Fish Match 3
Welcome to a private page that has some of the work I did for a game called "Fish Match 3". This is an unreleased game that I worked on at Storm8.
The team was very small and primarily consisted of an animator, a concept artist, a programmer, a tech artist and a 3D artist (myself). During the production each person had to be strong at multitasking and taking on different roles. I lead the overall artistic vision, the low poly 3D modeling and texturing, all the rigging and MEL scripting, along with some animations. I worked closely with engineering and tech art to implement into Unity using in house tools.
To start it off I thought it would be fun to see the final splash screen for the game. I was responsible for composition, the yellow fish, painting of some assets and re-painting of assets for a higher quality look and a more cohesive lighting.
Mobile Games
Going into the project we knew we wanted to make a Match 3 game with a fish theme. We wanted to push the bar in the quality of the art, amount of fish on the screen, the amount of animation in the game, the illusion of caustics and cast shadows on the ground while still having the ability to run on Android and IOS phones. We heavily relied on Unity to bring that idea to the mobile phones.
We were anticipating at least 6 fish on the screen so our rigs needed to be light and our fish needed to have a low vert count but enough vertices for clean shapes and deformations.
Collaborative Process
With all that in mind we set out to create a combination of drawings that would set the tone for the game. Back and forth I worked with Katherine Waddell on our initial starter fish. Once we found a drawing we all liked, I then did a colored version of the fish that would help us establish our color language and amount of detail.
We then brought all of our pieces together. Katherine created the UI, Erin Schleupner created the decorations and plants and I brought in the fish into a background that I painted. I also did a concept of what a dirty tank could look like.
Cohesion with the Art Assets
The decorations and plants needed a boost in fidelity to feel more cohesive along side the 3D fish. I painted two assets that would establish the design language.
Planning For The Fish
Once we established the look I moved on to the creation of the fish. We knew it would be impractical for me to create a new rig for each fish so we planned from the beginning to use one rig as much as possible. I then created a guide that would answer some questions. What do our overall colors look like? What types of fish will we have? How many rigs might need to be created?
The Rig, MEL scripting and Low Poly Models
The rig had two aspects to it. At the visible level it had animation controllers but at a hidden level it had an adjustable rig to change the size of the eyes, size and position of the mouth, position of the fins and position of the spine.
I wrote a MEL script that could easily turn off one rig and geo and turn on the hidden rig and geo.
We could line up the hidden rig with a concept. Model out the new fish. Transfer weighting to the new geometry and have a new character ready to reference the existing animation file. The workflow allowed me to drastically cut down the production time and create a variety of different fish.
The joints in the spine and tail were primarily used for character driven animations and posing. The swimming motion in the game was from painted vertex colors.
All assets were exported out as FBX files and then brought into Unity for animation hook ups and material creation.
Fish Concepts
Concepts I created that could line up with the hidden rig.
Final Low Poly Fish
Here are the final set of fish that are all using one rig and are able to reference one set of animations.
Emotion
Our characters needed to emote so we needed a rig that could express that range.
Mobile Phone Ready Textures
Our fish textures were 256x256 while our larger creatures like the shark were 512x512.
Advertising With High Res Images
I created some carousel ad's that were displayed on Facebook.
Decoration Concepts
Concept art for decorations in the game.
Background Concept
Japanese Garden concept. (Background and decorations the player could earn.)
Shark Rig and MEL Scripting
To allow for more variety I created a shark rig that had the same functionality as the fish rig.
We could also use the same MEL script to reveal the hidden rig.
Animations
Though I was the Principal 3D Artist on the game, I would often step into the roll of animator. I helped create the idle and emote animations for the shark character.
Password for the video below is current45
The Crate
And finally I concepted, modeled, textured, rigged and animated a gift crate that could present itself to the player. It was also accompanied by particles made in Unity.
Thank you for your time. If you have any questions feel free to email me.
Thank you.