Powered Up

Powered Up is an independently animated short brought to life by the UCBUGG: 3D Modeling and Animation DeCal’s Fall 2019 facilitators. Our goal was to work on a fun piece throughout the semester that would allow the course facilitators to learn and hone their craft. I shaded and textured various environment assets for the video game world in the short.

Unfortunately, my time contributing to this project was cut short due to a wrist injury in mid-October.

Programs used: Maya (2018), Substance Painter

Hand painting textures

Since my job was to shade assets for a video game world, I thought to emulate the type of texturing commonly used in video games, especially MMORPGs. Early in our development we wanted to try a cel-shaded look for the video game world (later cut due to collective school fatigue), so I needed to make sure the base color maps for the assets delivered enough depth information and could mostly stand alone. To achieve these two goals, I hand-painted the plant assets below using Substance Painter.
Note: the turntable gifs below may not fully animate in the Firefox browser.

All flower models done by Ashna Choudhury.

Other assets

In addition to the above plants, I shaded crystals and glowing mushrooms for the short. We wanted a variety of differently-shaped crystals, so I needed to create some sort of smart material I could hand off to my team for a standardized crystal look. I looked to artists on ArtStation for inspiration/reference, and came up with a result I was pleasantly surprised with. I applied what I learned from creating the crystal smart material to shading the glowing mushrooms.

Crystals and mushroom modeled by Abby Cohn.