Game journal

05/03/2018: Today we’ve received our assignment which is to build a mechanically working game on the Unreal 4 Engine.

06/03/2018: We started working in the Unreal 4 Engine by importing LP assets from Maya into the engine on a starting setup level.

13/03/2018: In this session we experimented with health bars, health pickups, custom characters (The cylinder),jump pads and damage zones.

20/03/2018: Here I started to work on my game idea which is basically the floor is lava hard mode. The plan for this game is to climb the tower faster than the rising death zone to get to the exit. I have an idea to add different kinds of jumps, checkpoints along with sliding and moving platforms.

16/04/2018: Over the Easter holidays I planned out more for my game and added the base layout. I’ve set up the second level fully and planed out the third section and built the end zone.

17/04/2018: This session I’ve added in the moving and sliding platforms. Both of these use the same blue print, by using scene locations A (where it stars) and B (where it ends). I’ve now added an end zone at the top of the tower.

24/04/2018: By using a modified version of the moving platform blue print I’ve designed the death zone area along with materials. I’ve now added checkpoints into the levels also with a start, dead and end screen. Also, I’ve scrapped my idea of having different jumps and only using single and double jumps.

01/05/2018: This week I’ve added a UI to show the location of the player and the death zone. Also seems to be a glitch triggering the death screen twice or rarely three times.

08/05/2018: Today I figured out that the glitch was caused by the mesh and the box collision both could kill the player, so when a player fell from a height it built momentum leading the player to go fast enough to trigger both so I turned off the meshes collision solving the issue. The game is now in a finished state ready for submission.

Essay: How does the shooter genre evolve between the games, Time Crisis and Halo Reach?

Adam Gibbs

1601391

Games Art and Design (year 1)

Essay

 

 

Word count:

2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This essay’s subject is the comparison of an old arcade era title ‘Time Crisis’ (1995) with a home console era ‘Halo Reach’; (2010). Both of these games are in the first-person shooter genre so this makes them an appropriate comparison in terms of their structure. I will be investigating different areas to see what has changed in the fifteen years between the games releases, for example I will be looking into the origin of the genre from the military, and the differences in mechanics and aesthetics of the game. I will also look into how the narratives differ from each other and how this along with other aspects, like immersion, affect the games, also investigate how the games software and hardware has changed. I will back up these points by doing primary research in the form of critical play, and I will be looking at a range of sources for my secondary research, such as examining how these games are related to theories by Vladimir Propp, Kevin Cheng, Paul A Cairns and Miguel Sicart.

Both ‘Halo Reach’ and ‘Time Crisis’ have a military theme, in ‘Halo Reach’ you play as a super soldier working for the games representation of a futuristic military, while in ‘Time Crisis’ you play as an agent for the government. (Christian Beekman 2014) “The U.S. military’s first involvement with any type of electronic gaming was more of a happy accident than anything else. During the 1950s, Brookhaven National Laboratory had several early computers, designed to crunch the numbers on ballistic missile trajectories. In an attempt to garner interest from bored visitors to the lab, an enterprising physicist named William Higinbotham took one of these computers, hooked it up to oscilloscope, and created a small physics-based game dubbed Tennis For Two.” This here is how the military were first introduced in to digital gaming which became the start of their interest into the industry which slow id build up until this moment went beyond what anyone from there, (Christian Beekman 2014) “Thirty years later, the military was getting directly involved. One the first links between a commercial game company and a military agency occurred during the arcade game frenzy of the early 1980s. One of the more popular games at the time was Atari’s Battlezone, a tank game with eerie green wireframe graphics.” At this point the idea of military focused games officially took off with the gaming community eventually, nearly forty years later they are a huge area of gaming, creating titles like ‘Halo Reach’ and ‘Time Crisis’. These events have lead up too many of these titles being a very successful genre within the game industry due to players enjoying the dramatized version of the military for high action narratives.

Since ‘Halo Reach’ and ‘Time Crisis’ are fifteen years apart there is a massive difference in hardware and software. Halo Reach was made for the Xbox 360 back in September of 2010 as an exclusive for the home console. The main hardware needed to play it would be the game disk, the controller, the console, a TV and possibly a headset to talk to your friends while online. The software on the game and in the Xbox console allow for smooth and entertaining game play. Although these weren’t available in the arcade era fifteen years before ‘Halo Reach’, ‘Time Crisis’ was released in 1995 on its own arcade machine at many different arcades. The arcade machine that was built for the game had specialised hardware including a plastic pistol controller that is used to feel as though you are actually shooting in the game and a pedal to duck and stand up. The software is going to be less powerful than ’Halo Reach’ but it’s on a large machine which shows how much software has evolved from only one single game on the large arcade machine to a compact disk that can hold more information than its predecessor. This is a good example on how far technology has advanced over the fifteen-year gap between both of these games.

Both of these games may look different due to ‘Halo Reach’s’ software being fifteen years ahead of ‘Time Crisis’. Though deep down they are both the same game which can apply to every game in the shooter genre because the base mechanic in all of these different games is the very simple objective of shoot the target and the target dies before they shoot you, then move on to the next objective or another target to shoot. Though both games use these mechanics, they both expand on these base mechanics in how both of these games handle how to transition around the playable level. In ‘Time Crisis’ you cannot move freely, it moves you once you clear the game it moves you to the next area this classifies the game as an on the rails shooter. ‘Halo Reach’ gives the player free movement around the level for the mission or game mode. The movement is only one many different mechanics in both of these games, The other mechanics available in ‘Halo Reach’ would be the many different amour abilities like sprint that allows your character to go faster, a jet pack to let your character to fly around and the drop shield to give you a bubble-like energy shield. A quote from Miguel Sicart who has a PhD within game studies, uses the game ‘Gears of War’, another game in the shooter genre as an example of game mechanics with it’s cover based system. (Miguel Sicart 2008) “Seasoned players would probably not hesitate to call the cover system a “mechanic”, something that connects players’ actions with the purpose of the game and its main challenges. But the meaning of the term is not always clear.” As he states mechanics don’t just apply to basic areas, mechanics are used to input actions into the game’s title, for example it can be the enemy AI/players, the gunplay, the level and, as I stated earlier, the movement along with any added abilities like ‘Halo Reach’s’ armour abilities.

Both games have story driven narratives as their main game modes. One of Vladimir Propp theories in his book called ‘Morphology of Folktale’ which explained the standard structure for a narrative of fairy tales, where most stories have set roles a hero, a villain, a king, a princess and companions. This theory can can apply to many different types of media like games for instance (Propp, V. 1958) “The word ‘morphology’ means the study of forms. In botany, the term ‘morphology’ means the study of the component parts of a plant, of their relationship to each other and to the whole – in other words, the study of a plant’s structure.” This applies to this game because you are the hero of the story, the terrorists are the villain the rest of the agency count as helpers and the president is the king while his daughter who you need to save is princess. Although ‘Halo Reach’ doesn’t fully apply to this theory closely but it keeps certain elements of it, for example there is a clear hero which is the player, the villain which would be the alien army/military cult the Covenant and the companions will be Noble team and the rest of the human military the UNSC.

‘Time Crisis’ is a rather short story which leads the game to be thirty to forty minutes long. Where the player is on a mission to save the president’s daughter from a dangerous terrorist group, and mercenaries, which is a rather straight forward story but it’s very entertaining and action packed to draw players in. While ‘Halo Reach’s’ main campaign is about five hours long with its range of story levels and cut scenes. The game starts when you arrive on planet reach to meet the new team you had been assigned to, on your first mission with the team you discover that the alien military the Covenant has infiltrated onto Reach. Over the course of the campaign you destroy one of their huge ships which fills the player with relief until a huge fleet of their large ships appear which causes the situation on Reach to rapidly decline then you slowly loose members of your team until you are the last one to fall in a heroic final stand at the end of the campaign. Though ‘Halo Reach’s’ story doesn’t end there because the multiplayer can lead to emanant experiences which are the memories that you and your friends can obtain through playing the game. An example of this I can remember is that I was playing with a few friends online and we had a random player on our team so I called him random guy and when he died I yelled out “Random guy no!” rather dramatically, which led us all to burst out laughing. This is an effective example of an emanant moment because it builds a narrative from an event that wasn’t linked to the main story of Halo Reach’s campaign.

Both games have dealt with immersion very differently through different means, ‘Halo Reach’ uses its environments and characters to tell a compelling story that draws the player into a possible futuristic outcome within five hundred years. While ‘Time Crisis’ uses the hardware that I mentioned early with its plastic pistol controller make the player believe that they are actually shooting the enemies in a high action scenario which draws players to play it and keep playing it through. Paul A. Cairns and Kevin Cheng’s wrote an Article on ‘Behaviour, realism and immersion in games’ says as such (Paul A. Cairns/Kevin Cheng 2005) “The main manipulation was to alter the behaviour and realism of the graphics in the course of a simple game situation. Surprisingly, results indicated that participants could be so immersed within a simple environment such that even significant changes in behaviour had little effect on the level of immersion.” ‘Time Crisis’ has a more modern setting than ‘Halo Reach’ so it will be more familiar to the audience that plays the game, though ‘Halo Reach’s’ environments are more detailed as they look like they belong in a world that absorbs the player into immersion due to nothing looking out of place within that gaming world. Immersion, done correctly through different means, can lead the game to be very successful, which I believe both of these titles do effectively due to a lot of players enjoying both games.

In conclusion the shooter genre has notably evolved between both of these games, my reasoning for this conclusion is because of one main factor. First would be in the hardware and software for both games, the original copy of ‘Time Crisis’ was on a large arcade machine that only had enough memory and processing power to contain a forty-minute game with one game mode. While ‘Halo Reach’ is on a much smaller disk that contains a five-hour long game that has many different modes and looks more detailed than ‘Time Crisis’. Overall both games are similar in their base components of narrative, immersion and mechanics. The narratives of both titles use elements of props theory on fairy tales, but ‘Time Crisis’ follows this much more closely using all of the narrative roles he listed. Next would be the basic mechanics of shoot and move on but ‘Halo Reach’ expands on these by the addition use of amour abilities and free movement and not a on the rails shooter like ‘Time Crisis’. The final point would be the games use of immersion, both use immersion differently for example ‘Time Crisis’ use of hardware with the pistol controller to make the player feel as though they are in the game and a modern setting to make it familiar to the player. ‘Halo Reach’ uses realistic characters so the player can connect with them and its detailed settings which look like they belong in the game can make the draw the player into that world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Christian Beekman (2014) The History Of Video Games And The Military. Available at: https://taskandpurpose.com/us-militarys-close-history-video-games/ (Accessed: 03/05/2018)

Propp, V. (1958) The Morphology of the Folktale. Available at: http://homes.di.unimi.it/~alberti/Mm10/doc/propp.pdf (Accessed: 04/052018).

Miguel Sicart (2008) Defining game mechanics. Available at: http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sicart (Accessed: 06/052018).

Kevin Cheng/ Paul A. Cairns (2005) Behaviour, realism and immersion in games. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056894 (Accessed: 04/052018).

Bungie (2010) Halo Reach Xbox 360 Microsoft

Namco (1995) Time Crisis

Figure 1 Halo Reach Xbox 360 case: https://www.gamestop.com/games/halo-reach/75976

Figure Time Crisis PlayStation 1 case 2: http://www.mobygames.com/game/time-crisis/cover-art/gameCoverId,231390/

Figure 3 Xbox 360: https://ebgames.com.au/xbox360-149627-Xbox-360-Elite-250GB-Console-Refurbished-by-EB-Games-preowned-Xbox-360

Figure 4 Time Crisis arcade machine: https://www.gamesroomcompany.com/time-crisis-arcade-machine?adGroupId=48885574503&device=c&gclid=Cj0KCQjw5qrXBRC3ARIsAJq3bwoRR2RNHeIGD1n4dRY-UK3ODbKR8olnBV2M2_dYnEZlFsG7EWmirTgaAjhDEALw_wcB

Task 5: Games telling stories

This Article goes over various different ways of discussing on how all games can tell a story small or large, from the gameplay, the cutscenes for the campaign, the experiences people have while playing them along with the stories make up while playing the game.

The player corner represents the most subjective of imaginings that although inspired by the game are not supported by its rules and code, nor are they communicated by its representational dimensions. An example of this (1) would be the background story of my character in World of Warcraft. I might imagine that my Night Elf Muun is leaving his homeland of Teldrassil because of an embarrassing situation with the Head Tailor’s younger daughter. Aside from the basic geography of Azeroth and the existence of tailors, the game system does not support this segment of emanant narrative, yet I am free to create it and even act upon it.

Games like ‘World of Warcraft’ are known as Roleplaying Games (RPGs) these games can vary where you play as a character that you create it is in this example and similar games like the Elder Scroll series, Dragon age, mass effect, Star Wars Knights of the old republic and dark souls. While some games give you a set character but you can play them how you want which is in some games like The Witcher series and all of the telltale games that have come out such as the Walking dead, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy and many others.

Emanant narrative refers to the active construction of story through interaction with the game world’s topography, inhabitants, objects, game rules and coded physics. Emanant narrative thus consists of a feedback loop between the player’s interpretation of cyber-textual elements [17], the surface sign, and the coded structures of the game environment: the game rules, physics and other mechanical operations that animate the game world and its inhabitants.  

Every game I have played uses the environment to tell a story, the opening area of White Orchard in ‘The Witcher 3 Wild hunt’ is based in a post battle battlefield so there is a lot of death and destruction which draws in the monsters which leads why a Witcher is needed there.

Task 4

Halo reach Blog review

I am looking into Alex cooks blog piece on one of my all-time favourite games ‘Halo Reach’. It’s good to see another fan of this game seeing the great sides of this game like the enjoyable campaign that turns tragic in the end by losing all but one of your squad members and then yourself on the final mission. Your character and squad are all super soldiers called Spartans which a mentioned in the other halo game instalments that they almost all of them died on a planet know as ‘Reach’ and on the opening cutscene you see your helmet in the dirt of the burning planet which lessens the impact at the end of the game, these two things do make the ending less of a surprise for the player. Another good thing the game does right is that you can customise your character in multiplier and campaign which makes the player more attached to their character because they are basically playing themselves.

Though Alex didn’t mention the suffer quite a bit when the developer changed from Bungie who wanted to work on their new project which became the online game ‘Destiny’ to 343 Industries who have made the recent Halo games such as (Halo CE remastered, Halo 4, Halo master chief collection and the most recent Halo 5 Guardians). It suffered by 343 taking a lack of interest in this game and wanting to make their own, this lead to multiple server issues and a lack of maintenance on the game until the player base spoke out leading more technical support the be sent the Reach’s online services. Although I do heavily agree what he said about the different game modes designed for different players or players wanting to play something different than they usually do. For an example I and a few friends who played it back then mainly played the large game modes like ‘Big team battle’ which was a playlist full of different game modes on large vehicle maps and ‘Invasion’ which was also on large maps but it was Humans vs Aliens, to some smaller game modes if there weren’t that many of us online.

How does the shooter genre evolve between the games, Time Crisis and Halo Reach?

Name

Games art and design (year 1)

Essay

Word count

Introduction (200 words)

(1600) Military origin of shooters, Mechanics and appearance, The narratives, Hard ware and software, How immersion changes

Conclusion (200 words)

I believe that all of these will help answer the question on how the genre evolves by these two games. Except for the military origin of this genre but it could set up a basis on the similarities the games have. While the hardware and software will show the most difference between the two games.

Task 3a

Physical games: Snakes and ladders

The game of Snakes and ladders is a game that’s been round for hundreds of years that still exists to this day. A modern name for it is chutes and ladders though I’m not fully sure why the name was changed from the original maybe it was an idea to reach a new generation of an audience or maybe it was found offensive for some reason. The game has very simple mechanics that are very easy for children to learn, first the game is on a 10×10 which you role a dice on to get from square one to square one hundred, as the same says there are snakes and ladders first you can use the ladders to skip to a higher level while the snakes or shoots will do the opposite by sliding down a player to a lower level to where the snake ends.

The game can be played by at least two or more players which can lead to competitive situations between all the players to see who would get to the top first out of everyone else playing the game. I believe that is why the game became so successful that it still exists because it’s a fun family game with a bit of competiveness between the players to win and since it’s a board game the rules can be modified to any custom house rules that the players could make up even if they don’t make sense and the opposite of the actual game.

Arcade era: Street fighter

Similar to snake and ladders, the arcade game known as Street fighter is famously known for being a very competitive fighting game. This game was very successful during its arcade years that now of days it’s available as a home/ contemporary game on many different platforms around the world. This game was influential to all fighting games along with its competition Mortal combat to push this genre as far as it has in the current day.

The reason it was so competitive because it was one a small scale of only one player verses another on the same screen, this technique is very effective because it draws the players in for a fun and competitive match between each other while there sitting next to each other which raises the stakes by actually seeing your opponent next to you. This is basically what made the game take off to begin with because of this connection between the players and this competitive setting of a game. The narrative of the game is that the world’s best fighters which are on the games character roster that the players use to fight each other in game or choose own to fight against the rest in a story mode camping of the world tournament. This would attract completionsists to play through the story mode using all of the characters, also this was one of the first games to introduce combos into its fighting styles for each character.

Home/ contemporary games: Rainbow 6 Siege

Like my previous games I’ve written up I have chosen this due to how competitive it can be between the players within the game. Siege is a first-person shooter video game based during our modern era but there is an international task force based around counter terrorism called team Rainbow.

The multiplayer is split into two teams of attackers and defenders which are both on team rainbow, so from what I believe it is basically a training exercise for both sides. The atmosphere and the gameplay are quite serious which builds the tension more for both teams, the best way to win is to work well as a team by combing your operators’ unique abilities to either take the objective from the defending team, but for the defending team they need hold off the attacking team long enough to protect the objectives or just eliminate all five members of the opposite team first which can get competitive to see who can deal the final shot first.

The game’s gun play is one of the reason it can be so competitive due to all of it being based on strategy and the skill of the players in combat due to one of the Siege’s main mechanic of head shots being instant kill making them well earned to the winning player of that firefight. The maps play another important role in the competitiveness of the game by making them within a single building but laid out differently on each map.

Flow of Games: Task 3

The Witcher 3 wild hunt which is a role-playing game is a good example of immersion due to believable character, good aesthetics with detailed environments that don’t look out of place all affect the flow of the game along with the gameplay and mechanics.

A quote from Paul A. Cairns and Kevin Cheng’s Article on ‘Behaviour, realism and immersion in games’ says as such “The main manipulation was to alter the behaviour and realism of the graphics in the course of a simple game situation. Surprisingly, results indicated that participants could be so immersed within a simple environment such that even significant changes in behaviour had little effect on the level of immersion.” This shows that even in the fantasy setting the world should be realistic enough to make the player feel like they belong in that world, this is the same for the combat system.

The protagonist in ‘The Witcher wild hunt’ is Geralt of Riva who is a mutated human known as a Witcher; Witchers are basically hired monster slayer mercenaries. Geralt can have small customisation to his base appearance like his hair and beard length to suit your preference, along with what type of armour you want. Geralt narrative options can be either, good, neutral or evil, choices which are good for immersion of the player and multiple playthroughs to add replayability to players. This is a common in most RPG titles because this lets the player decide how their character will react in different scenarios.

 

Task 2: Serious game

Serious Game- Ghost Recon Future Soldier

The ‘serious’ game I decided to play was ‘Ghost Recon Future Soldier’ is a Tom Clancy game that is designed as a third person shooter based around a secret black ops unit called Ghosts because they’re objective is to do covert missions without leaving a trace of their presence in the area.

This game is relevant to our world by showing what warfare would be like if we used very advanced technology in the modern day such as the ability to blend into any surrounding, the use of augmented reality to assist our character in game.

I feel bias to my feelings to my response to this game because I am fan of these types of games, so I feel happy to engage  because the story focused on your squad which made me feel attached to each character and their goal to hunt down who killed their friends in another ghost squad, also the action and stealth parts felt right in both sectors with levels designed to complement both type of play styles, until there are some sections that force you to be one or the other.

I believe this is a fun game but it does have its issues here and there but overall, it’s still enjoyable. The story campaign mode can be played by yourself or three overs taking over the AI characters similar to ‘Left 4 Dead’ to play through what basically is an interactive action movie, or the online multiplayer which is just normal multiplayer for a shooter game.

Task one

2001 games entering the academic field- Here is when the academic society saw the possibility that gaming could be a teachable subject in an academic environment for studies, art and design.

Games a phenomenon of a greater cultural importance over most media-  This use of interactable media which became gaming became a such popular concept to the public with a range of different games to appeal to a large diversity of audiences by using different genre of games like platformers, shooters, etc.

Yet much of the industry and the academic commentators see the need for “narrative” structures in order to understand games and make games “better.”- Some games like The Witcher, Mass Effect and Bethesda games are great examples of game narratives that could be better than a movie or another type of media.

Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonising attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again. And again, until computer game studies emerge as a clearly self-sustained academic field. – Games are a combination of many different areas of media including cinema and literary but it also contains other areas like 3D/2D modelling and design.

The digital theorists will finally have found interest and acceptance back at the old discipline, and so the fellowship offered by interdisciplinary communities (such as the Internet Research Association) while still valuable, is no longer crucial when building a career. – Here is when game studies became possible by breaking down the game industry into its basic components.

Presentation Journal

Presentation journal

Log 1: 13/12/17

After last weeks lecture we were given our groups and I was in a group of five (Dean Gibson, Josh Gates, Sarah Drew and Abbie Fisher). We have decided to decide a topic for our presentation over Christmas holidays but we did decide to use the hackNplan as the chat room for our presentation from the ones we were given.

Log 2: 10/01/18

I just met up with our group with my idea of comparing the comparison between new and old games my plan was to compare the original Legend of Zelda to The Witcher 3 Wild hunt, but we changed our topic to the compassion of indie games and AAA titles.

Log 3: 17/01/18

We’ve decided to switch our chat room to Discod due to none of us having the experience to figure out how to use hackNplan effectively which I set up for the group, and we changed our topic from what we decided to outsourcing because we felt it was more focused that what we had originally. I also have started on the presentation which I need to at least get a draft version ready for the test read in two weeks’ time.

 

 

 

Log 4: 24/01/18

This week we’ve added a lot more content in the into the presentation for next week I’ve added my negatives of outsourcing with my example for this was the game ‘Mass effect andromeda.

https://www.geek.com/games/mass-effect-andromedas-facial-animations-were-reportedly-outsourced-1694894/ : This was the article I had got most of my information from but I knew a few things from different articles from about a year before when I got the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect:_Andromeda: I didn’t use any information from Wikipedia but this was the only site that had a high-resolution photo of the games promotional version cover.

Log 5: 29/01/18: Sarah sent me all of the work she had included information about her interviews with some game developers.

Log 6: 31/01/18: We had our test run today and we got some good feedback the first the background colour affected some people so I need to choose a darker background, along with better team planning along with a range of other things.

Log 7: 13/02/18: These past two weeks we have been perfecting the presentation which is at 11:30 tomorrow and we’ve decided to meet up an hour before hand to go over the final product as a group.

 

 

 

 

 

Log 7: 14/02/18: The presentation came out great but I feel like I could have done better on my parts because I froze up during the mass effect part and skipped half of what I planned to say but it could have come out worse, I was glad to have this team everyone carried their own weight in the group which Is why I think we did so well.

3D journal

3D Blog

4/12/17: Today we received our first lecture on our 3D project, which has given us our brief for our assignment which is to make a sign using the program Maya along with others that will be explained to us as we reach that point in the project.

5/12/17: The session we had was going over the basics of maya and started modelling out our signs. My idea for a sign is a medieval/fantasy black smith shop sign.

I wanted to keep a classic basic design that would be suitable for the environment I had in mind. I’ve inverted the bevel tool to add the curves on the corners.

12/12/17: This session we’ve been introduced to the Z-brush program which we are using to make high poly version of our sign. Though since there is no free version for students, I am going to try and find a safe torrent or wait until the Christmas holiday ends.

 

9/1/18: I’ve changed the design from a post sign to a sign that that is displayed from the side of a building and only using one part of the chain link due to make it easier for the later stages of the project, this was a suggestion from Chris. Also, I have got a torrent version of Zbrush so I can do more work at home.

16/1/18: I’ve made new changes to my sign to make retopology easier to do and to be honest I think they old design looked very scruffy, so this one looks much cleaner of a design.

 

 

23/1/18: The sign design has been fully retopologised by using quad draw to map it out now ready for the next of Uv mapping the sign for the final part of the project. This makes a low poly version of the high poly model.

30/1/18: The sign has been fully Uv mapped and unwrapped so it will be ready to be exported to substance painter for the final program we will need for this project.

6/2/18: Here is the current finished version of the sign after being importing the low poly and high poly from maya and then baked to give the full rendered sign model. I wanted to use materials based in the scenario I based this on. So, I used painted red wood, steel and the closest a stone pattern I liked which was this marble pattern, which still works by basing this black smith sign in a high-class area of a city in medieval/fantasy times.

 

09/05/18: Here I test the finished sign model in a few fantasy city environments to see if it can fit in to the soundings before exporting it for the