Tuesday 11/10 - aaaah finally, some modelling

So as the title suggests, I'm sure you can guess that today I finally got to start modelling some of the assets to be used within the game. As the most important, and obviously most people's starting point, the player ship is where I get started (that and because on Thursday I already planned what I would do, and by which date; if you read last Thursday's post, and remember).

So not too much to tell really as the modelling took around 2 or 3 hours, along with the texturing which took another couple hours (solely because it was a 3D model and for some reason I worked closely on too much detail, even though it will eventually be rendered quite small and most of the detail won't be seen.... aaah the bane of the artists, always wanting to make things perfect. It is an art in itself to know when to stop making things better).
Different looks were tried for the ship, but in general it was clear that I wanted it to be 'neon-esque', like that of tron but a little softer. In the end this is what I settled on:

Player ship

The beauty of doing this in 3D is that once modelled you can get different views and angles with very minimal work. I have also got 4 other angles of the ship that could possibly be used, 2 versions of it leaning left and right for when the player is moving the ship:

Player ship at different angles

Don't forget that in-game this ship will be a lot smaller than this, so even though it looks pretty nice unfortunately most of it won't be seen. Still it's nice to know you've done a good piece of work, even if others can't tell. This really did make me feel a lot better about my abilities and answered a couple of questions I'd been asking myself, such as "how am I here? what have I got to offer that is good?", well even though Richard also went the route of 3D after I mentioned the idea, and he is very good too and has come up with some great designs, the style really are quite different.

When I got home I watched the football, France qualified for Euro 2012 by coming top of the group by drawing 1-1 with Bosnia, but it certainly wasn't easy to watch. After this I decided to start on designing and creating an enemy ship, just so that I would have something for the programmers to shoot instead of just red squares. I was up until 1.30 am working on this, and then decided I should get some sleep and finish off in the morning, so screenshot to come in tomorrow's post!