Animation Strategies - Blacksmith Environment
Updated: Mar 3
For week 2, I was moved to a different group, due to my initial group being too big. I was quickly brought up to speed by Conor, and informed on the group's goal. Our group chose the blacksmith environment, and the concept was to have it be owned by a dwarf blacksmith. The twist being he's also deeply passionate about cooking, so combines both professions into one. He crafts weapons and cooking utensils. He also both sells weapons, and runs a little eatery.
The plan was to have two main rooms of the emvironment: the dining section, and the blacksmithing section. The main centrepiece of the environment would be the furnace itself - as the group áwanted to take a Ghibli-inspired direction with it by incorporating a sea-creature design into it. There were already some inspiration sources such as Breath of the Wild, studio Ghibli, and MediEvil's 2019 remake. As I'm super familiar with the latter, it allowed us to decide on that as our main inspiration for the art style of our assets.
I spent the class looking at concept art from the 2019 remake:
Key features I picked up from looking at the work, (and how it translated into the game models themselves) was how proportions were exaggerated. Not chaotic in its cartoonishness, but instead what I like to call "diet Tim Burton". The original game was inspired by the works of Tim Burton and Danny Elfman to begin with, and its evident in the final product. I characterise the MediEvil 2019 style as "blotchy" with its textures. Not quite painterly, as strokes cant really be seen in the final textures, but the colours aren't 100% flat throughout either. I also observed that, particularly on metallic materials, models have a lighter colour around their edges, acting as a highlight.
After studying the style more, I got to sketching out some rough weaponty concepts. The idea was naturally to have weapons the blacksmith made scattered around the smithing room - including a wall of "easter egg" weaponry; each of us in the group would model their own special weapon for this rack, each referencing a preexisting weapon from a piece of media that we like.
Following the sketches, I took one, (the scythe) and attempted to fully render it in a style similar to the MediEvil 2019 concept art. It was something out of my comfort zone, but despite being a little tricky at first, I ended up really loving the result.
WEEK 3
week 3-4 - concepts, scythe, knightly sword, rack, style guide
Over the next week, I volunteered to create a style guide for the group. As the one with most experience with the MediEvil style, and knowledge on the right terminology needed to outline what elements of a given style we're using to fuel our own, I was eager to take up the task. I thought the strongest way to convey the differences between a photo-realistic style and the stylised one we were aiming for, would be to take a realistic model, and compare it to a model of the same object that instead follows the guidelines I'll be outlining for our own style.
I decided to use the scythe concept for the test model, as it was the sole concept I'd done a rendered depiction of. The cylinder and attachment piece were both created using cylinders; the blade itself was made from a plane that I extruded and adjusted to my liking. The fun part came with the texturing itself. Figuring out how to achieve a blotched effect was really fun - it just came down to having a black mask with a dripping rust generator and blur scope filter applied. For edge highlights I used the metal edge generator with a blur scope filter. As the early few models didn't have great UVs, I would alternate between metal edge, mask builder, or curvature. Once I'd learnt how to UV efficiently and had went back over the previous models, I was able to refine the edge highlights. Using the UV border distance generator enabled this process to be much more effective.
I followed a tutorial to achieve a basic stylised wood texture, before editing it myself to the desired effect. It was mainly achieved by using grunge dot textures and applying a directional blur on them. I'd then toy about with the height levels in order to achieve a wood grain effect. Following this, I used a mask builder with the blur filter to create a thicker, more blurred edge highlight.
After I'd created this test asset, I began writing up the style guide. I looked at existing examples to help me see how to organise my own, and what kind of language was used. I started the style guide off by outlining the general style we were aiming for. I used the term "diluted Tim Burton" to describe ours as whilst MediEvil was heavily inspired by the works of Tim Burton, it can be observed that the edges and proportions in MediEvil 2019 aren't as harsh or sharp - not as overtly gothic. In the same sense, the MediEvil 2019 style isn't overtly cartoonish and exaggerated either. Its by no means realistic, but is neither comparable to the levels of cartoonishness that styles like rubberhouse would show. Following this, I outlined a step-by-step texturing guide using SUbstance Painter. I outlined the methods I'd used for the test asset, including the layer types, generators and filters used. I concluded the guide with a side-by-side of a photo-realistic scythe model with the one I'd made, to highlight the differences. I additionally included other examples of MediEvil 2019 concept art that really exemplified the style we were aiming for.
My next task to complete for the next week was conceptual art for the following items:
Weapons rack
Fuller tool
Knightly sword
Bastard sword
Axe
Morning star
Mace
Zweihander
Great sword
While I wanted to have detailed and coloured concepts, I knew aiming for fully rendered concepts, (like the scythe made earlier) would be too time-consuming. Instead, I kept my concept style to rough but detailed sketches, base colours, and some basic shading and highlights.
For the first few concepts, I wanted to include nautical details where I could, since they were already being included in the axolotl/catfish furnace itself. I was later told that it wasn't going to be such a key theme, so the later concepts don't have any of these nautical elements incorporated. I paid attention to the MediEvil 2019 concept art, to see how proportions and colours were exaggerated. With the swords, it became a little challenging to create concepts that weren't too similar to each other, but I believe they ended up being distinctive enough. The axe and morning star concepts in particular were really enjoyable to play about with - my favourite out of all the concepts being the morning star concept with the handle that resembles an arm and hand.
I asked the other group members to vote on which concept for each weapon they preferred, but I ended up having to choose myself. In order, I went with:
3
(didn't end up choosing as my name wasn't put down for modelling the fuller tool)
4
4
2
4
2
1
2
With the concepts decided upon, I began working down through the list of weapon assets I'd been assigned to.
The first
DO
WEEK 4
sword
axe
sword