PaperPlane
PaperPlane is a videogame project that we made over six months in 2009/2010. It was developed by nine French students at ENJMIN. In this prototype, you are playing with a simple paper airplane around a countryside house. The airplane is some kind of memory vector, and step by step, you breathe life into the scenery : objects and people appear and fill the environment.
In-games screenshots
We were only two graphics designers on it. Our work consisted in the creation of a large outside area that we fulfilled with a lot of different assets and also few characters and animations. Of course this work was supported by classical references in literature (Jean Giono, H.D Thoreau, or simply Boule et Bill comics) and Arts - I thought especially of Raymond Depardon's works.
Examples of drawings that I've did to find a graphics style for the game. I had different sources of inspiration: we did hikes and mountain bike rides around the countryside. We also thought about our own childhood holidays.
Technical work
It was possible because we chose a very simple visual style: 3D assets don't contain a lot of polygons and they are colorized only with diffuse map (no shading effects like bump or specular reflect).
I worked mainly on the set (ground, trees and buildings) but also on characters (especially on the paper airplane).
To work faster, I developed some tools: I wrote maxscripts for the light map generation process and material management. I've created a trees generator too: based on L-systems, just by changing the generation rules, it allows you to create a one piece mesh, with tiled UVs and leafs.
At last, I've worked on the introduction movie. In this case, I've programmed a kind of particles filter to give a painting aspect on the video. It was a pre-calculated effect, but I currently work on a real-time shader to do the same (here).
The 3D works (modeling and animation) was done mainly with 3DSmax - Textures were painted with Photoshop - the trees generator and painting filter were written with Processing
Game Trailer & Walktrought