"A Warrior's Archive"

About Me:

I started clay sculpting when I was 8 years old and made Claymation films with my friends. That lead to making cartoons and animations in Power Point during middle school. I then found a passion for pottery and whittling in my mid 20's which inevitably landed me here, in the 3D modeling and video game industry. I have loved video games throughout my entire life. A dream of mine is slowly coming true while I have been developing my game. I am heavily inspired by Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe, and his journey developing "Stardew Valley" by himself. I wish to follow in his footsteps.

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy what you see.

Demo:

The Breakdown:

First off, I have learned my lesson. I regret not taking more screenshots in the early stages of development. A mistake I will not make again.

I started with Unreal Engine's experimental water system. I added a landscape, allowed it to be effected by the water and splines, then started adjusting the settings to get the most interesting shape that I could.

Slowly, I started to populate my island. Learning more and more, I was becoming obsessed with all the different ways nodes could be used. I then stumbled upon auto-materials. I was devastated. The second image is entirely hand painted, haha. The final is painted using an auto-material that updates live, depending on the slope of the landscape.

Those are all the progress shots I took. Again, I have learned from my mistake of not taking more. It's a lot of fun looking back and seeing where I was and where I am now.

Wireframes to Engine:

Textures:

I made a stylized wood trim sheet and made 4 color variants so that I could use this throughout my game and no one would be the wiser. I also made a seamless brick texture.

My workflow for the wood trim sheet consisted of making a plane in Maya, adding knife cuts across and extruding faces upwards, scaling them inwards a bit, beveling them for curvature, duplicating off a low-poly copy and subdividing the forms to create the high-poly copy.

I exported the high-poly into zBrush and subdivided it further. Taking the Orb Brush Kit, I stylized the wood plank forms and exported.

Into Substance painter we went where I baked the high onto the low and added details by masks, generators and filters.

For the brick texture I basically followed the same workflow, except I used multiple different cubes in a random pattern that tiled properly.

The grass, dirt, sand, bark and mountain textures were all done in Substance Designer. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to it to show screenshots of the node structures, however I can assure you they were not terribly advanced. I loved the node structure workflow a lot and it helped me better visualize what was happening "under the hood" in Substance Painter.

This is where I decided to not use Unreal Engine's water system and created my own, using the Single Layer Water node. I adjusted and animated the normal maps from my sand texture using panner and radial nodes. Using Distance Fields, a Sin node, and some math, edges were now being detected and emitting ripples against objects.

Character Design:

Animation:

I built my character starting from a cube in Maya. Then rigged it for animation. Slapped those into a state machine. I had to change the attack sequence to a montage with eventUpdate, so the player had to click 3x to complete the hit combo. Otherwise, you would press once and be stuck doing the entire animation.

I bound the weapon and shield to the jnt_L_wrist/jnt_R_wrist and gave it logic using a collision box. Had I known about 'Line Trace by Channel' at the time, I would have used that method instead.

Next was to give her something to fight. I created a simple fire slime model and rig. Put on a custom animated material, and emitted my fire VFX from its mesh. Then programmed its brain with randomRoam, gave it "eyes", and a state machine.

Lastly, the UI is a placeholder. I do have the character sheet and bag UI functional to key binds. Figuring out the inventory system, equipping different armor/weapons and moving mini-map has been a challenge.

Niagara VFX:

The fire was made with a flipbook of 4 different shapes, then sequenced through a material and project upwards using the fountain system. I used photoshop to create the alpha for this and then used color ramp inside Niagara.

The wind was extremely challenging. First, I made 2 wind shape meshes, created an opaque material that then animates through a color ramp from the tip to the end of the mesh and finally rendered the mesh instead of the sprite particulate.

Other Projects:

This beauty of a vehicle is parked outside my house. My 2017 VW Trendline Golf. I love this car. I've been in the V Dub Club since Highschool (13 years ago) and don't plan on leaving anytime soon.

I've always some sort of.. 'dark side' lingering in me. I love horror and at an early age I read, Stephen King's, "IT". That was my first introduction to horror and have been a fan ever since.

I was invited to be a Generalist in a Game Jam this month to help create Zagan Interritus. Be sure to check it out.

I did a hipoly sculpt of my creature and then did the retopo for animation. I also took care of the Skull Rig for Zagan's summoning ability. The textures were taken care of in engine by our project leader. However, I will be finishing the process of my creature and props on my end very soon.

It was a lot of fun to be apart of and I can now say that I was apart a game release for the first time!

Outro:

I would like to thank you for making it this far and thank The Rookies for giving us this platform to present our work.

I ooze with excitement to begin my career in the video game industry.

My next project, amongst finishing the props above, will be creating a mobile game with 2 friends that currently work in the industry. If you would like to keep up with those projects and future ones, please visit my Artstation or LinkedIn.

Lastly, please do not hesitate on giving feedback or any criticisms. I welcome it all.

Take care,

Xavier