Freelance year Project Titan

During my time creating the Robot character and attending the ZBrush workshops another event was advertised on the discord. This event called Project Titan was hosted by Epic Games were anyone who joined would be given the opportunity to work with Epic Games staff and game art experts to create art pieces to be placed into a open world game. The main objectives were to learn how open world games are created and to allow artists to come together in a fun and creative way to create a beautiful world.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/introducing-the-project-titan-collaborative-art-jam-register-today

Each participant would choose a certain field to specialise in including, prop, environment, character artists or things like level designers which gives people the opportunity to work in many different sectors of the games industry. I was initially hesitant to join due to feeling like my skill wasn't good enough to join however, after some consideration I decided to join the event as a props artist in order make use of all the skills that I had learned until this point and put myself into a collaborative environment which, is something I feel I haven't gotten much of this year leading to a lack of growth in team working and communication skills which are necessary skills for industry jobs.

We also had to use a new programs that was similar to Github called Perforce that would allow everyone to update their game to the most recent version and see all the new content added. I hadn't really used a program like this before so it was a good chance to improve my technical skills.

During the first introduction stream the organisers had established the art style the game was going to follow and how any of the assets made for the game have to use specifically hand painted textures rather than just premade materials in order for the game and each of the assets to have their own unique appeal. This was somewhat of a new direction for me as I primarily used premade materials and fill layers to texture my models with the occasional paint layer for placing on emissives.

As mentioned above we were all given the choice of what position we wanted in the team however we were also given the choice of what location in the world we wanted to specifically work in, as the world was split into multiple biomes, volcanic, arctic, jungle, etc which would help artist make their pieces more unique as they would have to design them to match the environment they were placed in. I chose to work on the starter island as tutorial areas are some of my favourite areas in games but, I also felt as though in this area it would be easier to make props with designs that could add to the worldbuilding of the island and even the other biomes due to the starter island being connect to them. I hoped that this way I could develop some storytelling skills through my modelling.

To make it so there would be more unique ideas a rule was put in place that if one artist was working on a specific props for example a fishing rod no-one else could make the same prop, this help improve my communication and teamworking skills as I was in constant communication through messages and different discord channels to plan out what props people were making for each are and how we could come together to make the locations more unique.

First the props artist waited for a few days to allow the level designers, environment artists and the lore writers time to establish locations on the island and their stories. Although we could come up with our own lore for smaller location we had to adhere to the preestablished lore of the world as seen on the image below.

After location were established I got to work, first collaborating with a level designer that created a abandoned fishing village, I other artist were already helping with the location so I joined and acted to create a crab trap to place at the fishing spots to make the purpose of the location more obvious. I got to work on the carb trap model after the designer agreed to the idea, first I modeled a plank of wood and duplicated it around in a cuboid shape to more accurately reflect the older style of crab traps that I used a reference. I altered the scale and shape of some of the planks to give the trap a more withered appearance to reflect the mood of the location, I then added a few plane polygons to act as the net when I brought it into substance painter. When it was in substance painter I remembered a tutorial video someone in the class discord server sent to me for how to create translucent netting for a goal post I was making for the Desy Jennings charity so I decided to use it here, this let me gain a new tools to use both in substance painter and unreal as I had to learn how to turn on translucent materials in unreal.

Next I moved on to create a prop for a port town another environment artist was making specifically a cooking pot, I wanted to make this prop to see if I could successfully create a prop primarily with metal that would still fit into the cartoon like style of the game as wood is very easy to stylise compared to metal in my opinion. In order to make the model itself match the style of the game I gathered references of cooking pots from very stylised games to replicate their proportions and I also gathered references of different chair legs so that I could add some wood textures to the model that would contrast off the darker colours of the metal pot.

When I had finished my first round of texturing on the model I sent it into the art submission channel of the competition and the WIP channel the the UU server, both gave the advice that the textures on the model were too realistic for the style of the game so I should simplify them as well as giving some tips to help stylise the model by using baked lighting to brighten up the colours. I also made sure to add some hand painter details to the model by painting on the shadows for the rock ring to make the blues pop more, I also added some burn marks and dirt to the bottom and inside of the pot to show that flames and liquid had left their damage showing the player how much this item was used.

Finally the organisers had came in to tell the artists that they should focus on creating assets they wanted to make rather than waiting on a request or a new location to be created. As a result I searched through the server and didn't find anyone that was creating wizard staffs despite the game being in a fantasy setting, I felt lucky so I began work on a series of wizard staffs that would reflect the different biomes of the world. I also informers an environment artist on in the starter island team who was creating a wizard tower on what I intended to do so that he could add them to the environment when I added them to the project.

Altogether I worked on four separate wizard staffs that reflected the woodland, sun, moon and artic themes. The woodland was the most simple in design as I mainly took inspiration from Gandalf's staff from Lord of the rings and added some branches to make it look overgrown or that the winding branch was a handle for the staff. When texturing I thought a bit more about how I wanted the wands story to look so unlike the other staffs I added more symbols or runes onto the wand main shaft to make the asset feel more mystical or mysterious giving the impression the previous user was very skilled at their craft.

The sun staff was the next model I created, originally it was the volcano staff but I changed it for reasons ill explain in a bit but at first I took inspiration from some of the volcanic biome team's props mainly for the design and colouration of the wood and crystals. When modelling and texturing this modelling I was taking inspiration from other games that were normally labeled sun staffs and the design of the model already looked like a sun. From this I got the idea to look around the discord channel for anyone making an astral observatory and by some luck there was someone doing one so I changed the name of the model to the sun staff and started another substance file to create the moon staff. The idea in my head was that if there was people looking into the celestial bodies the mostly common people would be wizards so they would carry around staffs that represented their connect to their subject of research just like how a wizard from the woods would use a staff made of wood.

Finally I got some advice from the volcanic team on how to style my wood to be more ash like in colour and how to design the crystals to look like theirs, I also added horns onto the model in order to keep consistent with their team's design goals.

Lastly I created the arctic staff that I designed to be more aggressive in appearance to reflect the environment it was located in. I designed it as a halberd/wand hybrid to show how the previous user was more of a warrior to the other wizards in the world. I took design ideas from the other staffs specifically the colouration of the wood reflecting the trees in the area, crystals with emissives showing the magic power in the staff and how the environment has affected the staff with ice from blizzards covering the entire staff in ice and snow. I also designed the blades of the axe to look like blocks of sharp ice to show how the biome has affected the design of the weapon in universe.

Altogether I feel Project Titan was one of best experiences I had this year for the development of my technical, artist and communicative skills. I got to work with so many great people and learn new techniques both on my own and with help from others. One complaint I do have was that the communication began to slow down near the end of the project when everyone was focusing on their own projects but the experience was still great all around.