Cutscene - Evaluation

Evaluation

For this assignment, I had to work in a team of my peers to design and produce the intro cutscene for an imaginary game of our choosing. We worked together to come up with ideas, create pre-production and eventually a final product. Throughout the course of this assignment, we ran into a few difficulties but were able to overcome them.

The first thing me and my team did was to brainstorm ideas for an intro cutscene. We started by making a list of genres and deciding which we didn’t agree on until we had narrowed down the options. We then decided on what we wanted to make and chose a man who is in purgatory, which we chose to design as a prison cell, and has a conversation with the ‘Good and Bad’ spirits on his shoulders about what he had done to help decide if he goes to heaven or hell.

We then started working on the pre-production, delegating different roles among us to help speed up the process. I worked on helping to make the moodboard at this stage while other team members were beginning to work on the script and storyboard. I gathered images of things such as prison cells, prisons, depictions of heaven and hell and other images that matched with the prisoner theme.

After a few weeks into this project, we had a team member leave and not pass on the work they said they had done. This caused a large delay in our production and we decided to change our idea slightly to help lower the complexity as we were now a few weeks behind and a man down. We decided on keeping the prison theme and instead of having the character be dead, he is instead making drawings of his past wrongs. This is how we decided to go with our idea.

After some small tweaking to the moodboard and storyboard, we were ready to start making a model sheet while the animatic was being made. During this time, I worked on making the script for the cutscene and allowed other members to work on other aspects. With all the pre-production finally finished we were able to start working on production.

Since this assignment is also heavily based around foley sounds, we spent one lesson a week for two weeks working as a team to collect audio for our project. We made a simple sound list to make sure we knew what sounds we needed that we didn’t already have. We needed sounds that would fit in with our scenes and went around the college grounds to gather as many sounds as we could such as ambient noise from classrooms, loud bangs and crashing to help make explosions and other similar sounds.

We started production by meeting together as a team and deciding who was going to model what from the list. I worked with one team mate to start making models for the first scene as well as some for the second scene such as the vault door. Most of the assets were fairly simplistic and easy to make so we were able to catch up fairly quickly on how much time had lost with our previous setback.

Leading up to Christmas my team had roughly half of the assets we needed modelled, so we were on track to complete the assignment in time. As we were about to break up we delegated who was going to animate which scene over the break and I chose to do the scene where the protagonist break into a bank.

I started by making a simple box-out of the scene against our character model for scaling. This let me put in the walls in a roughly proportionate position. Thanks to my research and looking up reference images online, I boxed-out the area where transactions are done over a counter and started with this. I made the dividing wall and added in the side wall to cordon the area off and give myself a space to work with. I made the desk roughly stomach height on my scale reference model and added dividers to mark off each section. I then added in a thin box above this to act as the bulletproof glass banks normally have. I placed in a simple box behind this area to act as a work desk for the clerks, but I didn’t add much detail to this because it wouldn’t be in view much, thus letting me lower the poly count.

I move away from the desk and added simple poles and ropes to section off each line for the bank tellers. I had an issue here because when I tried to add a bend modifier to the rope to make them look saggy, no matter what I tried they would only bend across a plan and severely warp the asset, so I had to leave them straight. I would probably try a different method to make rope if I were to try a similar technique again. It was then as simple as copying both the pole and ropes a few times to make enough to section off a few lines.

From here I thought bank looked a bit bare, so I decided to create a chair to copy into multiple. I didn’t know how to make a chair other than a few simple boxes and extrusions, so I looked up a tutorial that showed me how to make a tidy looking chair quickly and easily with a line and a few modifiers.

At this point it was nearing the end of the holidays and I wasn’t as close to finishing as I had originally meant to be and as such, I had to leave out a lot of small details I could have added in to make the scene look better such as some potted plants or some stand in characters but because of time restraints my team was unable to get enough characters modelled to have as a stand in.

After modelling all my assets, I unwrapped the whole scene to be ready to texture. I didn’t have many difficulties whilst unwrapping until I realised, I needed to make glass. I hadn’t done this before so I looked up a tutorial that showed how to make a reflective glass texture without the need to unwrap, so I was able to save a lot of time with this.

The final thing I did before animating was to texture my scene. I have very little artistic skill so texturing has always been difficult for me. I tried to make the walls of the bank a muted yellow with a bumpy texture by making a normal map of some darker dots sprinkled over the texture but this didn’t work very well. I continued to texture everything else in the scene to the best of my ability but was overall unhappy with it, but I have a hard time being artistic.

With everything textured I only had a small amount of time left until the deadline date, so I had to shorten the number of scenes I had originally wanted to add. I tried to make up for this by adding some physics such as wind blowing a paper into the store when the door opens but was unsuccessful in my endeavours. I finished my animating and rendered it out as images to import into Adobe Premiere Pro.

After importing the images and editing them together as a video, I added sounds. I have a very large sound library, so I was able to get a working sound very easily. With everything edited I exported the video to hand on the deadline date.

Overall, I’m a little unhappy with my product. This is mostly due to not managing my time well and will strive in the future to follow a strict deadline for my assignments.