Second submission! We each had to design environment assets to put in the game that would have elements of motion. Because our game is set in a rather tropical setting, trees were an emphasized asset that would be needed. Also, our game was set to be made with 3D models that were low poly.
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| Initial silhouette thumbnails |
While focusing more on trees, I also tried to branch off into a few different assets such as flags and skulls that could be placed in the background. Rather that objects the player can interact with, I thought I would work on assets that the player would see in the environment around them. .....
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| More Assets - rough concepts |
I chose three silhouettes to flesh out for the trees, and also added other concepts such as treasure chests and a rock with grass growing on it(...). For the treasure chest that opens outwards instead of the usual upwards, I had wanted to try a concept that would be different to the usual treasure chests.
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| Last page for rough concepts |
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| Grabbed all the silhouettes and shaded them better + started looking at colours for the tree |
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| Flag: looking at designs, shape and colour |
I decided to develop the one of the trees and a flag stuck in the ground. To have a different aesthetic for the tree, we decided to develop the bending tree with the sign. However, Ethan suggested that we remove the sign hanging off the trunk because:
1. It would look out of place
2. The sign would look quite clunky and clustered.
My designs were made to be quite simple because of our game concept being low poly.
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| Developed drawing of tree |
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Developed drawing of flag |
After discussing different assets to animate between team members. I was tasked to model the tree. We also decided to add a coconut falling out of the tree to have it looping while also making the tree trunk + leaves swaying to add more motion as well as detail to the environment.
I first started by modelling the trunk by readjusting the vertices for a cylinder, and made coconuts by using spheres with subdivisions of 7. For leaves, we all agreed it would be fine to just model half a leaf, mirror it, and duplicate it multiple times while readjusting rotation and scale to make it look more natural altogether.
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| Trunk |
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| Added leaves and coconuts |
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| Animated movement |
After modelling and animating the swaying movement of the trunk + leaves, along with the falling of the coconut, we ran into a problem: the tree trunk was frozen while the leaves and coconuts moved accordingly when we exported the file into unity. We were then told that unity doesn't support animation through vertices.
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| Added joints, control, and IK handle |
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| Animation with the new componenets |
During the fixing process, we had to add joints to the tree trunk, and Hamish also came to help add an IK handle while also suggesting that parenting everything to the already animated leaves so that we wouldn't have to re-key the tree trunk, thus saving time. For a cleaner animation loop for the coconuts, we also keyed the falling coconut to be invisible early until it fell to the ground.
