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

I’ve started my 6th and final term for the animation program and I’ve just finished the first of 11 weeks until I’m finished. It’s not long at all.

We have Animation Studio as one of the most intensive classes for the term and I’m going with the modeling track. Since Game Art is what I’m shooting for I decided to make my capstone video game based as in I’m going to focus on creating content for my game except more intensive and of a much higher poly count. Since I have 2 low poly models done I’m pretty far ahead except the plan is to undo the triangulation I did on them so I can create a high poly model with intricate detail from my existing characters to later bake into a normal map to be reapplied to a lower poly model. Seems like more work then is necessary? Well for one it does give a level of detail you can’t achieve with photoshop alone not to mention I’d have examples of low and high poly respectively. I find it exciting, I dunno about you but it should be fun. What I really hope to achieve with this capstone project is to really come up with some great stuff that an employer at a Game Studio can look at and see that I am more then capable of doing the work necessary to be an asset. I really feel confident in what I may achieve with this.

In other news, I’ve gotten some XNA under my belt, the book I acquired recently is pretty good however I feel like the author assumes too much at places, now the book does do a good job of introducing XNA 3.0 but it seemed like he jumped from one way of doing it in Chapter 2 to an entirely different way in Chapters 3 and 4 which didn’t seem to relate at all. I’m like a chapter or so away from starting the 3D aspects but the 2D parts are pretty interesting. I’ll be announcing my bizarre 2D test game in a later post. I guarantee either a good laugh or a raised eyebrow lol.

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 meaning to post these for quite some time now but it’s slipped my mind along with many other things as of late so here they are for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure). If they play slow lower the quality.

Note: I havn’t figured out how to create loaders in ActionScript 2.0 or 3.0 yet so wait a bit before hitting play

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As part of the 4 part final for my Surface Techniques class we were tasked with taking a model of our own creation (preferably a non-organic object) and place it into a photograph with adequate lighting and the use of the matte/shadow material to make the object look like it was actually part of the scene. Well I decided to go with my Extreme Ghostbusters ghost trap model I created previously. I just threw on a reflection map, some soft lighting, added a trap switch (though I think the EGB trap was wireless in the cartoon lol) and angled it. I like how it came out but I guess it’s not entirely photo realistic, the way the trap casts a shadow seems to work but should it be softer? These are questions I’ll need to answer when I get a job in modeling.

I’ve learned quite a bit since starting my Surface Techniques class back in October. About a week ago our midterm was due for the class which involved texturing a gas station scene. This model was of questionable construction in my personal opinion with some awkward additions to the mapping and the overall design of the structures. One thing we were not allowed to do was alter any geometry in it so I had to use maps to my advantage. While this project doesn’t look as amazing as I had hoped it would I’m still proud of it, I was basically used as an example of what an A looked like in the class lol. That made my day.

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I handed in my production guide final for my Scriptwriting course today and I can tell you what a relief.. I finished about 69 storyboards which was about 207 individual drawings, it’s a very time consuming process. I have a new found respect for the people in the industry who produce storyboards for feature length films because my storyboard were only for a 25-30 min short and it took me quite awhile. Whats cool is I now have a working script, storyboards, character and environment concepts if I decided to turn it into an actual animated piece. By the way, try out a program called Celtx. It’s a script writing application and I can say it made it very easy to write a professional looking script.