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rhainontheshelves · 5 years

Note

Hey could I request 94 & 87 for Rocky?

A/N: In light of the Astro comeback, I finally ditched my original idea for this and came up with this! Thanks for being patient for a year and 4 months! Happy New Year, and happy reading! - Rhin

#94: “I had a bad dream again.”

#87: “Stay awake.”

You woke up in a sweat, your heart racing and mouth dry. Your head whipped to the left, expecting someone to be there, but all there was was the piercing light of your alarm clock, reading 1:15 AM. Sighing, you covered your eyes with your arm and did some breathing exercises to calm down. It’s okay. Everything’s over, you’re fine.

Finding the familiar worn plastic in between your mattress and the bed frame, you pulled out your phone and dialed your best friend Minhyuk.

“Oh, please be awake, please be awake.” you muttered as the other end rang. At the last second, he picked up and relief washed over you.

“Hey (Y/N), what’s up?” Minhyuk’s low and scratchy voice came over a bit too loud. It was obvious that he was tired, but he often stayed up late to choreograph songs for his group. You could faintly hear music in the background, further confirming what you knew.

“Are you at the building?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Is it alright if I come over for bit? Or would I be destroying your creative process?” You tossed in a teasing tone. He often told you that he liked being alone so he wouldn’t get distracted, but you knew that having someone there to listen to his ideas and give him feedback helped him a lot. He recognized this too, but most of the time was too stubborn to admit it, so you two threw around the “creative process” joke whenever times like this came around.

“My creative process is and always will be intact,” he retorted, feigning offense. “It doesn’t care if you’re here or not.”

Laughing, you rolled out of bed and started changing into your go-to leggings and hoodie. “I take that as a yes.”

“No, I wouldn’t want my BFF’s company at 1 in the morning! Of course you can come over. I’ll unlock the side door for you.”

“Cool. Thanks, man.”

“No problem. See you in a bit.”

“Yep!” With that, you hung up and slipped on some sneakers. Grabbing your keys and a hair tie, you left your apartment and walked to Fantagio.

About 15 minutes later, you pulled open the side door and walked down the dark hallway. The light from the practice room and the faint playing of Call Out guided your steps to Minhyuk.

“Hey, close the door! You’re letting all the cold air in,” Minhyuk called from the middle of the room. You were standing in the doorway, watching his fluid movements and the little quirky ones as he tried to figure out what should be next.

“It’s burning up in here! You need some cold air,” you fully entered and set your keys down on the table next to his phone.

“It’s perfect in here, thank you very much. Besides, you’re wearing a hoodie!”

“Because it’s cold outside! It’s winter, Minhyuk!” you shook your head. “Where were we going with this?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.”

“I don’t know either.” Plopping on the couch, you started scrolling on your phone. Soon, a sweaty and kinda smelly Minhyuk joined you.

“To what do I owe this visit?” he asked, not-so-sneakily looking over your shoulder at your screen.

“I had a bad dream again.”

“Again? Why was I not aware of these?”

You shrugged, trying to push the recollections to the back of your mind. “They don’t happen too often, and they don’t include you, so you didn’t need to know.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw possibly the biggest eye roll known to mankind. “If you’re having nightmares that keep you up past 2 in the morning, I should definitely know about them.”

“Look, I usually wake up from them around 4, so you’re lucky this is early for me.”

“Still isn’t a good reason,” he sing-songed.

“Ugh, shut up Minhyuk.” you slapped him on the arm and switched to Twitter to continue scrolling.

“What are they about?”

You raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“The nightmares. If you want to talk about them, then they might go away.”

“Honestly? I’d rather go back to middle school.” you tried to be as nonchalant as you could, but there was a tremor in your voice anyway.

“They’re that bad? Wow, they must have you really shaken up.” Concern made his eyebrows furrow and a small frown appear. The only other time you refused to talk to him about something was when you were having problems with family and choosing between the company and university. You had explained to him after it passed that you had felt like you needed to listen to yourself and not have anyone else’s opinion influencing you. He figured it was something similar this time, too. “Just know you’re not alone in this, okay?”

You dabbed at your eyes. “Okay.”

“Hey, do you still remember that routine we did before you left?” Minhyuk hopped up and held out his hands.

“Hyuk, that was like three years ago! How could I remember?”

“I could re-teach you!”

Finally, a grin broke out on your face. “Okay, let’s do it. See if I still got my moves.”

“They’ll come back, I don’t doubt it for a minute.”

You took his hands, got hoisted up, and followed Minhyuk to the middle of the room, ready to dance like you used to.

~~~

“Yeah!” you yelled, jumping up and down. “We did it!”

You two just did the whole routine all the way through without any mistakes. It took you a bit and a lot of reminders, but eventually muscle memory kicked in and suddenly you were dancing pretty much like before you left. Minhyuk loved the moment when you realized you were matching him with minimal effort. Your eyes lit up and you grinned really big, suddenly gaining more energy and charisma. He loved this side of you.

“Yeah! I’m so proud of you!” he mirrored your excitement, hugging you and spinning you around. “It’s just like old times!”

“Old times.” you hugged him tighter, “I miss the old times.”

“Me too.” he sighed, enjoying this little moment.

You pulled away and put your hands on his shoulders. “We have to film this.”

“We do?”

“Yeah! So we can compare it to that video the staff took when we first mastered this!”

“Okay. Ddoca should be around here somewhere.” Minhyuk began to look around.

“We could just do it on our phones. Is there a tripod anywhere?” You opened a closet and found one.

“My phone doesn’t have enough space. Ddoca probably has better filming quality, anyway.” Minhyuk pulled a little white camera out from behind the soundboard with a triumphant “Aha!”.

“Okay.” you shrugged. “Having the company label on it would probably be safer, anyway.”

Minhyuk laughed as he set the tripod up and screwed on Ddoca. “You know all of that is added after we film everything, right?”

“Yeah, I know! I’m just saying that I don’t mind if the company releases it if they want to.”

“Alright, we’re set.” Minhyuk looked up at you. “Wanna do an introduction?”

“I guess that’s probably the best way to do things, huh?” you came and crouched next to Minhyuk. “It’s gonna be weird, though.”

“You’ll get used to it.” Minhyuk chuckled. “Ready?”

With a nod, he reached over and pressed record.

“What’s up! It’s Rocky,” Minhyuk started, using his stage name out of force of habit. “Today is kind of a special edition of Y.Y.Y. I have a guest today!” He grinned as he put both arms out and gestured to you like that Will Smith meme. You shyly smiled and waved.

“I’m (Y/N). I used to be a trainee here at Fantagio.”

“We auditioned and got accepted around the same time, so we kinda became best friends.” Minhyuk put an arm around your shoulders, throwing you off balance and causing you to fall on your butt. You two dissolved into giggles, mostly due to it being 3:30 in the morning.

“Dear god, we’re tired.” you said, wiping a tear from your eye. “It’s so early.”

“Stay awake!” Minhyuk shook your shoulders. “We gotta get this done.” he went into another giggle fit.

“Anyway, we’re best friends here to recreate a routine we learned before I left and he debuted.” You smacked him, signalling him to calm down and focus. “We spent an hour and a half relearning it, so hopefully it’s pretty similar to the original.”

“It’s probably way better now. We’ve both matured and changed our styles, so it’ll look way different. Are you ready?” Minhyuk looked at you.

“As I’ll ever be. Let’s go!” With that, you went to your spot, Minhyuk started the music, and you two performed.

It felt like a huge audience was watching when it was only a camera. Nerves turned into focus. Focus on your moves, on your expressions, on the flow with Minhyuk. It felt like the old times, and that was the best feeling you had in a while. And just like old times, the routine was over way too quickly. You both froze in the ending pose, breathing heavily and grinning from ear to ear.

Minhyuk picked you up and spun you around again, making you squeal in surprise. “Minhyuk, I swear to god-”

“That was even better than the last time! We should have filmed the whole process.” Minhyuk continued to hold you as he walked toward Ddoca.

“No! I would have made a fool out of myself!” you lightly smacked his head. He put you down and squatted for Ddoca again.

“You did fine, (Y/N)! I swear, this girl is too hard on herself.” He said to the camera.

“Do you want me to actually whack you? ‘Cause I can do that.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll stop! Let me live.”

“We’ll see.”

“Uh, yeah. Anyway! We need to go, so this is Rocky and (Y/N) signing off.”

“Hopefully we’ll get to do more stuff in the future! Bye Ddoca,” you waved once again as Minhyuk said bye and stopped recording.

You flopped on the ground. “My legs are burning. Is that normal?”

“You haven’t danced seriously in years. I think it’s normal.” Minhyuk chuckled.

“Getting sleepy…” you couldn’t keep your eyes open anymore. You were warm from dancing and exhausted.

“Ah, let’s get you home before you do that. Come on, get up.” Minhyuk grabbed your hands and pulled you up.

Minhyuk walked you home after locking up. You yawned pretty much the whole way home, infecting him with them too.

“Do you want to stay the night?” you asked before you entered the apartment building. “You’re just as tired as I am.”

“I would, but Jinwoo-hyung and Dongmin-hyung are gonna have my head if I don’t go back to the dorm soon.” Minhyuk rubbed his neck.

You frowned, but hugged him anyway. “Be safe going back, okay?”

“I will.” He said, squeezing you once for good measure. He watched you run up the stairs and open the door to the complex.

“(Y/N)!” Minhyuk called just before the door closed.

You stuck your head out of the door. “What?”

“When you have another nightmare, I’ll always be there to dance with you.”

#513 days #513 days i let this sit #wow good job rhin #anyway #i originally planned this to be a follow-up to at first from a distance #if anyone remembers that dumpster fire #but now here this is!#hope you're still around to like it #park minhyuk scenario #rocky scenario #requested

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moonmurph-gamedev · 6 years

Text

Evaluation of Process

Throughout Unit 2 I’ve learnt lots of new skills and a brief understanding of different programs such as Maya & ZBrush. This is my first time creating a character so I was also developing my own personal work flow through this Unit.

Preproduction

I started my process with preproduction specifically creating mind maps of different ideas for both my protagonist and antagonist. I knew I wanted to create characters that would be used in my game next year so they both needed to suit the setting of the game.

I feel mind maps are a great way of organizing my ideas and I will definitely continue to use them as part of my creative process. It really helps to have a clear map of the initial idea and then branch off. Before creating a character, you want to have a solid concrete idea of exactly what you’re creating so it’s important to get your preproduction done right to not waste time.

In my mind map I looked at possible motivations, attacks and backgrounds for my character. I also related my ideas to existing characters in pop culture and games and took inspiration from them. I really liked using the mind map and it helped me narrow down an exact idea for my character. I personally like to have a clear idea in my head before I begin drawing my character to save time.

Once I had settled on an idea for my character I began searching tags I’d used in my mind map and used Pinterest to create mood boards. It was great having visual references for my ideas and seeing what other people tend to use. This was also the part of the process where I decided to base the character’s weapons around the “Player 1 & 2” Pink and blue arcade guns.

This is just one of four different mood boards that I created. I added small annotation to point out points I liked about the images and went into more detail about them on my blog post. Mood boards are seen commonly in the industry especially when creating concept art for characters.

After creating mood boards I went into Photoshop to begin the concept art. I’m quite familiar with Photoshop so I was able to get right into finding a pose and body type that I liked. I decided to settle on a smaller body type instead of the large bulky muscular male you typically see in video games. This is just because I’ve planned for his attacks to be quite mobile and feel it’ll work better for the animation.

This simple turnaround helped a lot later on the in the modelling process as I was able to open the PNGs into the image plane on Maya. I can’t imagine modelling without a reference open directly in Maya and this is something I’ll probably always use in the future. I really enjoyed using Photoshop and it’s definitely my go to program when doing anything art related. Since I created this art a few months ago and have been practicing almost daily I found my drawing and Photoshop skills have improved a lot since then. Over the summer I plan on going back over and redrawing my character to create higher quality art. I’ll also begin the process of drawing different poses to show off his personality and possible animation ideas. This will help a lot next year when we begin to animate our character in UE4 and work on creating our game prototype. My game design document already has a list of attack ideas but it’ll be nice to have concept art included.

In a VICE interview with Bill Petras (Art director for Overwatch) and Arnold Tsang (Character-concept artist) they spoke about their role as artists in the games development and the importance of concept art.

“One of the main jobs that we do as art directors is having a vision for what the game looks like, of what the heroes look like, the feeling of the animation, the color palette, and the architecture of the buildings of the world.” And often that means putting ink to paper: “A lot of times the art directors themselves will do a painting of a concept to show a vision to the team. That’s step one.” –Bill Petras

Arnold Tsang speaks about how the concept art is important for making the vision and idea of the game clear to the other developers.

“Early on, our first job is to inspire and rally the team behind our vision. The development of the style guide is a huge first step in getting our feet on the ground for Overwatch.” Setting down the core of the game’s look is an incredibly important part of the early process. “After we had the core tenets in place,” says Tsang, “we worked with the engineers and some of the animators to start to realize that content and make visual targets that start to realize what we set out to do in the style guide. And we saw how things worked in the game engine, and how these characters moved and acted.” –Arnold Tsang

When we have an idea in our head it might be obvious to us what the character looks and moves like but to others it’s not clear at all so concept art is integral for making that vision clearer to others. In the industry where you have specialised modellers, programmers and animators it’s important everyone is on the same wavelength. You wouldn’t start building a game without a games design document and you wouldn’t start creating a character without completing preproduction.

Maya

When I finished preproduction I moved into the next stage of modelling my character in Maya. I also installed the student version at home so I can continue working on my model outside of college. I opened the turnaround images and began shaping from a simple cube. There are plenty of different methods of creating a character and everyone has a different workflow but I decided to stick with this recommended method as it’s good for beginners like myself. I extruded and multi cut the shape to create a simple humanoid shape and then started adding finer details such as clothing later on. I had to go back a few times to recreate certain sections of the model. I had issues with multi-facing where Maya placed faces underneath faces and I had to slowly go through the whole model deleting these issues. It was also a challenge dealing with edge loops and topology. I’ve never dealt with it before so it was a lot of trial and error figuring out what works.

My main issue with modelling is I chose to create an organic human shaped character but my result was a lot blockier and square especially in the waist/torso area.

Even with some adjustments I wasn’t 100% happy with my result. I also struggled a lot on the fingers as they were too sharp and pointed and almost resembled claws. I used MudBox which detected errors in my model so I could go back into Maya and fix them. This however was a difficult process as I had to go back and remodel entire sections again. I was getting frustrated with my model and did quite a large rework.

This model although fixed is a lot less detailed and not what I envisioned for my character. I decided instead of beginning again I’ll just begin the UV process as that will take a while and I was beginning to run out of time. I repeated my preproduction and modelling process with my villain character. I found the second time around was considerably quicker as I wasn’t relearning all the hotkeys and jargon.

A huge mistake I made with my first UVs was doing the front, back and side as three large chunks. I didn’t fully understand how the UVs related to the texture maps and so I didn’t see how much of an issue the overlap caused until I placed the image onto the UV. You can see the grey areas where the black pants and grey accents share a UV and cause issues. I had to delete these UVs and looked into other methods.

I used planar mapping and unfolding the different pieces of my model to create clear separate sections. This thankfully allowed me to avoid the same mistake I made without any overlap.

The UV process was a long task but essential for creating a character. I now have a better understanding of how to do it and how it relates to textures and painting the character later on. In the future I’ll be a lot quicker at the process. Like most of Maya it was simply a learning curve but the best way of learning a new program is by practice.

ZBrush

The next step after finishing my UVs was exporting my model as an OBJ and opening it in ZBrush. I decided to keep the Hair and Eyes as separate subtools.

My first attempt at Polypainting was rough as I didn’t fully understand the tools and brushes I was using. I looked at different methods online and went back over my model. I found the ZBrush youtube channel as a great resource as they do really quick tutorials on the different tools in ZBrush.

The spotlight is a really powerful tool that allows you to paint directly onto the model with other images. You can scale, rotate and adjust these images and apply them directly onto the model with total control. I was using a tablet too so the amount of pressure I applied also determined how strong the brush was. I saw the potential with the insane detail you could put into the skin with ZBrush. I’m not going for a super realistic human character though so I didn’t want to add loads of blemishes so just simple colours and blush was enough for me.

My favourite tools and brushes in ZBrush was the DamStandard, Curve and Curvepinch brushes. This was useful for creating folds around the eyes and also definition on the welded sections of the face. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different brushes but next time I create a character. Surface, Noise Editor and the Deformation tools were also great ways of quickly editing large portions of the model.

Because I like Photoshop so much I decided to go back on the hair and see if I could try a different method of texturing them. I opened the UV as a png and a simple hair texture with Photoshop brushes.

I like the different layers of opacity and think it looks more interesting than just block opaque colour. I’ll probably stick to ZBrush in the future however as it’s a much more powerful tool than Photoshop.

I was able to create the texture maps from Polypaint and then create Normal maps directly in ZBrush. If I wanted to neaten up or edit my textures, I could open the JPEG directly in Photoshop and paint on that.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this Unit. I found it really interesting to go from having a character concept to a 3D model. It was my first time ever modelling something as complex as a character and I’m really proud it’s my own original idea and not an already existing character.

I didn’t have much trouble preproduction with generating ideas and creating mind maps/mood boards. The majority of my issues this Unit came in the production phase but that was mainly due to inexperience and some issues with the programs. I have however begun to enjoy using ZBrush after painting my character.

I got quite frustrated at points as I felt I wasn’t at the quality I wanted. I’m still not happy with the end product but I now have a much better understanding of the tools and programs and know I could work at a faster pace. I’m planning over the summer to do a full rework of my hero character.

As my game concept has changed my characters have changed slightly. I want to go for simpler cartoony proportions for my hero instead of realistic. I think this style would suit my game better. I also think a more cartoony player character will blend better with my very wacky cartoony robot villain. At the moment they contrast and look like they’re from different games.

I’m excited to redesign my character and think this will a much better style for my game concept. I think it’ll also be great for creating fun dynamic animations as the games attacks and mechanics I have planned are very fast paced and colourful.

#unit2

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