From September 28th 2024 to October 18th 2024, I participated in my first local Game Jam, Chicaghoul 2024, hosted by Indie City Games in Chicago. The theme of the jam was “found footage”. My intent was to build up experience in the game development pipeline as a 3D Artist, joined by programmer Austin Acosta and musician Julius Johnson. The game we decided to make was a bird photography simulator where you find increasingly uncanny birds throughout the game. The project was made in Unreal Engine.

My goal was to make low-poly, PS1 style birds to put in the game. This would involve modeling, uv-mapping and texturing, rigging, and animating the models. This was done in Blender first, then imported into Unreal. Since this was my first real attempt at making an asset for a videogame, my aim was to make one bird model from start to finish for the jam.

The blue jay model in progress

I learned how to model low-poly birds from a tutorial on Youtube. The tutorial showed how to model, texture, and rig the bird.

The initial, rough texture of the bird model(left) vs the cleaned up texture(right)

Once I had my model uv-mapped, I was able to import the rough texture into Clip Studio Paint so I could paint a cleaner texture.

The cleaned up blue jay texture.

Once I understood the process of making my own textures, I went on to create other textures for the increasingly decaying bird.

Three stages of decay pictured

Rigging the model proved to be fairly easy with Blender’s rigify add-on making it a matter of aligning the bones to the model.

I was able to use Blender’s rigify tool to add bones to the bird. From there I was able to animate the bird freely.

After having prepared the bird model I was ready to import the model into Unreal Engine. Although we were not able to meet the deadline of the jam, it was an educational experience learning the pipeline for making an animated bird from start to finish.