GAME ART: Exercises & Projects

GAME ART: EXERCISES & PROJECTS

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23/04/2026 - 03/08/2026 (Week 1 - Week 15)
Irdhina binti Mazli Sham (0366894)
Game Art - Bachelor of Design in Creative Media - Taylors University
Exercises and Projects



TABLE OF CONTENTS:
  1. Instructions
  2. Exercises: Foundational Design Studies
  3. Projects
    1. Project 1: Prop/Asset Design
    2. Project 2: Asset Pack for Game World 
    3. Final Project: Environment Concept Built from Assets
  4. Feedback
  5. Reflection


INSTRUCTIONS





EXERCISES


PROJECTS

PROJECT 1: PROP/ASSET DESIGN

For Project 1, the gist of what we had to do was to make concept art of either a character, creature or game asset based on our own chosen game then choose one to be finalised later on.

The game I chose was Hades 2. I would have gone for Hades but I did not have the game so I chose the one that I actually have instead. I also chose Bastion as a backup since Mr Kannan told us to choose two or three games.


Initially, I was going to include Peregrine (from Character Design) as a character for the player to interact with and be given boons to. However, Mr Kannan suggested I can do a creature instead if I'm interested since this was one of the only modules I would be able to do so.

So instead, I intended to do Orion, the pet lizard Peregrine named his Apothecary after. Except in the game, Orion would start from an ally you can see bouncing between the trees in the framing but he eventually gets infected by the cursed plant and becomes a Warden which the player has to defeat. 

First, I started with the thumbnails of the lizard with different poses.


Then based on the ones Mr Kannan accepted, I drew in the details of the chosen designs.


Mr Kannan said to choose number 3 but with the tail of number 1. 


However, there was a problem with both the hump and the legs where the anatomy kept looking off. So instead, I redesigned the whole thing and referenced animals such as crocodiles and komodo dragons. I also made the ally version of him with a size comparison.


Aside from Orion himself, I also made thumbnails of how his shop would look like. It has a similar concept to Charon's Well where players can buy temporary boons but instead of using coins, the player can instead trade materials with plants specifically giving better rewards.


Following the thumbnails, I made a cleaner version with the chosen design. Since the shop was only open if Orion was available, I made two versions for an open and closed version as well as the alert for when the player needs to interact with Orion.


I also designed a dagger that the player would eventually receive after fighting Orion several times. When cutting open Orion using this dagger, the player is able to achieve rewards including boons or materials for Hecate's spells.


Mr Kannan said to go for the last design but with adjustments including adding decals and make the blade look similar to a fang (reference Buck's dagger from Ice Age).


Other than that, there was also Orion's domain where in-game would be presented in isometric form.




I also started on the 3D model blockout. Although, I first used the initial design but then changed to the updated design as shown in the final outcome.



Final Outcome:

PROJECT 2: ASSET PACK FOR GAME WORLD

For those who are doing character or creature, we were required to go further in our project by sculpting and detailing the character until it is all finished (that's the gist of it anyway).

I started giving detail to Orion's ridges. Initially, they were supposed to mimic leaves with some parts distorting into actual leaves but my friend advised against it as it would be challenging to execute and I had a similar feedback from Mr Kannan back then. Thus, I chose to present them in a flower-ish shape that looks similar to a triceratops. 


Afterwards, I zremeshed everything and projected the high poly onto the low poly mesh. I also brought the model to Substance Painter to bake and paint, which was a mistake since I had to do retopology and UV unwrap everything first. 



As a result of my mistake, I had to retexture Orion later on in Project 3.

Final Outcome:


PROJECT 3: ENVIRONMENT CONCEPT BUILT FROM ASSETS


Continuing from Project 2, I retraced my steps and started doing the retopology in Blender. Mr Kannan recommended I use Retopoflow to help make the work faster.
Once the retopology was done, I marked the seams and UV unwrapped everything. Here, I used UDIMs with a video given by Mr Kannan for better understanding.



Initially, I tried baking in blender but that just did not go well because the retopology was not the best.


Instead, I baked in Substance Painter, which gave a lot more control and options for baking.


Then, I got to painting. Even though I used UDIMs, I still separated the texture tiles so I could colour individual mesh without it going to the next. The problem I had here was sometimes the colour would bleed to other parts but that was easily fixed by setting the brush's projection alignment from tangent to UV.



Once the texturing was done, I exported everything and went back to Blender to rig and animate.

For rigging, I used the basic quadruped metarig but with extra bones for the tail. The problem here was I accidentally adjusted the weight paint on the metarig itself instead of the generated rig from Rigify. Fortunately, all I had to do to fix that is parent with Armature Deform then add "DEF-" prefix to each bone in the data panel. Because I had to do it for every single mesh, I looked up a way to change the name in a mass scale. That is how I found out Blender has a scripting mode to input Python in!


For animation, it was relatively smooth sailing, one of the smoothest in fact. The only problem was Blender straight up deleting the keyframes for one of the three animations.... So I had to redo the jumping animation. Thankfully I had screen recorded the original so it can be shown here.



Once all was done, I moved on to Unity! Unfortunately, I came to realise that for textures (which makes sense now that I think about it), Unity does not support UDIMs. Thankfully, the solution was to just change the Image Node from UDIM Tile to Single Image. The only issue I had was the fact that the head was split into two tiles so I had to combine them together into one image.



Once the fixes were done, the textures finally got on the model properly.


I wanted to try on the Toon Shader but unfortunately, I couldn't figure it out and time was running out. Instead, I just set up the animation with a solid colour background. I did, however, tried playing around with the shader settings (particularly the emission) but I opted to just put in the lighting.








Here are the animations done:






Final Outcome:



FEEDBACK
Week 3: Mr Kannan mostly explained how the project would work based on the studies we made on the game chosen. He told me to pick which game I want, I chose Hades 2.
Week 4: Why is everything so bright.... use duller colours for silhouettes, also to avoid straining the eyes. The design, in terms of Hades 2, doesn't look scary enough to be a final region boss so I changed it to a Warden, which is a powerful foe but not as powerful as the boss.

Week 5: Why is everything purple.... better use complete black and white for blocking out compositions so I don't have to worry about saturation. As for the character design, combine the head of Design 1 and the tail of Design 3. For the weapon, choose Design 3 but with the end hilt of Design 4 and can further refine the design by adding details on the blade (refer to Buck's knife from Ice Age).

Week 6: The blockout looks compressed, widen it a bit and add the hard frills onto the blockout. Colours are fine but Mr. Kannan said to draw more of the character ie. how it attacks, its usual stance etc.

Week 7: Fix the anatomy on the legs, take note of the padding and overlap (how it concave/convex). Mr Kannan also said to reduce the hump as it looked too sharp and I can separate the model into sections for easier modelling (head, neck, torso, pelvis). If the legs are separated into different objects, add/sculpt an interlock to make it move later on. As for the weapon, offset the bumps and add accents to break the linearity.

Week 8: The mouth opening feels a bit silly but can proceed, just need to think of the mechanics. The lizard's new design looks a lot better now but I need to make its colours not look washed out.

Week 9: The tail looks silly, make the protruding part similar to a horn where a bone punctures through the skin. Can start on detailing now. I also showed additional designs I could not put in Project 1 and he said to just put them in as addition and just resubmit.

Week 10: No consultation as I was too sick to progress on my work.

Week 11: Mr Kannan said to look into Unity's toon shader if I want to make a similar shading style to Hades 2. Can start on retopology.

Week 12: The zremesh polycount can be a bit higher to maintain details. Can proceed with base colours, add the details. Also, add texture to the skin to give bumps and variety.

Week 13: Mr Kannan said better don't use the auto unwrap feature in Substance because it would unwrap as one island. Just do the UVs first and see how but most likely the texture will distort. He likes the texture appearance, though.

Week 14: The retopo on the head can be reduced. It's all about how the muscle flows so better follow that for retopology. I showed a sketch of the UI but he said better just focus on the 3D aspect, there's supposed to be UI as part of submission but he removed it :( He also explained the workflow of 3D modelling when I asked and the differences between Normal Map, World Space Normal Map and Normals as well as the difference between Alpha and an Alpha, which was very appreciated. 

REFLECTION

Experience: This module was overall really fun even with the amount of mistakes I did in the final project, truly one of my favourite modules because I finally got to make a creature. On the bright side, the mistakes I made definitely helped me understand each software better because the solutions sometimes made me explore a different feature or even interface such as Blender's Scripting interface. So, it is a silver lining of sorts and I guess it's not as bad because as said by Mr Kannan, making mistakes is part of the learning process. 

Observation: I found myself comparing my progress to other people a lot, which is still something I am working on. From what I've been told, I also have a problem of overcomplicating things, which is also something I'm working on. It is fun, though, because this module made me learn new softwares and sharpen my skills more and I got my hands in actually making/animating a quadruped. Additionally, seeing my friends progress in their project also made it as motivation to finish mine.

Findings: I find that you can reference anything in real life even if the concept you're making is not logical or realistic in reality. In my case, Orion ended up being a combination of several types of lizards and dinosaurs, which was interesting. I do wish I could have incorporated the actual cutting open scene, though.


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