Andrew Dowell

Welcome readers, it's been a turbulent year but we made it! As the year reaches an end, it has been a stressful and busy time as we need to get a working prototype finished in just four weeks. Not an easy task, but I've had the privilege of being appointed Creative Director for the project. I'm learning a lot about people management and creative control in a short time with very little room for error. So far, it's going great and we have some excellent people working in our five-man team! Looking forward to testing this gun out on some zombie raptors! All aboard the cross-desert submarine armoured train! An 8-week deadline is insane. I just hope we can finish it all in time! Anyway, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas and a few self inflicted gifts have arrived early. A good strategy boardgame is always welcome and this one is a beast. Looking forward to playing this one! Thank you Asia Airmiles, I knew your points eventually wo...

So, we have been trying to get a new project off the ground. It's taking a while because of a number of issues outside of our control but the most important thing is planning. Some things to think about are: What are you creating? Build a working foundation. The scale of project and timescale implications. 1. The idea. - What do you want to create? A creative idea won't just magically appear just because you are at work or in a creative zone. They will happen anytime, any place. Just learn to recognize that all these things are connected, and subconsciously you are thinking about the project. Anything can become a game environment. make sure you record all of your ideas. I use 'google keep' on my phone. Here are some examples of inspiration. Movies Photographs Architecture Travel History Concept Art Stories Books Comics TV shows The internet. Pinterest is amazing for gathering ideas. Life Experiences 2. Purpose and Features - Why do you want t...

Within a 360 environment, it's difficult to get everything looking aesthetically balanced and often when using player guidance such as text it can get lost. This quick blog is to show you how to make the blueprint to avoid this. The text needs to be yellow, but so does the floor. When looking around it's not a problem but if a player is looking down the texts will mostly be unreadable. This is unacceptable so you can simply create an alternate colour for the overlap. Make sure Surface and Translucent are selected. And that you've disabled depth test. Or this will happen. The blueprint below shows how to set it up. The outline colour (red) lerps between the two base colour pre-sets (orange and white). The lerp alpha is masked with R and G channels and then clamped. Hope this helps and thank you again to Zoe Yu!

As part of a project, we wanted to have control over the skydome colour. Using a mixture of shades and textures, I created a single material with parameters to instance. The scene starts black but I left this parameter at zero to have more control later when I want to switch back up through the colour range. Plug in 'Enable Input' and 'Get player controller' to 'Event beginplay'. Next, create a timeline with two float tracks. These will control your fade in and out. These are connected to 'Set Scalar Parameter Value on Materials' nodes, with the target object mesh and parameter name. The two float tracks will act as a crossfade between the two materials. I want the material to change at the correct point in the game, so using a delay or timeline won't be suitable. Instead, I can use Custom events, I've renamed them to match the storyboard so we know exactly when to call them Finally, testing my material works exactly like I need it to. Using a s...

Just a quick post about my wargaming scenery collection. By day I'm usually painting in Substance painter or modeling in Maya, but night I'm getting my hands dirty, covered in glue, spray paint and grass flocking. In an effort to really think about the things I enjoy doing, and how I can build this into a career, I've been going back to my roots. Drawing, painting, model making and scenery. I've been building this scenery for a few weeks but actually don't have a game to play it with. I can probably use it with 'Dust' and at some point pick up the new Games Workshop 40k. Foam core buildings with broken cork pieces: Fimo polymer clay sand bags: Foam core small building generators: Small wooden pallets: Fence soft cover: Modular tower units: Cardboard and foam core Cargo crates: Foam core, fimo polymer clay bunker: Landing platform: Wooden balsa wood crates: Ancient monument: It's been great fun building these and hopefully will add some more in t...

Documenting work is a good habit for any R&D team. I recently looked into using Cell shading for a project but had a few issues with the implementation and the final result. We started with our realistic looking underwater environment. Applied a cell shaded post process effect that clamped colors within ranges. But it looks terrible. I then remade all the materials and added back the normal maps for each asset. This looks a lot better but isn't the desired 'hand drawn' effect. The Unreal marketplace has a wonderful free Stylized Rendering project. I decided to take a deep look at what could be learnt from here. A post process for adding a black outline will always be useful Once applied in my scene it's finally moving in the right direction but the asset materials now need more work. Time to hit Substance painter. 1. No normal map. (Far left) 2. Normal map with block colour 3-5 Substance painted textures with different brush textures. Only 1 and 2 look fairly good, ...

Hey guys, Some of you may know that I start out life as a traditional model maker and once worked for Games workshop. It's funny to think how life is circular and that I've returned to the things I started doing over 20 years ago. Although I love using digital software, there's nothing like getting your hands messy and building something with your fingers. I've been doing a lot of scenery making to get back into things before I start parting any models again. This weekend we had a double typhoon, so it was definitely a good time to stay in and get some model making done. You can buy a lot of resin and polymer kits, but it can start to get expensive when your just free forming and making experimental stuff.  The Green Stuff from Games Workshop is a great two-part modelling putty that is useful for filling in gaps on models and sculpting additional details but has real trouble in tropical heat and usually dries up pretty quick without monthly attention. Building l...