Journeyman Weekly Blog - Week 10 - Glowing Up

It's nice to see you again, our time is coming to a close.

Since the last blog, I worked with James to complete the health bar for James. Like the game logo before, the Health Bar was created in Blender, and was rendered out as static images to link up with the different states of the player's health. I designed the health bar to change colours to reperesent the state in which the player was in, three green bars being full, two yellow bars being hurt, one red bar being critical, and all black bars being dead. Below is a representation of how this will look in game.

When working with James, he noted some issues with trying to get these renders to work with his system, so I was asked to provide renders of just the gems to see if that would work instead. Upon receiving these seperate renders, James was able to overlay the gems on top of the "dead" state render, this seemed to work but only for the green gems. James said that this would work at the very least in case he was unable to incorperate the colour changes.

Moving on from this, we received the model for our player character from the character team, I took the time to make some renders in Blender using the model to showcase the Energy Whip in use. Unfortunately, the model that was provided to us was unrigged, and the textures did not follow the format that was required via the art bible i created. With such little time left on the module, we had to just grit our teeth and hope that the animation team would be able to rig the model, but just in case I had rigged the model via Mixamo while creating the renders below. These renders were done as a way to practice for posting portfolio pieces online, showcasing the renders in use.

Additionally to these renders, I rendered out a UI icon for James to use for the weapon swap system. This can be seen below.

And that brings our time to an end. It's been a wild ride during this module, and quite the experience for me, being the only other major group project I have worked on since my time with the Installation 01 Dev Team in 2017-2019 along with more recently becoming a member of Arripe Gladium, working on the Destiny 2 fan project "Season of the Plague". 

As my first major "lead" role, I feel like I have provided all the required support to the other artists to the best of my ability, and that this will be a key point of self improvement when it comes to working in industry and other group projects in the future.

For now though, the art team is essentially done with creating new assets, and will wind down until the industry presentation. We will provide additional support to the design team with the finalisation of the Verticle Slice video cut, but until then, this is where the journey ends for me.

Thank you for joining me for these blog posts, all the best.

-Jake