Cryptic Worlds

For the first part of my capstone an inorganic object is required, I split it up into 3 weapons for the game I want to make and the capstone is based around. I thought it’d be easier then it was to complete this part of the project but it took me much longer then original predicted. However I have finished them, except for the rather plain look of the PAK Rifles texture I’m pretty satisfied with how they turned out. The 3 weapons out of the 7-8 I had conceived for the game include:

Protonic Accelerated Kinetics (PAK) Rifle

This weapons I designed to fulfill the purpose of the token shotgun weapon, giving it a more sci fi approach as in it shoots out shards of energy instead of buck shot. I’m not as satisfied with the outcome of the texture of the rifles body however.

MKV Inferno Flamethrower

This has my favorite texture job of the 3 weapons here, I think it came out really nice however it does show the weaker texture of the PAK Rifle if they were placed side by side, I’ll have to think of what to do to make the texture better on the other gun.

Cryo Rifle

This is one of my favorite weapon concepts, a cryonics gun (a freeze gun).  I wanted to make environmental hazards in game like coolant tanks so a freeze effect would be cool to use for a weapon.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted guns to have secondary fire but I thought it’d be cool to make this guns secondary fire shoot a projectile that creates icicles when it hits a surface which you could then throw enemies into to impale them. The possibilities are endless! (At least.. as far as I can program lol)

Next up.. Characters

My attempt at a low polygonal character for an assignment going over low poly character construction. So far this guy is clocking in at 988 triangles. I find it odd actually wanting to use triangles since we had been taught that triangles are undesirable but they are used extensively in low polygonal modeling however if you have the ability to go high polygonal (4k+ Polygons) then triangles can be avoided. I want to add a cloak and a bottom jaw as separate objects to this guy but I have to continue to work it down further. I’ve seen people who have made working characters at 500 triangles but I don’t see mine being that low poly and functional at this point. It’s not suppose to look pretty by itself, the texture mapping will be what makes this look good. Though I believe I’m under the typical amount of triangles for a model found in a PSP game.

I’ve been working on building up my portfolio for character design. So far I’ve been pretty slow at it as I’ve only gotten 2 fully modeled (minus a few accessories such as hair and cloth) characters done. My 2nd personal character is the 3D rendition of the Annulnali race from my Chronicles of Terrus universe. This one unlike the Vulkanian is skinned with 3DS Max’s Biped skeletal system which I’ve not really experimented with until the Advanced Animation class that I am taking this term, while parts of it are pretty cool others I don’t like as much such as some of the ways the bones rotate or turn as opposed to the standard IK Bone system I had utilized for the Vulkanian. It does however have a built in walk cycle but it yields rather weak and robotic looking motions so it really comes down to personal preference I guess. I’ve heard the industry loves the Biped system for humanoid characters but I’ve also heard that when hiring, they usually look for people who have used the systems walk cycle so maybe it’s better that I refine my standard skeletal systems and my walk cycles.

As I’m more focused on Character Design and Construction, it’s mainly my focus as of late but the progression of learning better techniques for character modeling have slowed me down a bit but I hope to start churning them out at a more steady pace so I have a stellar portfolio to show off my skills.

So I’ve been basically working my ass off on this one so I could use it for a project due this coming monday. I can say that from unwrapping this model (which took me nearly a week x.X) I know how NOT to model a humanoid character, while I’ve cleaned up a lot of the triangles, 5 sided polygons (anything but 4 sided is a no no), stray vertices and overall shape of parts of the model there are still parts of it that need work but I’m at the point where this being my first humanoid character model ever it’s probably pretty good since without NURBS or Turbosmooth it clocks in at about 4,358 polygons which is a good number for a low poly model. Now I just finished putting together and implementing a basic rig for this model, next step: Skinning, this is where I apply the skin modifier where the mesh is directly manipulated by the IK Bone system that is the heart of the rig, and the most time consuming aspect of that process is adjusting the Envelope. This is what tells the modifier whether to warp a certain part for example an elbow to higher extent then say the mesh where the forearm is.

We’ve been covering rigging and IK bone chains in Intermediate Animation and I’ve been dying to apply it to some of my own models, well it’s not as easy as I thought it’d be. For the most part the original model had some sloppy work on it compared to what I can churn out now so that needed to be fixed. I’ve corrected the odd neck, better spaced the eyes, added a bit more girth to his frame and fixed a slew of bad geometry but the hands are probably the biggest tweak.. well.. tweak is maybe not the right word because I amputated the old ones lol. So the hands are brand spankin new and I think they better convey the bulky nature of the characters race. Now all I gotta do is unwrap this thing and my prior attempts have left me knowing it’s gonna take a lot of patience and time.. can’t say I’m looking forward to it but it’s gotta be done if I wanna apply a texture to the model.

With the release of the Ghostbusters video game (and it is an amazing game by the way), I got inspired to try and make my own models of Ghostbuster tools of the trade. So I present two of my works in progress.

The standard trap, based on the movie design with aspects taken from The Real Ghostbuster’s trap design. There is a lot more minute details then I remembered, so it took some watching lots of Real Ghostbusters to get everything i needed. Though I’m still missing some lights, buttons and nobs.

My take on the trap from Extreme Ghostbusters, while not as memorable as the original trap, it’s rounded shape and tri-winged door were a bit of a challenge, it still needs some creative additions.

I think when I’m done with these, I’ll try making the Proton Pack from Extreme Ghostbusters.

It’s pretty much finished, though I may have to tweak a few things since they do not look as smooth as I would like even with NURBS turned on. Currently I’m just gonna leave it with flat shading and some specular mapping. I guess my next step would be to experiment with bones since I modeled this in the standard ‘T’ pose it should be pretty easy, though I know next to nothing about applying said system. We won’t be getting into that at school until either Intermediate or Advanced Modeling. Dunno, but I think my model came out really well for my first attempt.

I’m rather excited about my overall progress with 3D Studio Max 2009. For our final project in my Introduction to Modeling course we were to create a cartoon character. I chose to create a model of one of the characters I developed for a fighting game concept and space opera I’ve been working on for quite some time on and off. If I can pick up some more XNA, maybe I will use these in an actual game!