MA Games Design Blog - Lance Muir

Semester 2 - Project 1 - The Yawning Portal "The Yawning Portal is far-and-away the most famous inn in the world. It’s a three-story stone building with a slate gray roof and several chimneys. A signboard that simply reads “The Yawning Portal,” hangs on chains from a black iron pole above the front door, announcing the entry to the inn. Well-worn boards cover the floor, but the main impression is of comfort. Rich blue tapestries of fairytale adventurers decorate the wood-paneled walls of the common room, which consist of a bar and tables of stout wood. The inn was built in 1306 DR by Durnan the Wanderer on the ruins of Halaster’s Hold. The famous adventurer returned from Undermountain with his adventuring companion Mirt the Merciless nearly two centuries ago, laden with riches. In this place Durnan built his inn and began a gold-rush of adventurers into the deadly dungeon." The Entry Well "What dominates the bar, and lends the inn its name and reputation is the giant sto...

 Semester 2 - Visual Storytelling Project     Just a quick update now that I have moved onto semester 2 I will be changing the focus of my masters research as I briefly mention at the end of my photogrammetry project.      While I found the photogrammetry project interesting and it has helped me gain a new skill in my toolkit as a designer, I felt I was a little stuck creatively on where to go next with the project so with this I have decided to shift onto a new endeavour.     Within  this next project I will be using pieces of non-visual storytelling that describes a series of objects or a whole scene, which will take the form of narrative descriptions from popular dungeons and dragons games. Using this information, I will attempt to create objects or partial scenes that use the narrative descriptor as a basic foundation for building on top of, while using multiple facets of 3D visual storytelling to capture the original vision or feeling of...

Unreal Scene / Photogrammetry Assets - Final Analysis     The ultimate goal for this project and my essay in semester 1 was to introduce myself to photogrammetry, something I was completely new at and analyse it's effectiveness in creating high quality complex assets instead of having to model these through traditional methods.      Through research and practical experimentation I have progressed through this question and deepened my understanding of the subject. Here are my personal thoughts on my findings.     Photogrammetry as a medium is one that is complex in itself and hard to establish for a singular person with limited resources and knowledge. It is better suited for a team of people or larger studios that have funding behind them to invest in the best equipment they can and delegate different processes to at least a couple of people. Having said this as an individual with no prior knowledge of the subject I have been able to generate a couple ...

Project 2 - Unreal Scene - Final Renders     Below are some of the final rendered screenshots from unreal for this current project as it has to be submitted for review. While I didn't manage to achieve everything in terms of the modelling I still have worked towards the core ideas and principles of this project. I will do a final conclusion post to talk about my thoughts and findings from this project.

 Project 2 - Unreal Scene - Texturing Update     Since the deadline is approaching for the review of this project with only a couple of days to go I have decided to stop modelling for now and focus on getting a basic texture pass done of the scene in Substance.     I wanted at least a base framework that I can put into Unreal with the photogrammetry assets I have and setup lighting and try to render out some good screenshots of everything together which will be what I set to working on up until the deadline.     Right now the textures are just loaded at a 1024 resolution and the screenshots are directly from the substance editor so they aren't the prettiest to look at. However I will be upscaling the textures to either 2k or 4k if possible when I export them out to unreal to ensure that the fidelity of the 3D models somewhat aligns with the high fidelity of the photogrammetry assets so they don't look out of place. Since the ultimate goal was to try an...

 Project 2 - Stool/Chopping Board - Photogrammetry Asset     I wanted to attempt a more complex object again for the photogrammetry to see what results I would achieve and so I decided to use one of my kitchen stools. I was also waiting for the weather to settle down as we had consistent heavy rain during December which meant I couldn't do any outside shoots which I needed to do for an object this size.     While I got some good photos again the results that I achieved were not as expected due to the materials of the stool, however I managed a good result of rendering the the seat portion of the stool which I decided to repurpose as a chopping board for the kitchen so that my effort this time did not go to waste.  Again below are the screenshots of the progression. Raw Photos Lightroom Edits   Since I shot outside and orbited around the object I did not need to mask it out in the void style of rendering as I have done with previous indoor shoots, and s...

Bread & Egg Carton - Photogrammetry Assets (Failed)     So one of my aims was to try and do a photogrammetry piece of bread and then a piece of toast however after following the same steps as I have in previous photogrammetry models I ran into another attempt that reality capture would just not do anything with. Again I spent a lot of time trying to re edit and light the photos in different formats and spent a lot of time changing settings in reality capture, however I could not produce any kind of decent result and so I decided to move on from this object and attempt something different. Below are some images for reference. Raw Photos Masked Photos     I think the issues with the bread right now is that it's shape deforms if moved and that both sides of the bread look relatively similar and so reality capture has a hard time distinguishing one side from the other and like in previous attempts just sees the camera as a fixed statice point instead of tricking it i...

 Project 2 - Unreal Scene - Modelling Update 3     More progress screenshots from Maya this time. I decided to remove the shelf unit in the top corner as I wasn't really happy with how it looked and I also altered the handles for the cupboards and drawers from the previous iteration to make them stand out a little more. I finished off the cooker and overhead extraction fan.