Grimble

-About-

Grimble is a 3D explorative game where players can discover the peaceful island of Grimble and interact with the quirky inhabitants known as Grimblys, Explore, discover, mingle, collect, sell, buy, decorate, fish, garden, participate in town activities or watch the sunset. The game places emphasis on player experience, using visuals and sound to create an immersive experience.

Grimble has been showcased at Level Up Toronto and Humber Polytechnic’s Interaction Design Showcase.

Click to View Instagram - @grimble.explore

-Role-

I am Co-Founder, Co-Manager, and Lead 3D Artist for Grimble alongside Andreia Silva.

While I had my hand in all areas of Grimble, there are a few key areas I worked on/implemented the most.

Environment Assembly (e.g., building assembly)
Lighting & Post process
Cameras & Rendering
Landscape sculpting & painting
Sky & Clouds
Atmosphere & Fog

Day & Night cycle
Water System
Grimbly character design & modeling
Grimbly facial animations & implementation
Player Movement System
Firefly system (Niagara particles)

-Team-

What started from two 3D artists, has now developed into a production team of 7, with 2 more programmers coming onboard.

Natalie Mota (Co-Founder, Co-Manager, Lead 3D Artist)
Andreia Silva (Co-Founder, Co-Manager, Lead 3D Artist)
Kevin Chen (Music Composer)

Logan Bacchus (Character Rigger)
Ralph Robes (Lead Programmer)

-Beauty Shots-

-Building Assembly-

A key aspect I worked on is assembling buildings for Grimble - houses, shops - utilizing the variety of modular assets modelled by Andreia Silva. The assets were snapped together like lego in Unreal Engine. There are currently 7 of these buildings, all of which were made to be copied around the map. Colours of the walls, wood, and roofs can be changed (via Material Instances) to create a large variety of combinations.

Rather than the buildings be static meshes or copied groups, they are instead Level Instances. You place the buildings around the map as "Level Instances" as if they were static meshes. Then if you want to make an edit to a building, you can go into its level instance, make the change, and the change will be applied to all of those instances of that building.

E.g., walls, corner walls, wood beams, wood planks, vines, etc

My personal favourite. Not only the first one I created, but also the most recently edited.

The largest building! Each side is unique, making this building the easiest to copy around. No matter which side you see, it looks like a whole new building.

Day & Night Cycle

Grimble thrives in both day and night. The Day & Night Cycle is an Unreal Engine Plugin that I inputted and manipulated.

Moon and sun intensities change depending on the time of day

The speed of the day can be changed to how ever long you'd like.

For all of the lantern lights (street lights & house lights), I created them to sync with the Day & Night Cycle. When its dusk, the lights come on, when its dawn, the lights turn off. It can be changed to any time of the day, its attached to a looped sequence.

Fireflies

Created utilizing Unreal Engine's Niagra particle system.

Like firelies, they change in scale, speed, density, colour, etc

Character Face Animation

The faces for the Grimblys were drawn and animated in Adobe Animate

The implementation was the tricky part to figure out. In short, it is a png image sequence on loop as a material. The character models have a separate piece of geometry on top of the face with a separate ID (done in 3Ds Max). The image sequence material in Unreal Engine is then assigned to that separate geometry. The sequence plays upon game start.