What Happened?

Today was quite slow and unproductive as far as work wise goes, i forgot how tedious it can be to make modular assets because it takes a lot of tweaking, especially with it having to modulate cylindrically. I was to do the ferris wheel today and i kinda did i still have some issues with it but I'm gonna call it for tonight before my laptop meets his new friend hammer.

The ferris wheel of the right was my first attempt and it was alright but there wasn't anywhere to put lights and so i made the left version which i like a lot better, this gives me more room to put a lot of flashy lights and make it interesting.

But with the other ones there were far too many spokes to get a carriage to decent size in so i had to sit and tweak and tweak and tweak, then tea and more tweaking because for some reason it wouldn't align properly. It still isn't right but i gave up at this point and added some lights and tested how it looked. Note that its missing the big round bit that's only because i forgot to export it. 

This is what the asset will look like when put into UDK then i have to assemble it, as i keep saying triangle count, doesn't count to repeated assets, blah blah blah and so I am able to get away with a little more detail. I didn't want to use alpha's either because i have plenty of assets and i don't wanna waste texture space and size by adding a massive one.

And i made these as well, the bulb i tested beforehand, a fence, rubber duck, balloon and no entry sign. So i didn't do too badly today it was just more frustrating that i had to spend so much time on that one asset. But I guess it is a main asset and stuff so it has to be right. Better spend a day and make it look good rather than an hour and make it look like a child had fashioned it out of play doe.

Whiteboxing

And so i spent the day whiteboxing, trying out different designs to see what would fit well. Obviously i want the Ferris wheel to be my main focal point. 

I finally settled with the one below and started to add some basic placeholders to get a feel for layout, size and scale of everything. you see the type of stuff i want on the rooftop.

I didn't like that layout and so i amended it some more to get a better composition and height variations. During all these test phases i was importing them in UDK as well to get a feel for scale and if the player can walk through the level.

So after i had put it into UDK one time i felt there wasn't enough height variation still so i searched some rides and found the sky master, tall ride but thin enough that i would put it in my level. Note the beautiful pastel pink.

And finally once I played it through i found the entrance wall and entrance blocked the view a lot and so i just removed them, i had them there in the first place to add an element of surprise but they ended up just distracting from it.

Now truthfully this wasn't done in one day but a few spread over but i was waiting to do a purely whitebox post. Now I'm going to block of the stairs as well so they can't actually get up there because I'm just pure evil. So I think its onto the asset listing which i have kindof started but because a lot of stuff is modulated due to the restrictions its hard to try and work out stuff...yeah lol so I will get that up tomorrow hopefully and get some low poly assets done for the scene. I plan to at least have one max scene with all my low polys and that will tell me my triangle count so I will never go over, aint I a smart bunny :D

Onwards and upwards 

Freak Show Posters

 So day two and what did i decide to do...draw freak show pictures. I want to have a tent in my rooftop for a freak show but i'm not going to let the player enter as it is  "closed". But I do need some posters to show the animals they have on show. And then heres the fun part making weird animals;

I tried to go for a vintage but modern approach to the design of the posters. I'm still not happy with the text but I will go back on it when i can be bothered to browse the web for "circus font". Hopefully i might have another one done by the end of tonight and I will upload that too.

As promised another one for tonight :D, thinking about texture size and stuff this might be all i can fit but i would like to do a few more if i have the space so i guess these are low priority until that point :(.

Rooftop First Day

First day back on the course, got our assignment to do the rooftop. I have been thinking what i want to do for the rooftop for a while and it is clear I want to do an amusement park. Nothing big because it has to be in the limits of the brief but enough to make it interesting. Todays challange was thinking about what assets i need to modulate to make the more use out of the tri and texture space we have.

Now because i want  to set my carnival at night time, there is a key factor;

LIGHTS

I want it to be so glowy your eyes burn, so in order to have a bijillion lights i need to think locially. I asked Heather if the same rule applied to us as the previous year.

Modulated items don't count toward the triangle count.

So this means i can have one light and spam it as it wont increase the triangle limit. So I spent my day thinking about UDK and how to set out to do what I want. Have multiple lights, they have to go on the same path, and they have to flash. So it has been a while since i used kismet and it took me a while to understand how to move more than one mover on the same track as the others. Here is the result;

Notice the multitude of actors...now image that with a lot more lights...it will look fabulous, the most complicated looking kismet you have ever seen lol. So once i finally got that set up with lots or trial and errors i moved on to my next problem. How do i create these flashing in a pattern? I remembered a tutorial that would decrease repetition in assets by using an overlay that would be offset to the world. My thought was to use this technique but apply it with a black and white mask that would make it seem like the lights were flashing. Because the lights will be rotating along with the rides then this seemed to make sense. And so many crappy tries and forum searching because it wasn't working i finally found someone that had a similar problem and was able to fix it. So here is the result;

Sorry for the not so great video, my computer seemed to want to lag but you get the jist of what i was trying to achieve. As you see i added a different colour as well and if it has the same mask and same number values then it will look like its going in a pattern.

And so ends my first day...I some what think tomorrow isn't going to be as productive but I will keep trying to post blog posts because its a great way to keep track and document the stuff while its fresh in the nogging.

Peace out :)

Animations

Well continuing from my last post on what I have done, or not done so the case may be I have finally found where the scene I tried to replicate came from. Its from a 2.5 D animation, their painting leaves my environment much to be desired but its awesome that I know its origin now. And since I'm on the topic of animation here's a few more i found interesting,

I think people can forget that we may be game artists but we love animations because of the visual style and execution of an idea. I love animations and the things i look for are fluidity, colour, motion, style and sound. Have I created a Sam's Law for Animation? Who knows, but do take the time to watch them above, they aren't long and are pretty damn amazing.

An update...kind of...not really...*sigh*

 I haven't wrote a blog post in forever, I almost forgot how this thing works. But I thought i should put up a little bit before work starts back this week. The summer has been and gone and before you even have time to think, I have done work during this time but I can never get anything finished. I get distracted and leave things before going back to them. This means I have started many things but finished nothing. Now that isn't the way to learn. Right now I'm trying to plow through Zbrush tutorials and I need to use it a lot during my final year to meet with the industries standards.

So here is some screenshots of one of the projects I was doing, it was based of an image I found and I was trying to replicate and make it. It was interesting making a stylized scene and it's all about the shader. If you have a good shader then you can make the scene really stand out. As I stated before this isn't finished but I hope to at least get it looking well at some point this year, render off a few good screengrabs for my portfolio you never know.

                          Progress shot with block out and a couple of textures

Progress shot, more textures are done at this point but more need to be done to refine especially the lighting.

I also was doing a creature for some organic practice but never got to finish it, the result is below, i have unfinished textures and some major seems going on but this is all trying to work out a good workflow when working between programs. 

What to do know is actually get stuck into work, reel out assets and produce awesome scenes for my last year. I don't feel ready to be a third year but I am going into it with a positive attitude and i will do the best I can. I only have one shot at this so I'm going to aim high and achieve. I may not be the best modeller or texturer on the course but I have creativity and passion to do well and I think that's what will see me through a successful last year :)

Glow Boy

And so my day has been doing some Zbrush practice, and when I say day I mean after my daily dose of anime...don't judge. 

With my new dance routine and lab sessions I felt compelled to do some personal work that wasn't so tedious as watching programs crash. I took my head from the 3D self project and messed around with it a bit in Zbrush, trying to get over my fear of "messing things up". And then I learned a bit of poly painting which is so awesome. I have yet to find the quick colour pick shortcut that doesn't involve dragging the colour box over to the area I want. Never the less it was fun and ended up with the below. I took it into Photoshop to do some things that Zbrush wouldn't let me but I feel poly paint is an awesome technique to get the creativity flowing. I did 10 other designs before this one, all crap but I went through the process. 

I did some colour changes in PS but I still liked the blue and orange one I had orange-ingly done ( If you get the joke it means you are as sad as me writing it). What is this character you say? Well....I dunno but lets say some tribe thing who likes glow in the dark paint.

Best thing about my mind is you don't need an explanation to be creative.

P.s. The "blood" you see in meat isn't actually blood. It's water mixed with myoglobin (a muscle protein)...my days apparently spent learning science facts.