The Old Earth

So hello again, long time no... speak?
Well I've been buried with uni work, as always, and this is going to be like this until at least the end of August. It's all good though, keeps me busy and keeps me learning so much. It's rather funny that before starting this course I had only knowledge or 3D studio max, and I liked to think I was quite good with it; but for this course I have had to learn how to use Maya for our game, which was something I was a bit sceptical about because I did not want to learn something new when there was already something I could do and could improve with. That's not to say it was a bad idea, in fact I actually love it now; besides random crashes and battling with it on a daily basis, it's actually such a powerful software with such an intuitive UI, you can tell that this was designed by an artist where Max most probably by a programmer. So as I was saying, what's funny is that now I feel I am pretty efficient with Maya, but when I try to go back into Max it all feels so alien and I feel uneasy with it. Ah pretty ironic that my views have totally turned 180 degrees.

Anyway back to this post... As you saw in my last post I am doing some side projects to boost up my portfolio. That last one still needs a lot of work as I feel it is not particularly inspiring, but nonetheless I've had to get going on this next one, so it is something I will go back to on a later date.
This current project is based on the theme 'The Old Earth'; in fact I was given a choice of 3 to go with, with the other two being 'The Alchemist' and 'The forgotten realm'. So what I decided to model is an old carrack (old sailing ship back from the days of the pirates), with most of my references coming from a particular ship named 'Roter Lowe', a Dutch vessel which was big and mighty in its day. Working this kind of project is great, and references are not only good for helping you with you models, but the research also allows you to understand what you are modelling and learn about it; and at the end of the day the reason I love to travel is because I love to learn new and exciting things, so this is a way for me to do that during those times I cannot travel...fantastic :D

So this is still a work in progress but I figured I would treat you to a couple of images to show you where this is going.
The ship is actual size and is something which could be used as an environment piece in a game as it is quite low poly [under 7000 poly at the moment], but I plan to stick it in a bottle [which I will also show you the image of so you can see how pretty it is]. Which eventually will go onto a desk full of other well detailed models, which will eventually turn out to be a desk in a captain's cabin [which the idea is that it is the cabin inside the ship which is in the bottle which is on the desk within said cabin; aaaah craaaazy, it's like inception....but with ships]

Viewport screenshot of the Roter Lowe

Render of the view of from the previous image

The Roter Lowe inside its bottle

They Landed

It's been a while but here comes a proper post again, aah finally!

I have been on an Easter break now for two weeks and despite what that usually means, time to relax and enjoy lots of food and chocolate before going back to uni, I've actually been working quite a lot [still eating lots of food though of course]. I went home for a weekend and have been working at my job and the rest of the time I have been working on a portfolio project which I have been set by my tutor.

So in this project I've been asked to create an immovable prop based on the theme 'They Landed', which can be interpreted in any way.
It must also meet the following constraints:
- It must contain no more than 2500 polygons/5000 Tris
- Must use no more than a single 2048px texture [or 4 x 1024px textures]
- The scene must be no bigger than 5m x 5m

Some of the ideas which I thought of was something about aliens landing, the moon landings, aircraft landing on a carrier, D-Day landings. So I have decided to do the project based on the D-Day landings. The scene is of a machine gun from inside a German bunker looking out with the sky in view.

I have actually just finished this project, so I here a few screenshots that shows process of my modelling, right through to the finished thing.

Overview of the scene layout

Blocked out scene view

How the machine gun's barrel is modelled

Machine gun added to the scene

Final in software render

Mental Ray render

Diffuse textures used [4 x 1024px textures]

Specular textures used [4 x 1024px textures]

My first potentially published game - part II

So I thought I would carry on in another post as the other one was getting a little bit long.

As I was saying the final week was particularly stressful as, after having been responsible for the two characters in the game which took a lot of work, I was then given responsibility of creating the main boss room as I seemed to have a better vision of how it would work (I was originally tasked with creating the lift shaft, which would have been nice and tillable... making it a little easier). The difficulty with the main boss room is that there are a lot of bespoke tiles. I had to work hard at trying to find a way of making as many tillable assets as possible without losing the flow of the level. This took a lot of back and forth; modelling, rendering, putting into spritesheets and testing in game before realising it doesn't work and having to do it again. Eventually I got there and the whole room (though larger than the screen size in both vertical and horizontal) still managed to fit onto a single sprite sheet, leaving plenty of room for extra objects which the player would be able to run behind, giving the illusion of depth within the level.
By the Tuesday, the day before the final submission deadline, I had the whole level planned out and mostly rendered that night (at 3am). But there was still something missing, it all looked very nice but the top platform just did not quite look finished, and so the whole Wednesday was spent making that look right. For this I re-used Simon's corridor that he had done previously in the level. Unfortunately he had modelled it very simply and added a whole host of detail within photoshop, meaning that it was not a case of importing the models and rendering it, making it nice and easy, but instead I had to take the final images from the spritesheet and adjust them in photoshop to get them to look and feel right within the boss room. This required a LOT of tweaking to make it work as I needed them to be tiling all the way across, but in the spritesheet thee corridor just ran once, therefore meaning they did not need to tile fully. This was a very long and frustrating process, but in the end I got there.

This is the last render that I took, but unfortunately it does not include any of the work from the final day as that was all done in Photoshop and put directly into a spritesheet.

Please bare in mind that this has no post-processing applied to it and is purely a render view image.

We are trying to find a way of getting the whole game into a video, which is made difficult as game is for the iPad. We may have a video to show you when we get back to uni in January. Otherwise I will try to get an in-game screenshot for you all to see, as this image does not do justice to the actual final outcome. There are a few things I would have liked to have added in there, or have done differently if I had more time, or if it was not made for a 2D platform game, but I will keep those to myself for now. ha ha!


EDIT: Quickly pieced together what I had, though clearly isn't the finished article as there are some files which I do not hhave with me, and therefore cannot update the level completely. But roughly...

Click on the image to enlarge

My first potentially published game

Yes I agree with you too, it has been a long while since I've wrote anything here but it's for a good reason. We had a guest come in for a day; a certain Matt McDaid, lead artist on Brink. This day was brilliant as Matt is in a position where I would like to find myself someday, he gave us invaluable feedback on our current work, gave a casual presentation/talked us through his portfolio which was exceptionally good and included some of the work he had done for the Star Wars game that had the plug pulled out after 2 or 3 years of production. As it turns out Iain was Matt's mentor back when they worked together at Free Radical, which is really great as I now find myself looking up at Iain as my mentor.
Anyway during that time and for another couple weeks after that we were in full production and so was working whenever I had the slightest amount of free time, therefore not really capable to update you guys (plus Matt asked us not to say anything for a little while, so had to wait. And considering Gamer Camp have put up photos on facebook, I'm guessing it's fine now).

So we have now finished the game and it really is beautiful, everybody on the team has done a remarkable job. I do have to say that the last week was particularly stressful, at least for me. I had been responsible for the modelling, texturing, rigging and animations of the main character (the spy), and then had to take over the enemy ass they looked very different. Luckily enough Simon had already modelled and textured and quickly rigged him for a walk cycle, so I did not have to start from scratch, which was nice. Though I did need to take the model into mudbox to add a bit more form to the model (back of the head was a bit flat, and added a more significant jawline) and also add more detail, such as muscle definition on the arms which would be baked into a normal map, so as to get the clone to match the art style of the spy. Afterwards I needed to tweak colours on the diffuse map, and some of the weights on the rig before I could start animating. As I had previously spent a good couple of weeks animating the spy the animation process for the clone went a lot quicker and smoother, which was nice.
Finally we had two characters in-game which looked like they belong in the same world:

(to be continued in the next post...)