Nikki McGann
Human Out of Air
Human Out of Air was my final project for my 3D Modeling and Graphics class. I modeled the naval mine, underwater camera, and Exosuit in Maya. Then, I rendered them in Substance Painter. From there, I set them up in an underwater scene using custom caustics and a warping effect in Unreal Engine 5.(All landscape assets are from Quixel.)
Renders
Renders of the models without the
environment are available to view at:
Nikki McGann
Overly-drawn Bridge
Overly-drawn Bridge was my final project for my 3D Animation class. Using the rigid body physics and physics constraints in iClone, we were tasked with creating our own Rube Goldberg Machine. To create a more stylized look, I wanted to create an environment solely made out of low-poly models.
Credit for 3D Assets:
- Kay Lousberg
- Quaternius
- Essssam
- Creatus
- Raphael Gonçalves
Nikki McGann
Duck, Ugly
The first video game I ever created.Using Unreal Engine 4, we were tasked with creating a third-person dungeon game that included locked doors and chests, keys, health pickups, turrets, pendulum traps, spike pits, and trap doors.Duck, Ugly follows a duck named Nak as he desperately tries to save his younger brother, Ped. Along the way, Nak will face multiple jumping quests, rock-throwing golems, and enemy AI in the form of human plague doctors.
Level Design
Character Design
We were required to create our player character in Character Creator. As Character Creator is meant for designing bipedal humanoids, I was advised against using a duck as my player. Instead of listening, I took a gorilla preset within the program and used the sculping tools to shape the mesh into a duck.
SPOILER ALERT
Ped dies.
Let me explain.
Not wanting to create a cookie-cutter dungeon game, Duck, Ugly was ironically born from my twisted take on a classic fairy tale—The Ugly Duckling. However, in this story, the ugly duckling isn't secretly a swan. He's an actual duck who is heavily abused and bullied because of his looks, and unfortunately, the brunt of that abuse originates from Nak's own younger brother, Ped.Despite not getting along with his brother, Nak risks his life by waddling into a danger-filled magical cave in order to retrieve his kidnapped brother. And what happens when he finally reunites with Ped? Ped instantly assaults him with the word "ugly." So, when Ped is killed at the very last second of the game, Nak breaks out into hysterical laughter.The message here is that even good people can unexpectedly turn rotten at the hands of an abuser. So, yes, Ped had to die.At the beginning of this pipeline, we had to come up with a win condition for our games. Mine was: Nak makes it out of the cave alive. I never said Ped had to.
