Hey everyone, I’m Nick Seifert, and I’m the lead artist for Midnight Games' "The Brimstone." My job the first few weeks was creating all of the architectural pieces and polishing them, and now my main focus is props.

     As we continue to work, our capstone presentation draws nearer and we are reaching a point where all props need to be in and finalized. Since all of our models related to functionality are in and polished, all that's left to add is more visual interest. For our in person meeting on Tuesday, we discussed as a team what models we wanted to see get implemented the most and then then Hunter and I decided who was doing what. The best way of going about this is to see whos the most excited about what, so we can assure quality work. For this DevLog I want to go over my modeling process and how as a team, we aim towards a cohesive art style.

     First let's take a look at some of the models I created and where they were implemented.

Bar with Bottles (Lobby)

Grand Piano (Lobby)

Chandelier (Lobby)

These props are ones I was solely responsible for, but I also had a hand in texturing more of the clutter. As a small dev team, we have the advantage of a smaller scale. Having one person texture the majority of the props helps with a cohesive style and is completely doable, assuming they have been UV unwrapped properly beforehand. For every prop, regardless of who is creating it, the artist is required to send pictures at each step (closest reference images, completed model, finished textures), and if any part of the process doesn't meet the teams standard, feedback is given until a greenlight is given. 

     The most complicated model I created this week was the piano, since I'm setting it up to be animated as well. The first step was to find a top down view of piano keys for reference, which I imported directly into my Maya file. To save on texture space, I made the three possible variations the keys can come in, unwrapped them, then duplicated them and stacked their UVs.

     After creating the rest of the piano and the bench, I set all of the key pivot points to the back so that they could be properly pushed down in animation. As a test, I imported a clip of me playing my own piano and animated some of the keys in time with the tune. I'm not an animator, so I didn't create any sort of rig for this model and instead left each key inside of a group under the piano so they could be moved individually.

     After making sure everything was set up properly, the final step before importing it into the game was adding textures. Since I have overlapping UVs but still want to bake my model, I had to create an "explode" (separating or spacing out the individual components of a model) to ensure that none of my pieces would overlap while baking normal maps and ambient occlusion maps. This piece was relatively simple as far as materials go, consisting of black ivory for the base, white/black plastic for the keys and stool base, metal for the wheels/pedals, and black leather for the cushion. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this update. Your support and interest mean a great deal to both me and the team. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to make exciting progress on our project!