Giraffic Park
3D Action-Adventure / Platformer. Student project, 2012
Scope: Final 3-month student project. 6 programmers, 6 artists.
My Role: Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Lighting.
Engine: Havok - Vision
Quick story-breakdown: You're a lost viking-child who's crash-landed his steam-punk airship on an island. Home to various flora & fauna, the island seems to be devouring your mind.
- Succumb to the madness, decapitating local wildlife to wield their heads & faces as deadly weapons!
- Run & jump your way passed obstacles & vicious foes to find all the mechanical parts needed to repair your airship and escape before the island drives you completely insane!
We were trying an engine that was new to us (Havok: Vision, later released for mobile production as Havok: Anarchy) and the idea we had in mind was something wacky with a lot of animals in bizarre situations on a distant island.
We had a month for pre-production, my goal was to enter the industry as a Tech-Artist so I spent the month familiarizing myself with the Vision Engine, proposing lighting scenarios and approaches to animations and VFX while others worked on concept sketches.
Scope was something we were still learning about. We were knowingly unaware of what we were all capable of and despite our attempts to anticipate our own limitations, we still overscoped. We managed a lot, considering, but unfortunately the final outcome was a montage of unpolished works. It served me best as a major practice exercize. I walked away from it having really improved my knowledge around VFX, lighting and rigging.
As well as creating a lot of the environment modeling, lighting & shading, I also modeled, textured, rigged and animated all of our game's animals and several of the animated props. I'm not so proud of my modeling and texture work, but I am proud of my rigs and also how many animations I managed to get through by sheer necessity.
All the characters being different animals meant none of the rigs could be simply reused, and a fair amount of time also went into research both for the rigging and the animation. Thank god for BBC's motion gallery (at the time)!
I made assets as required, some were scrapped, some went in, I met a learning curve with normal mapping that slowed my progress to a degree. If I tackled this again, it's a fact that I'd be 10x as fast! It became apparent back then, though, that I should NOT be an animator or texture artist. This project really helped me find my strengths in some of the more technical areas in the art pipeline for games.
Lighting is something I was really looking forward to as part of this project. Unfortunately, though, our project became riddled with asset-errors in the final 3 weeks that plagued me such that I barely got time to work on lighting at all.
The pipeline wasn't as easy to enforce as I expected, naming conventions & duplicate files ran amok. Alot of cleanup tasks we popping up at the worst possible time, we hadn't even implemented everything yet. The light-bakes were crashing as a result. I had to re-export a lot of assets with correct lightmap UVs and our project was top-heavy with assets, making this a mammoth task.
But oh well, life goes on and we all move on to bigger and better things, yeah?
