Weekly Progress

 

This week, I focused on completing the model for the head of the princess character. Like with the body, my goal was to pay careful attention to the edge flow and keep it as low poly as possible without losing the level of detail I was originally striving for. I still plan to sculpt the general shape of the face a bit further in Mudbox, but for the most part, I have now completed the modeling stage for this character. I imported the completed character into Marvelous Designer to use as the avatar so that I can begin designing the clothing. 

 

For this upcoming week, I plan to continue working on the garment design in Marvelous Designer and begin creating a hairstyle in XGen. I also plan to finish importing the main environment assets into Unreal and hopefully begin working on the game mechanics.

Time spent this week: 9 hours

Week 7 Progress

This past week, I continued bringing assets for the castle environment into Unreal Engine. I also finished modeling the body of the princess character, reusing and re-topologizing the hands and feet from one of my previous models in order to save some time. For the castle, I began learning how to use Substance Painter to create materials for the assets and plug them into UE4. I figured out a workflow for texturing some of the modular assets, such as the pillars and the railings. I am currently continuing to create materials and import them into UE4 along with the models I created in Maya.

By the end of week 8, my goal is to start creating the lower part of the clothing in Marvelous Designer (the part that I will apply Apex cloth to). Even if I don't finish the details of the clothing, I would like to finish at least something simple so that I can better understand the workflow of exporting the cloth from MD to Maya (and then from Maya into Unreal). I would also like to begin sculpting the head in Mudbox, as well as continue creating models and textures for the castle environment.

Time spent this week: 16 hours

Weekly Progress

This past week, I began modeling the princess character, completed the layout of the castle and began bringing assets from Maya into Unreal. I still need to refine a lot of the meshes and UV them properly, but my goal for this week was to start bringing my scene into Unreal to start testing it with the scale of the character, collision maps and blueprints. I also did more research into creating hair for my characters and found that if my goal is to bring my characters into Unreal (as opposed to my original idea of just creating an animation in Maya), I should not use XGen like I had originally planned. Instead, I plan on looking into creating hair cards using textured planes and alpha channels.

For this upcoming week, I would like to finish the body of the character so that I can start work in Marvelous Designer by Week 7. If time allows, I would also like to start sculpting the face and begin creating the hair cards that I mentioned above. For the castle environment, I will continue to refine the meshes and do UV / texturing work. I would also like to see if I can figure out how to create NPC dialogue options using Blueprints in Unreal. For now, the NPC will just be a static mesh.

Time spent this week: 17 hours

The Story

Summary of the Original

As I mentioned before, my narrative will be based off of The Goose Girl. The story starts off with a princess being sent away to another kingdom to marry a prince. Along the way, the princess loses her amulet and her waiting maid tricks her into switching clothing with her. When they arrive at the kingdom, the prince assumes the waiting maid (dressed in the princess's clothing) to be the princess. The true princess is given a job tending the geese. She tries to hide her identity, but one day, the boy who tends to the geese alongside her notices her beautiful golden hair. He tries to get a better look before she ties it up, but the princess speaks to the wind and has the wind carry the boy's hat away so that he goes chasing after it instead. She does this every day until one day, the boy mentions her hair and her ability to control the wind to the king. Eventually her true identity as the princess is revealed and the waiting maid receives death as her punishment.

My Changes

In my interpretation of the story, I would like to incorporate a backstory and motivation for the waiting maid. Although not explicitly stated, it seems like the waiting maid has the power to make people do her bidding, much like the princess has control over the wind. In my take of the story, the waiting maid was also a princess once upon a time. When she was young, a much larger and more powerful kingdom found out about her powers and was frightened by them. They tried to get the king and queen to hand over their daughter, but they refused, so the larger kingdom invaded and detained everyone they could. The soon-to-be waiting maid's kingdom was small and peaceful, so they couldn't put up any resistance. All they could do was send their princess off through a secret tunnel leading out of the castle and hope she wouldn't be found. Meanwhile, one of the princes of the larger kingdom takes over her castle. This is the same prince that the other princess is supposed to marry years later.

Character Concept Sketches

The first character I will be designing is the princess from the Grimm fairy tale The Goose Girl. In the story, the princess travels to another kingdom, accompanied only by her waiting maid, to be wed to a prince. Along her journey, the princess loses her protective amulet and the waiting maid tricks her into switching clothing with her, so that the maid may pose as the princess. When they arrive at the prince's kingdom, the prince believes the waiting maid to be the princess and the true princess is sent off to tend to the geese. She tries to conceal her identity, but the golden color of her hair eventually gives her away.

The first concept is the princess in her true clothing and the rest are of the princess dressed in the waiting maid's clothing. For the design of this character, I definitely want the colors of her hair and eyes to stand out from the rest of her clothing. To do this, I will limit the color palette of the clothing to shades of brown. Because the princess will be taller than the waiting maid, I also want the dress to appear short on her.

When the player first meets her, she will not reveal her identity right away and she will be wearing a hood to hide her hair. It is up to the player to find her room and look through her belongings to find something that will identify her as the princess. If that happens, she will take off the hood. Because I would like the game to be based around the player's actions, it will be possible to proceed without revealing her as the princess. In that case, she will continue to pose as the waiting maid and the story will be revealed in a different way.

(Time spent: 8 hours)

Thesis Idea Revised Again

After thinking over my previous idea, I've decided to redirect the focus of my senior thesis project. Previously, I had been focused on combining Marvelous Designer cloth, XGen hair, and a fully rigged character to create a series of short animations for that character. However, I had a hard time finding something within that scope that I wanted to focus on that would make my project 'different' from the rest.

Now, I want to focus on bringing a character or two to life in an interactive environment. By that, I mean that I want to create a 1st person game in which the NPC characters will interact with the player. Some things I have in mind are that they will react differently depending on the actions the player takes. Or if the player is looking at a certain quest item or location for a while, the NPC character will take notice and say something about that item or location. It would also be neat if the character could tag along with the player without trailing along directly behind like NPCs do in most games. Maybe they could wander about on their own within a certain radius around the player until said player entered a key location. I will still be designing the characters using MD cloth and XGen hair, but instead of going for rendered short animations, I want to bring the characters into Unreal and focus on finding different ways to make them interact with the player and the player's decisions.

Since I am currently also taking Real Time Design, I would like to bring my projects for both classes together to create the final product. Therefore, rather than going with my first plan of creating the characters from my favorite childhood books (A Single Shard and Kira-kira), I will be creating characters based off of characters in one of Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Goose Girl. There will be some deviations from the original story, but I will detail those in a later post.

As for the aesthetic, I want the characters to be designed in a simple, yet elegant manner. I have begun collecting images of styles that I like on a Pinterest board (https://www.pinterest.com/sydney8073/3d-design-thesis/). For the environment, I would like the player to start in a forest, then make their way to a castle. The color palette for the forest will consist of cool, dark colors like blue and green. The castle will also have a darker, run-down look to it, based off of some of the changes I plan to make to the original narrative.

Revised Thesis Idea

My goal is to model and rig two characters and then render out a few short animations to show off the rig. I will create facial expressions using blend shapes and use set driven keys to control them through curves. I would like to use XGen to create hair and Marvelous Designer to create the clothing, though my focus will be on rigging. Ideally, I would like to set everything up so that I can export the characters for use in Unreal.