Research and Development Days at Coatsink
What is R&D Day?
On Research and Development Days, we encourage everyone at Coatsink to drop their main projects for the day to work on a small project of their own.
Do you want to try out new tools in Unity or Maya? Do you want to try out software you’ve never worked with? Or do you want to improve your skills in a new discipline? Because this is what Research and Development Day is for. We want to give our staff the opportunity to improve on skills or develop new skills on this day.
In today’s blog post, I want to showcase a couple of projects my colleagues have worked on.
Designer tools
I enjoy having the time to be able to explore areas in the periphery of what I do as it lets me expand my skillset. Because I’m constantly learning new things specifically about design each day, so it’s nice to have the opportunity to do something a little bit different and become more aware of other fields so I can work better with people within them.
Multi-layered VFX
The first thing I would like to show you today is a tornado which our VFX Artist Aaran Burnett created.
Experimenting making various Sprites in Photoshop and meshes in Maya for stylised VFX and applying them to Unity. The intention was to enhance my creative thinking process, to come up with new ways of making multi-layered VFX and become more familiar with Amplify Shader graphs processes.
PBR Texturing
Michael Ching, 3D Artist
This approach is mostly inspired by a few artists at Blizzard, that only use Photoshop for creating PBR texture maps. I have chosen this workflow because it gives me a better understanding of each texture map and how to make full use of them. For this particular R&D day, I have hand painted the Albedo, Normal, Specular and Gloss texture maps to achieve the overall result that I desire. The model and the Normal map were already made during my spare time at home.
A new take on Snake
One of our programmers, Lukas, created his own version of Snake using AR. As you can see in the video on the left-hand side, you have to select your play area first. Once this is done, you can start guiding your snake through your play space. Definitely an interesting take on this classic game!
It was quite fun to set up this prototype and it shows how quickly you can build something functional in Unity. I think AR has a lot of potential in the future – it may seem like a silly gimmick now, but that is how all great technologies start!
Combat animations
Lastly, our Junior Animator Ina worked on animating a character swinging a heavy axe. It came along nicely.
I was doing an animation study on attack animation with focus on body mechanics. I decided to do this to learn more about the fluidity and readability needed in games animation.
The end of R&D Day
Our Research and Development Day has been a successful one if I may say so myself. This blog post was only a glimpse of what has been created that day. I hope you enjoyed the projects that have been showcased above!
We ended the day with a game night where we all sat together and played video games. We also ordered pizza for everyone as you can see on the left-hand side. Our 3D Artist Emil sneakily tried to steal it all!
Ray looks after Moonglow Bay, REPLACED and #Coatsink10 ! He adores a good curry, loves RPGs, and has worked across a number of globally recognised franchises
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