Ashton Scally

youtube.com/SightsSetSouth

[ashtonscallz]

My near final iteration for Environment concept art. I worked more on colour and integration of elements such as the clouds. 

[ashtonscallz]

Progress from previous post. First colour test on one of the selected thumbnails. Took out the skull as it distracted from the environment. Crow looks a little more menacing now as well.

[ashtonscallz]

Some Environment Thumbnail concepts by Me. Quick and rough black & white thumbnails to try and find shape, form and silhouette.

[ashtonscallz]

My final render for Lighting & Texturing module. 

Completed in 5 days. 

Software Used: Mari, VRay, Maya

[ashtonscallz]

What’s up weirdos. This is a small portion of what I've been doing with my time.

[ashtonscallz]

Quick Speeder Bike model turn table. Made for practice.

[ashtonscallz]

Hello to anyone who still follows this blog, I haven't posted here for a long time. Great to see you are all working on interesting projects over at Creative tech. This is a quick model I made for practice, made in 2 days. 

[ashtonscallz]

Contextual Statement

My overarching mood of my photos was to be a form of grandiose eye-candy were every second of flame could be captured in some-what high definition. Along with the battle of the gods theme I wanted to pursue a darker theme of inner demons. I bounced and back and forth as I still liked the idea of gods and elemental powers. However, when It came to editing, I edited my final without my group.

[ashtonscallz]

Reflective Statement

Over the course of this Integrative Practice timeline I have taken many photos with a team (with different sometimes collaborators)  as well as by myself. 

The Beginning 

In the beginning, it was easy to find people who wanted to tackle the same techniques (long exposure) after watching a video from Ben Von Wong in a class lecture. Constructing a narrative was critical so we nailed down our story early on. Although we started as a group, In took photos without all the group present, and by myself. I found that less people worked better but that Is my personal preference, or possibly to many similar or different personalities made it harder to concentrate on one photograph/scene or idea, resulting in allot of fluff and time wasting. However, this experience helped me learn more and more after each session, learning what worked with a group and how to improve for the next photo session.

After some more brainstorming, we had the basic foundations of a narrative and idea for a "battle of the gods" which went through many stages and changes throughout the project based on the feasibility of some of the ideas and learning from each photo session.

Contribution 

In the group, I contributed ideas, themes, composition of scenes/photographs. For the final photographs, I was either an actor or character OR the photographer. I though both positions were interesting while I also tried being a behind-the-scenes 

[ashtonscallz]

Conceptual Statement

Concept

The concept for my Integrative Practice assignment was to explore with long exposures while following a theme of the Elements and Godly Powers. I have always been in love with the subject of Elemental and Supernatural powers. 

Inspiration

I was inspired by the photographer Ben Von Wong. Fire photography video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Ei1J35ZsQ

Andy introduced the class to this video in one of the early lectures and from then I wanted to explore the techniques necessary in producing-like images. It turned out that others in the class were also captured by this and wanted to pursue long-exposure fire photography as well. This is when the first crude sketches were made of what ideas could be presented through the techniques.

[ashtonscallz]

Check out my Portfolio Website

http://creativetechnologies.aut.ac.nz/~zdv8231

[ashtonscallz]

Reflective Statement

Me and Jareth have spent the last 5 weeks working on our Unreal Engine 4, Oculus Rift game "Rift Temple". Even with two people working on this game collaboratively, this project has been a true test of patience, perseverance and workflow. 

Why Rift Temple?

I decided to improve our project "Rift Temple" because It had been by far my favorite aspect of this year in the BCT. I felt there was so much that could be improved and polished, as well as including more of our original vision and idea into the game.  

Using Unreal Engine 4

Using Unreal Engine 4 was a huge challenge in this project. We spent weeks on a level, only to scrap it the day before hand in for Studio because of optimization issues and how we built the level with bsp brushes, causing numerous problems such as light bleed and unnecessary engine load. We also had to scrap all the textures we used in our Studio build of the game, in able to compile the game. This was because these textures used a Substance Plugin, which meant we had allot of trouble compiling the game. Even with these issues, I found Unreal Engine 4 to be extremely rewarding to use and will defiantly be my future game engine of choice in projects to come.

Oculus Rift Experience

Using the Oculus Rift has been a huge part of creating the experience we wanted for the player. Creating our game for Oculus has caused many problems with optimization but we got through them for the most part, getting our game running at a constant 75 frames per second. We ended up not being able to use the Oculus depth camera as it broke lighting upon entering any volume in game. This was very stressful to deal with as we didn't know the source of this problem for a while. We searched Google for anyone sharing our problem but we found no resolve and in so, left the camera unplugged. 

Vernissage

For the Vernissage Jareth worked on Blueprints and Code, and I worked on Visual and Audio design (although we often crossed into each others work). 

To improve the project, I focused on getting new textures for the game, optimizing and clean up level assets, creating a walkthrough start menu, re-working the audio, creating a second puzzle and end game, Compile game (without Substance) and add menu music. Allot of this work crossed over from Studio as we didn't find enough time to get these done in time, hence moving them over to Vernissage time.

Conclusion

This project has taught me so much about working on a large game project with another and managing workflow, assets and goals between us. Self-learning has been a major reason why we got so much done so quickly. Learning Unreal Engine 4, 3ds Max and Unreal Engine 4 as well as optimizing for Oculus Rift caused us to fail, succeed and fail again to finally finding the solution we need to keep us going.

[ashtonscallz]

Conceptual Statement

The concept for "Rift Temple"  was to be an immersive first person Oculus Rift experience with a focus on story, characters and uncovering a mystery. The player was to explore the environment, discovering more of the narrative whilst witnessing strange, and sometimes disturbing, events. I worked on this project with Jareth MacArthur because we felt our talents would complement each other and make it easier to create a feature complete game. Jareth was to work on more of the coding side and I was to work on the design and art side although we wanted to share work as well.

The Idea came from a few days of brainstorming at the beginning of the DIY project in Semester 2 with Jareth. Our original ideas were different in setting and style but at the core, were always focused on immersion and story. Our idea took shape and became Rift Temple. The next evolution of the idea was a turn more into a Thriller/Horror experience, over just the feeling of wearing the Oculus Rift.

We decided to create our game for the Oculus Rift because of the capability to truly immerse the player in a setting and game environment. Jareth had bought a DK2 a few weeks prior meaning he could test and see how performance and in general, how it played.

We decided to use Unreal Engine 4 to create this game because it was more advanced and capable compared to Unity, and it had excellent Oculus Rift support. This meant that me and Jareth had to get through a quite a learning curve.

We learnt along the way that we would need to present our game with a powerful desktop with Oculus Rift and Headphones because of performance (maintaining a steady 75fps for immersive gameplay). My desktop was able to run it only just but we knew that further optimizations would be made to run it for Studio and Vernissage marking.

[ashtonscallz]

Walk through Start Screen. Choose left or right door to load the appropriate level.

[ashtonscallz]

Today I made the Package Icon and Splash Screens that will be on the desktop of my pc for marking. This was not in the initial list of improvements that I posted on tumblr but I thought it was an easy and professional addition that was easy to create.

[ashtonscallz]

POSITIONAL TRACKING ISSUE

After much frustration and issues it seemed like all was lost. With help from Stefan and Ben, we found what the problem was, the positional tracking. The bug was that when positional tracking was working and tracking the Rift, upon entering a volume the lighting would turn off in the level. It is very strange. This is why our game worked fine on the Studio day (positional tracking did not install properly), yet stopped working yesterday when I worked with Jareth (we re installed the drivers). The good thing about this is that we now know that we can prepare our Vernissage without any worry of it critically breaking, while keeping the performance gains of our compiled build. There are a few reasons why this issue may be occurring. It could be a problem with our VR game blueprints for camera control. It could also be a UE4 4.5 update bug that not many people have found. And lastly, it could be a out-of-bounds warning from the Oculus as it also occurred when the Oculus Rift was outside it's tracking volume (except for downwards?).

[ashtonscallz]

IHATEERRORS...but everything else is ready.

I thought I should make the title speak for itself. All the Vernissage content is ready for implementation. I have the sound assets, menu music and splash screens ready and Jareth has the code for some special surprises which involve random generation, a start menu and more.