D_Rogue Game Art Project

N ow D_ROGUE  has been several years in the making (with this week marking the third blogiversary! ), I thought it was time to do a spring clean and better organise everything. I began by cataloguing all the assets (3D models) into a table in a spreadsheet. I structured the tables by interior and exterior items onboard  F/V  Scully,  and then by area/room. I then labelled what has been completed, what I am currently working on, what there is to do and any key items (essential items that can be picked up in-game etc). All colour coded of course! This process took some time to list everything down. Planning from what will be unique items, versus what will be duplicated and copied into different areas was no easy challenge. I had to think hard about what will fill each space and make it feel lived in (without being too empty or too cluttered). So far, I have just over one hundred and eighty assets on the list! At first, this seemed like a totally unrealistic goal. At th...

B ack in 2012, I created a project that required me to make a fictitious production company. I named my made-up company Exit Entertainment and even created a  title animation for it.  I soon went on to reuse this  again and again, for my own short films and comedy sketch outros while at college (see here ). Over the past decade, I've created several different iterations of the  Exit Entertainment  title animation . Going into this project, I thought it would be a great time to update and overhaul the whole look of the sequence to include it in the game's opening titles! Since D_ROGUE is set in the late 70's, I thought what better way than to create it in the style of what an exit sign might have looked like from that era. Although, a vast majority of them in the past just said EXIT, so I mostly just changed the two-tone colour palette. Getting started, I had to dig out the old files which needed to be cleaned up and vectorised. Ten years ago, I had only just st...

H appy  New Year! For my first post of 2022, I thought I'd give a brief summary (like usual) on the year gone by and where I'm going in the future with D_ROGUE. 2021 was quite a stir up in my creative output. I finally got a full-time job as a digital artist in a production company. I know, I still can't quite believe it!! This shifted my whole outlook as well as output in my artwork. Both figuratively and literally. While I was working part-time, I was able to use my available free time to create artwork for  D_ROGUE. Now my creative profession is full-time, I find I have less opportunities to create my art digitally (having already spent over eight hours each day staring at a screen). Now I know what you might be thinking. Am I ending this journey here? Not even the slightest. My productivity will indeed be slowed considerably, but I still intend to continue creating  3D assets and much more . One positive I have taken, from having less time on my hands for my personal ...

W hile I've been constructing the exterior of the F/V  Scully , I thought it was time to block out the interior for future modelling and complete the bulk of the boat's body.   From the start of the project, I had a rough idea on what the layout of the decks would look like from viewing similar crab fishing boats in the  TV show Deadliest Catch. Though it was only until I had completed the exterior of the hull could I make a start on building the internals. I was able to use the design sheets I created of the fore and aft cross sections (see  here  and  here ) to help guide me in the construction process. Jason Bartlett © Here is a preview of all the  F/V  Scully's  interior compartments   blocked out.  Jason Bartlett © Above I have unhidden the starboard hull surface for a better profile of the boat's outline. Once I get to a stage later down the line, where it feels overall closer to completion, I'll mirror the geometry ...

F ollowing reference material, such as photographs, can have its pros and cons. It can be rewarding to find new reference images online, of objects from different angles; to help better aid the accuracy of a 3D model. At the same time, for me at least, it is very easy to get lost in the detail of trying to precisely recreate things from real life. Take the anchor chain and drum below that I modelled. Although not entirely complete, the  bulk  majority of the model is done. I didn't have any close-up reference images of chains from crab fishing vessels in the 70's, so I had to use the contemporary equivalent (from the TV show Deadliest Catch) with some creative licence here and there to age it all (i.e. taking the design and construction from an engineering perspective and stripping it all back). The result turned out quite well. Overall, looking at the broader picture has worked great and I think I'll use this approach in the future. So long as i...

T he very first model I began to create at the start of the project, back in Autumn 2018, was the bow mast of the  F/V  Scully.  This was created using very little detailed reference; mostly from photographs (much like the rest of my work in the project). Since then, I have come a long way in my modelling skills and decided to take on creating one of the last large pieces of gear attached to the bow mast. The picking boom. This acts like a giant winch that hoists up crab pots onto the deck. After the coiling block has brought up a pot from the sea floor to the surface, the picking boom then transfers it onboard onto the pot launcher. Jason Bartlett © Above is the complete picking boom attached to the bow mast. I quite enjoyed working out the location of the mounting points to join the two like that onboard the fishing vessels seen on the  television show Deadliest Catch. Jason Bartlett © To create all the rigging, I used bezier curves and extruded highlighted cylinde...

S creenshot of  the F/V   Scully's   coiling block finally UV unwrapped in Maya . This model was a lot of fun to work on. Unlike the previous models I unwrapped, this one had a combination of relatively simple geometry, contrasted with some of the most complex I've worked on in the project  so far ! Jason Bartlett © Spreading a 3D objects surface into a 2D surface is never straightforward; they'll always be distortions. There are many ways to UV unwrap the same object. There's also many different software you can do this in. The best way, is the way that fits your needs the most! With the majority of the deck machinery now UV unwrapped, I feel confident moving forward with other assets and the workflow prepping for texturing. Thanks for reading :)

S creenshots of  the F/V   Scully's   sorting table and a tote UV unwrapped .  Like the pot launcher in the last post, this was a pretty straightforward unwrap; due to the model not being overly complex and mostly composing of planes or cylindrical  geometry . Jason Bartlett © Jason Bartlett © In the next post, UV unwrapping the last of the main deck gear...the coiling block! Thanks for reading :)

S creenshot of  the F/V   Scully's  pot launcher UV unwrapped .  This   was a fairly straightforward unwrap, with the geometry faces mostly  being  planes or cylindrical. Jason Bartlett © Next up, the sorting table and tote! Thanks for reading :)

 A nother s creenshot of my progress UV unwrapping assets onboard the F/V   Scully. This   time round, the rope coiler, unwrapped and ready for texturing! Jason Bartlett © I'm slowly making my way through unwrapping the assets for the main deck that I've worked on so far this year. I knew this would be a slightly time-consuming stage but I'm a lot quicker at it now than when I first began the project in 2019. Over time, I've found a steady balance in my workflow; where I alternate between  paths  to create the best possible UV maps. I use, both the main automatic UV projection tools available, or go in to the UV editor and manually unfold and correct where needed. When I reach the next major challenge of the project, working on the interior of the boat, I'll have even more experience and a greater idea in the whole unwrap workflow. Next up, the pot launcher! Thanks for reading :)