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

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...)