Simon Martinsson - The Game Assembly - Portfolio 2020

Offroad Vehicle

As a lover of details I wanted to take on the project of making an offroad car, with all its grinding gears displayed, and I came across the Ariel Nomad.

THE MODEL

With the model's 500+ parts I needed to find a pipeline that let me finish on time and so I used a mixture of highpoly and midpoly pieces made in Maya, and highpoly pieces made in ZBrush. The midpolys were used for pieces that would not be baked - like the wishbones, the inside of the wheel, and the suspension. ZBrush was mainly used for boolean operations and adding welding marks.

TRIS: 67433

TIME: 4,5 weeks

Rococo Table

Having just started to feel comfortable in ZBrush I wanted to set my teeth into something a little higher level, and the highly detailed swirls of the Rococo-style had long been a challenge I had liked to explore.

THE HIGHPOLY

The highpoly was made as a blockout first in Maya. I decided which shapes I wanted to do in Maya and which to do in ZBrush. It turned out I made most of the bigger shapes in Maya, including the bigger swirls and the leaves. I then took it into ZBrush for some boolean operations, cleanup and further detailing.

THE LOWPOLY

Being afraid of a crappy bake my first lowpoly was much too expensive at 31k tris. My later attempt was based on using opacity to maintain all the details and to make it easier to work with LODs.

THE MATERIAL

The material was made in Designer, inspired by red mahogny.

TRIS: 4288

TIME: 1,5 weeks

Duffle Bag

THE MODEL

I used a friend's dufflebag as a reference, and took countless pictures of it in different poses and angles. I then made the straps and hardsurface parts in Maya and the majority of the body in ZBrush.

BASICALLY A FACE RIG

To be able to add the complexity and control I was after, I saw to learning Python so as to not get bogged down by repetitive tasks and renaming. In a week I wrote 5 simple scripts that helped me through the whole project. Having no real prior programming experience this was very exciting.

All the straps were rigged using ribbons, which in turn were made using scripts.

The zipper rig was made using two ribbons driven by blendshapes. The blendshapes' vertices were each controlled by a setRange-node, and were split up with the help of a script, so that one vertex blended after the other.

The body of the bag was made using a series of layered meshes that each had its own function and finally merged together via skinning using joints that were constrained to the surfaces of the other meshes. At the core was a ribbon and of course the aforementioned zipper.

To top it all off I created blendshapes and wrinklemaps in ZBrush. I then imported them into, and baked them, in Substance Painter. The blendshapes were implemented into the rig where they are automatically driven by the main rig. The wrinklemaps are automated inside the engine, in my case being Unreal, by connecting them to the curves driving the blendshapes.

TRIS: 6792

TIME: 5 weeks

Anti-Air Mech

Proof of concept for a) an autoaiming turret, b) a mech in a more realistic style, and c) the former working as a whole together with animation blends inside Unreal Engine.

THE RIG

My eyes are drawn towards the function of things like robots and the like, and I wanted to bring some realism into its setup. The main inspiration was taken from old fashioned industry robots. They're tried and true and can take the heavy weight of the rest of the mech.

The legs were made using a typical hindleg setup with only one IK-solver. The rotation was then pulled from the hip-joint, separated to different axis and passed on to three other joints that were to take the hip-joint’s place. A duplicated, but reversed, version of the leg joints were then used to create the final leg, with its own IK-solver, and was driven by the foot and attached to the three new hip-joints.

The layer of actuators were then placed on top and was made up of mainly different IK-setups driving each other.

The foot was made to look like it could walk in different terrains, and was built using IK combined with some automated offset groups.

The neck was IK-based with selective rotations for the head to be able to swivel.

The gun itself was mainly FK-based and made for me to test the rig out in Maya before replacing everything in Unreal.

The camera-eye had a basic aim-constraint setup with separated rotations, which was also replaced later in Unreal.

THE UE4 SETUP

The model was imported into Unreal as two separate models; the legs and neck, and the turret, which were combined inside a blueprint.

The blueprints were then made for the autoaim system. It reads a target that enters a zone and places it in an array. Enum values can be changed to make it prioritize them in different ways; the order they were read, the closest to the mech, or the farthest from the mech.

The animation of the turret and the camera-eye were automated, and aim-constraints and rinterp-nodes were used to rotate to the targets.

Particle and sound effects were then added to the muzzles of the turret and the target when it gets hit.

ANIMATION

The legs were animated in Maya and brought into Unreal. A proper setup would most likely have 20 animations or more to blend between but I had time to do only a few, but made the most of it.

The camera inside Unreal was switched between following the facing of the mech and not following based on which way the player is walking. For instance when walking forward and turning it follows, and when walking backwards it does not.

TRIS: N/A

TIME: 2 weeks