Hello again!
I’m Peo Johansson, a graphic artist and the lead sound designer on team Ninja Slice, currently working on the game The Summoning as a student project.
As you may remember, our game is a top-down perspective 3D asymmetrical multiplayer game, where one player controls a single human and the other player plays a demon and controls the game akin to an RTS. The game is inspired by east Asian mythology, particularly Japanese mythology such as Shintoism.
This time I’ll focus on a 3D model for one of the in-game buildings that I’ve worked on.
The building in question is a portal that the demon player can place on the map to spawn minions from. We had already decided that this portal would take the form of a torii gate, which in Shintoism is a symbol for a passageway between the mundane and spiritual. Traditionally torii gates are seen as a good and purifying thing, but as this particular torii gate is used by a demon, the appearance would have to reflect that.
My goal with the design was to clearly communicate that the portal is twisted and corrupted in comparison to normal torii gates. As showing this was important, I had to develop the design before starting work on the 3D model. The first step in this process was to sketch up a few thumbnail silhouettes.
With feedback from our producer, I decided on merging different elements from a few of the thumbnails. I also took a few pointers on how to better integrate the torii gate design with the game environment from our producer.
The gate is placed on a small hill, with raised parts of the earth surrounding it pointing inwards. This is so that the eye should be led towards the center of the gate, and also to give the impression that the portal has sprung up from underneath the ground.
Ultimately the design of the ground portion of the 3D model turned out slightly different, due to me finding difficulties in properly modeling it.
I started the modelling process with making the portal by itself, and then adding surrounding parts of the modell afterwards. Even after I had started on the rest of the model, I made adjustments to the gate itself to maximize the aesthetics that we wanted it to have. That is, we wanted it to appear evil and imposing.
Again due to pointers from our producer, I made slight changes to the design at this stage, including the addition of fences to give the model a sense of structure and leading the eye towards the portal.
After I had finished the mesh itself, I UVW unwrapped the model. UVW unwrapping is, put shortly, done to make sure the 2D image textures are distorted as little as possible and without visible seams when applied to the 3D object.
At this stage in development the model has yet to be textured, but it will be before the project wraps up. We also plan to make slight modifications to the model for when it’s both damaged and when it’s destroyed, as the human player is meant to be able to destroy the buildings that the demon player has placed.
Until next time!
Peo Björn Johansson 