That gave the impression that it was dusk, or…dawn…which is the setting one?  It also had the added benefit of extending the visible light into the horizon, which gives the scene a bit more atmosphere. Theres only 1 light in this scene, and its sun…but not the one you see in the pic.

The other thing I did to this mockup, was add the hills in the distance, but the terrain there felt very empty, and I wasn’t feeling it. So how to spice it up? I did a very subtle thing, I added trees just on the other side of the hill to breakup the horizon line, and hint that theres a different scene just over the ridge. The figure in the foreground is there for scale reference.

There are other touches, like the sand texture change on the terrain where the rock wall is. There’s also some shrubbs that i placed for a bit of interest. Some final sculpting of the terrain really makes a nice scene.

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