Olivia Gunn - The Rookies 2023 (Environment Art - Game Development)

Olivia Gunn - Best Of 2023 (Game Art Production)

Project 01 - Real-Time Aughra's Observatory Study

My first major 3D game art project was that of the creating a real-time version of Aughra's Observatory from Jim Henson's 'The Dark Crystal', following the direction and requirements of a brief: “Create a cinematic in Unreal of a real-time game environment based on a movie or television series of your choice”. 

I completed the project through the use of Autodesk Maya 2023, Adobe 3D Substance Painter and Designer, Adobe Photoshop, Maxon Zbrush, and presented the final piece in Unreal Engine 5, animated elements (i.e. orrery planetarium) included in-engine.

The comprehensive production blog I created throughout the duration of this project can be found here, detailing the process of creation from initial scene break-down to final presentation, as well as evaluative self-reflection.

Mini-Project - Wand Design and Creation

Working as a TA, aiding in Falmouth University's lower year's learning regarding environment art in video games, I found myself inspired by their project - to conceptualize and model a themed shop selling magical items - and, in my free time, decided to put my inspiration to productive use. Through discussion with some of my peers and friends, I designed and modelled what I imagine their wands might be in a magical world, placing them in a small wand shop façade scene for rendering and presentation purposes.

I wanted to pay close attention to not only my perception of them but also their self-perception and the qualities they most value within themselves to create a set of distinct objects that would encompass each individual exactly. I pushed to present this primarily in the inclusion of the silhouettes of the designs, as well as the more subtle details and inclusion of non-wood materials such as metals, precious stones, and bone. In including each of these, I aimed to include components which hold mythological and folklore relevancies - such as my use of opals in the handle for one of the wands, which I discovered have been used historically to purge imperfections, like nightmares and the stressful emotions invoked by anxiety; all of which were are prominent themes in the life of the person I based the wand around. Further tertiary details recieved the same treatment, such as the Slavic rune for the goddess Marzanna, ruler of death and rebirth (e.g. the shift of winter to spring; a phenomenon I had taken note the holder of this wand holds a fondness for) inset into the same wand.

Wand 01

- Marzanna/Morana rune; winter-spring shift

- Opal; nightmares, anxiety, hopefulness, calm after the storm

- Deer antler; personal significance

- Mushrooms; connection to earth

- Raw/exposed metals, copper/iron; refined naturalism

- Rhythmically "thorny" wand length; hidden fieriness, natural form, akin to shape language of an antler 

Wand 02

- Indented holly wood; spontaneity/creativity

- Intertwining turquoise and tiger's eye ribbons; balancing self-confidence and internal peace

Wand 3

- Wood colour shift; tri-colour gradient working from a mild burgundy to a blue-grey, and back again, a popular palette in the Georgian era, the romanticization of which inspired much of this wand's design (including the ornamental gold vines with oak leaves and dog roses)

Wand 4

- Pearl-inlayed handle; forms, engravings, and palette inspired by Art Nouveau's intricate forms and powerful delicacy; reinforced by use of ash blossoms pattern.

Project 02 - Custom Brief (Operatic Prop Design and Modelling)

My second key project permitted me to write my own brief, and having been recently inspired by a fortunate opportunity to see Mozart's 'Die Zauberflote' ('The Magic Flute') opera I had decided to encapsulate my project's direction as to "Create a set of textured bespoke hero assets inspired by a piece of narrative classical music, optimised for real-time presentation in the style of virtual prop production."

"My primary reasoning for choosing this project is to refine my hero asset production due to a greater proportion of my previous work having required the faster, less detail-oriented production of low-priority (i.e. clutter) assets. I also hold a deep love for classical performing arts and the cultural influences behind their creation and continuation, especially the creation of preproduction diorama models for environment (set) and prop design-and-construction. With familial connections to the Royal Opera House orchestra, I have found myself infatuated with the vivid and emotional worlds created through the communicative languages of both music and the visual arts. I hold a strong fondness for traditional art, such as maquette construction, and wish to improve my skillset in this realm while marrying it with the vast capabilities of 2D and 3D digital art."

I decided to use ‘The Magic Flute’ as my point of reference not only because of how fondly I see the story and music, but also for the design potential held within it. Written in 1791, the show was initially introduced to the public at the height of the Neoclassical art period, just as Romanticism was about to herald the next major era of western art. Consequently, the narrative and visual themes were greatly influenced by the fashions of the time; most particularly the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and their respective polytheistic religions and cultures. Though, due to somewhat of a lack of understanding and respect surrounding such topics and the cultures which fueled them, as well as a simplicity of their integration into the narrative, ‘The Magic Flute’ became somewhat of a mishmash of classical cultures and themes, ending up with the result feeling part-German, part-Hellenistic, part-Roman, part-Kemetic. 

The general visual style of the stage show tends to be one resembling late eighteenth-century western Europe fashions, but other visuals very clearly work their way in. Tamino, the princely protagonist who receives the titular flute, fights a giant serpent, The Queen of the Night appears to be an amalgamation of the main Greek and Roman depictions of feminine night deities, and Sarastro – the religious leader who kidnapped Pamina, the Queen’s daughter – worships the Kemetic deities of Isis and Osiris. Thus, when designing the props – creating three variations for Tamino’s flute, Papageno, the bird-catcher’s, magic bells, as well as Pamina’s dagger gifted by her mother to kill Sarastro with – I found myself with a myriad of sources to draw inspiration from. For each, I wanted the object’s visuals to reflect not only the characters by which they were wielded but also their respective narrative journeys. For example, in designing Tamino’s flute, I felt drawn towards the introductory segment of the opera where he is defeated by a giant serpent (representative of his susceptibility towards giving into the wiles of the world) before being saved by the Queen of the Night’s three handmaidens. I could envision the character of the Queen creating the flute to act as a constant reminder of how Tamino owed her his life, manifesting itself as a twin-headed snake, carved from the same wood as the gifted flute, which would snap away as he played. The more raw, rugged feel also worked well with his character.

Conversely, with Pamina’s dagger, I found myself looking more heavily into the historic relevancies of the prop’s visual design before looking at Pamina’s character. This may be because the female characters in ‘Die Zauberflote’ find themselves unfortunately underdeveloped, often acting merely as an objective for the heroes of the narrative to aim towards in the evolution of their own stories. My first design looked at the use of a kopis: a style of blade often utilized in Ancient Greece with a long, curved edge in cutting meat, such as during ritualistic animal sacrifice. I could imagine the Queen of the Night, in her rage, creating the object in such a style so as to make Pamina’s ultimate act of killing Sarastro even more humiliating and demeaning – a reminder that he is only a man, merely flesh. In addition to this, I looked to decorate the design with precious stones that held relevance to the goddesses and cultures which inspired the character of the Queen of the Night, such as:

- A carved, mother of pearl inlay, set within the blade; holding connotations of clarity, adaptability, and intuition, acting in reference to both the Queen’s determination to kill Sarastro and shift the balance of power as well as Pamina’s internal struggle with the idea of killing someone.

- A large moonstone, set into the handle; a gem often used in reverence towards Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon.

- Pyrope garnet, a potential alternative to the moonstone set into the blade’s handle; also used in Ancient Greece to aid in receiving clarity in times of darkness (the warmth of the stone could also have worked as a nod towards the warmer palettes often used in designs surrounding Sarastro and the temple.)

In additional designs, I looked towards designs that may have been popular at the time of the opera’s initial composition, particularly the ornate designs present in 17th century Italian metalwork. I tried to work layers of wavy, metal lengths into the handle of this design, attempting to evoke the look of flames or a torch – another piece of imagery often used in association with Hekate, Greek goddess of gateways through the worlds. I designed this to have inlays of lapis lazuli, which was popular both in Ancient Egypt and Kemetic practices in addition to being used in the center of depictions of strophaloi (a wheel-like symbol used spiritually to represent the goddess Hekate’s presence.) Ultimately, I settled for my third design: a short dagger with a blade cut from obsidian, hilt engraved with Sun hieroglyphs, leading up to a delicate handle in the form of a pearlescent, marble sculpture. In the design of the sculpture, I looked towards M.C. Selva’s ‘The Death of Sappho’ as inspiration. My hope for the continuation of the design, as can be seen in further stages of the process, was that the expression and pose the statue holds would be able to differ, depending on who looked at it, be it:

- Rage (akin to that felt by the Queen of the Night)

- Terror (felt by Pamina during her abduction)

- Disgust (experienced by Pamina at being instructed to murder someone)

- Incredulity (felt by the Queen of the Night upon her husband handing the Temple of the Sun to Sarastro, as opposed to her)

Papageno’s bells felt more difficult. While Papageno can easily be presented using bird/feather motifs, being a bird-catcher, I found there to be somewhat of a conflict in balancing his motifs. Papageno, himself, is the hedonistic, comedic-relief presence in the opera; while rugged and intricately connected to the Earth through his profession and desires for a “Papagena of his own,” there is also a need to present the divine delicacy of the magical bells, as created by the Queen of the Night. With my first two attempts at conceptualizing Papageno’s bells, I leaned heavily towards one side of visual theming, looking at the idea of a delicately carved music box, before trying to head to the opposite end of the visual spectrum, looking towards less-refined, hand-held bells. Though, still wanting to further test the possibilities available in combining the bells’ more rustic form, as well as the fine forms of the music box, I attempted to create a third design which combined the two: a set of bells more consistent in design, held together by a wooden handle carved in the form of a peacock (representative of the bird-catcher’s own vain nature.) I found that taking into consideration more raw materials (exposed wood, brass, etc.) resulted in well-balanced harmony with the more complex form (carefully carved birds, rhythmic patterns, etc.) However, I found myself heavily drawn towards the music box, the delicacy of its golden trims and ceramic surface working in greater complement with Tamino’s snake-flute and Pamina’s obsidian dagger. Further, I found there to be greater visual storytelling in the design of the music box, using the warmth of the golds as a stark contrast to the cooler blues – just as the Queen of the Night is in rivalry with Sarastro and the Temple of the Sun.

In beginning the production of the assets, I created to-scale blockout averages of the key forms of each of the props. Due to the uncommon forms of the items I intended on creating, I looked for close equivalents available for purchase online – such as looking for aulos flutes in music shops, music boxes on offer in antique auctioning, and a variety of short-bladed, hand-held daggers detailed in online museum archives. I searched through the product descriptions of similar objects, using their differing dimensions to produce a fitting average – though, I permitted myself some creative leeway due to the unique forms of some components within the assets, such as the sculpted handle and carved snakes.

Following these averages, I created the subsequent blockouts of the items’ primary forms: the main body and neck of the flute, the body of the music box (along with its key), and the handle and blade of the dagger. In creating these bases, I kept in mind the workflow which I wanted to utilise based around a low-high-low structure, I would create simple, low poly silhouettes of the “hard surface” elements of the designs, excluding the more organic forms which would require more extensive sculpting. I would then separately develop the sculpted components (marble handle, “living” snakes) in a high-poly format before combining them with similarly polygon-dense versions of the hard-surface blockouts. I would then utilise the original blockouts as low-poly bases, manipulating them to be more form-fitting to the high-poly versions of the assets, filling in any gaps with retopology. This would not only save me time in the production process, but also meant I could create all the assets alongside one another, keeping each in a similar stage of production without having to finish one entirely – from base to final texture and rendering - before moving onto another. I understand that this would not likely be the route taken in the production of a set of hero assets for a game or piece of pre-rendered media, companies often feeling more comfortable seeing a higher rate of final products being produced at a faster rate. However, as I wanted to maintain a sense of consistent workflow throughout this project while maintaining a harmonious visual style, I decided to deviate from the formal production pipeline to best time my limited production schedule.

During the creation of the blockouts, I also tested out an alternate flute-head style for Tamino’s aulos. While my original concept utilises the blockiness of a typical flute or recorder head and the term aulos translates to “double-flute,” the sound produced by the instrument is often one closer to that of an oboe or similarly reed-headed instrument; therefore, I create a reed-head style for the flute’s mouthpiece. In the end, this was the version I decided to go with, thinking it would help add some additional texture and visual intrigue to break up the density of the instrument’s primarily wooden form.

Papageno’s music box was somewhat of an exception in my pipeline, following a more typical low-to-high poly workflow. Consequently, the asset’s blockout turned very naturally into the object’s low-poly version, allowing me to get a head-start on laying out its UV maps while the flute and dagger were in the earlier parts of their high-poly sculpting stages. To utilise the UV space most efficiently and maximise the resolution of the intended 2048x2048 texture space, I created the music box’s gold decorations in a modular sense, modelling one of each different form which I could then go on to map before doing a uniform, rotational duplication to match my originally created concept design.

I developed the high-poly sculpts for the dagger, and flute’s snakes next. To save time with modelling the dual heads of the horn-nosed viper, I began by modelling a single, typical-looking snake with an open mouth, detailing a set of fangs, venom canals, glottis, and tongue sheath. I then duplicated it, splitting the copy’s body halfway, and merging the two together at a similar point in the sculpt where naturally occurring polycephalic snakes in life tend to split in anatomy, creating a symmetrical form. Making best use of this symmetricity, I found open-use images of snakes and isolated sections of their scales and softer underbellies with different shapes and lighting, extracting and isolating their tonal values in Adobe Photoshop to produce custom height maps. I imported these into ZBrush to use in tandem with the Clay Build-Up brush as an alpha to mimic the look of scales. I used these rather freely to produce a more stylised look to the snakes, making them appear more realistically as though they had been carved out of wood (perhaps somewhat imperfectly, following the decline in the Queen of the Night’s powers).

In sculpting the handle for the dagger, I used a multitude of references within a range of Neoclassical and Romantic paintings – though perhaps none as frequently as M.C. Selva’s ‘The Death of Sappho’. I began with simple forms, providing myself with a low-detail silhouette of what I imagined the body of the recoiling woman may have looked like in order to provide myself with a strong base on top of which I could accurately extract the topology of her dress and mold it to her form, as it would if it were to be blowing in the wind or otherwise caught in motion. I did the same with her hair, manipulating a sphere into a larger form evocative of a larger silhouette of hair, before selectively sculpting a handful of smaller strands that wind their way in and out of the larger form to provide greater visual detail. In sculpting the handle’s face, I also wanted to keep the structure relatively ambiguous in age. The expression being a combination of multiple emotions helps distort the features, keeping this lack of clarity as to the subject’s age, which I wanted to maintain for a multitude of reasons, though primarily:

- The Queen of the Night’s associations with Hekate as the Triple-Faced Goddess (the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone; each representing a stereotypical archetype of maturity).

- Pamina’s youth conflicting with the expectations placed upon her by her mother forcing to assess her morals and place in the narrative.

Once the construction of the high-poly variations of all the assets were completed, each split into relative components with subsequent naming conventions (e.g. paminadagger_handle_hp), I moved on to retopologising the sections of the models which needed it: the handle and blade of the dagger, as well as the flute’s snakes. In creating the low-poly version of the handle, I tried to take into consideration how it would have been made if it were to have been carved by hand – such as capping off the bottom of the skirt. This not only resulted in saved time, but also a lower poly-count as I did not have to take into consideration the volume of the legs, hidden by the skirt. Rather, I was able to cut the feet off at the ankles, as well as the torso, including only that which could be seen. 

With the low-poly and high-poly structures complete, I moved on to focusing on baking the details down as well as creating custom height maps to apply manually in order to help build-up the assets’ normal maps. I began by applying test materials to the low-poly assets after baking the high-poly components onto them, turning to default Smart Materials in Adobe Substance Painter with high-contrast edge-wear and dirt to clearly present where the bake is successful as well as any potential errors.

I found very few errors in the initial bakes, but the select few I came across I took into Photoshop and manually corrected by iteratively painting over the items’ occlusion and normal maps. This was especially important in some visual focal points, such as the face on the handle of Pamina’s dagger. Following this, I went forward with painting the custom alphas I needed to create the look of the ceramic reliefs in the side panels of the music box. I looked towards Neoclassical imagery for each panel’s relief, ensuring each held narrative relevancy:

- Three cherubs, representing the trio of wise helper boys the Queen of the Night sends to help Tamino and Papageno along their journey.

- A greyhound dog, torch, and set of keys; each of which are symbols used consistently alongside depictions of the goddess Hekate.

- A doe deer, representative of Pamina’s delicacy and wariness.

- A set of ostrich feathers, often used in Kemetic theology to represent Osiris, one of the gods worshipped in Sarastro’s Temple of the Sun.

- A peacock perched atop a bird cage, representative of Papageno the bird-catcher’s hubris and how it is both his most forthcoming trait as well as his most fatal flaw.

- A winged sun, in the style of typical Neoclassical imagery; a symbol which is representative of Isis, often considered Osiris’s female equivalent.

- A coiled serpent, akin to that which the Queen of the Night saved Tamino from (and a visual link to my design of his flute.)

Utilising these alphas in Substance as masks, I was able to integrate these designs into the creation of the textures through the height and normal maps.

With the base bakes and height stamps applied and achieved, I moved on to building up the albedo, roughness, and metallic bitmaps for each asset until I reached a first-pass that I found a satisfactory base to work from. The greatest challenge, I found, was reaching a texture on the dagger blade that most satisfactorily mimicked obsidian. I layered multiple masks of faded blues and purples upon one another to try and achieve the sheen that is present in the precious stone, akin to that of petroleum. However, it wasn’t until I started playing aroudnd with fading the edges of the albedo out into a lighter tone and adding a slight metalness to it that it began to more accurately match the high-silica composition of the natural volcanic rock. 

There are a handful of key changes and iterations I had to test and work through during the texturing process:

- Further developing the dagger’s obsidian.

- Balancing the coolness throughout the dagger’s pure metals, blade, and marble handle with some warm highlights in the alloys of the hilt.

- Finding a warmer hue within the gold of the music box and drawing it out to provide a greater visual complement between the ceramic blues and whites.

- Including a subtle emissive value within the glass eyes of the snakes to make them feel inherently magical, even without any immediate motion.

- Including sufficient wear to each item to suggest the Queen of the Night’s waning power, but not to the extent they look overly ragged or ruined.

I also worked on developing the internal painting of the music box, which I wanted to rotate if I reached my stretch goals of animating some parts of the assets. I wanted it to hold further narrative relevance, pointing towards a less-mentioned part of ‘Die Zauberflote’s story: the Queen of the Night’s lover. In the opera, her wrath towards Sarastro is fuelled by a resentment towards how her husband made him the head of the Temple of the Sun instead of her before his death. Consequently, I created the circular painting to present a version of the Queen of the Night, gazing at the still form of her crying lover. As the Queen of the Night’s character was inspired by stories of the goddess Diana, I reference Guillaume Seignac’s ‘Diana the Huntress’ painting in the watchful tilt of her head and the way her fingers rest against her collarbone. Her hair is a dark black, almost blue, and scattered with tiny stars (much like her skin) as a halo of starlit gems circle her head.

Her lover, opposite her in the painting, is inspired by Francesco Solimena’s ‘Endymion and Diana’. Endymion is written in mythology as a beautiful young man who was cursed (or blessed, dependant on the version) to a life of perpetual sleep by Zeus. In this sleep, the goddess Selene (whose acts as one of the many constituents to the Queen of the Night’s character, and was often mistaken for the goddess Diana in the Neoclassical period) falls in love with Endymion, watching over his eternally wakeless form in her infatuation. I found this a fitting metaphor to use in relation to how the Queen of the Night’s husband was blind, or “asleep”, to her capabilities as a leader and arcane abilities. While one may initially take a first glance at the painting and think the Queen of the Night’s expression is one of gentle adoration as her lover cries (representative of his death, and the Queen’s own conflicting emotions surrounding her lover), a second look reveals that her brows are, in fact, downturned, sending him an icy glare as he parses her lengths of hair through his fingers, holding her under his control even in his passing. I also made the Queen of the night’s palette distinctly cooler than her lover’s in an attempt to further convey their sun/moon contrasting dynamic.

In lighting the assets for final renders, I created initial test shots with a more cool-neutral background and sky-light. While this permitted a level of clarity in the presentation of the detail in the objects’ textures, I also found it muted a lot of the reflectivity and contrasting warmth I had put effort into bringing out in the previous iterative material passes. It worked in favour of creating a moody, atmospheric feel to the assets – particularly Tamino’s flute, helping highlight the emissive quality in the snakes’ eyes – but ultimately, I found that the dampening effect the grey background had on the rest of the textures was too oppressive.

Alternatively, I tried to emulate the warmer colours typically found in opera houses, using primary reference taken in the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden to emulate the light reflected from the reds of the grand curtain and seating, as well as the golds of the ornamental decorations. I found that, not only did this provide greater visual intrigue and contrast against the assets’ primarily cool palettes but also worked in favour of tying together the warmer accents of the gold-bronze metals.

Pamina's Dagger

Papageno's Music Box

Tamino's Flute

**Thank you if you've read through this far! I hope you've found it entertaining to read through the development process for some of my work.**

If you're interested in seeing more of my work, some further pieces in my portfolio can be seen on my ArtStation. Best of wishes to you.