Art Creation for Games [Month 12]

July went by so quickly, I'm still not sure exactly where the time all went. I do know, however, that I spent more time than ever with my face glued to a computer screen ... but mostly for our other class this month: motion capture.
So in Art Creation for Games [ACG], we got our first glimpse at a game art class. Everything up until now has been for our computer animation brothers and sisters, so for me it was an exciting break into the world I've been longing to get into for a while.
We had three projects this month based on types of consoles the game would be played on, which can show the different techniques used to create the art for those types of games.

Week 1:
Project 1: hand held consoles
Recreate a God of War scene using vertex lighting baked from a light, then delete the lights in the scene and the lighting should remain for the player to run through and view your level.

original from GoW2:

recreation ... I didn't quite get the color right between the lights and the textures though.
We had to build the basic shaped geometry as well as create all of our own textures to make this piece come together.

Week 2&3:
Project 2: xbox 360, ps3 "next gen. consoles"
Create six pieces of modular geometry, apply normal mapping to them and then import them into the Unreal Tournament Editor

Piece 1: a set of stairs
In this pic is the set of stairs with a small light in front of it to help cast some shadows, the little cylinder to the left of the stairs is to simulate the size of a character in Unreal Tournament.

Piece 2: a wallLike the stairs, there's a small light in the front center of the wall and the cylinder to the left of the wall is a character size simulation.

Piece 3: a small lamp that sits atop a wall


Piece 4a: grass clump
Piece 4b: grass clump with alpha channels in the texture
Piece 5a: small strip of a vine
Piece 5b: small strip of a vine with alpha channels on the texture
Piece 6a: tree
Piece 6b: tree with alpha channel on the textureAt the end of this project we duplicated the UV's and imported each object into the Unreal Tournament Editor for turn-in as a single .upk

Week 4:
Project 3: Top end computer consoles
Create a basic pillar with five basic components
silhouette change
indentation
embed an image and add damage
add noise to show texture

Pillar 1: made in zbrush, this has slightly over two million polygons on it

Pillar 2: decimated to 15000 polygons, and then retopologized to have 482 polygonsIn this project we were able to take the normal map from the texture and from the high resolution mesh to apply to the material.

In this class I spent most of my "weekend" time doing extra credit, as it was more of a photoshop practice than real extra credit ... and I really need as much practice in photoshop that I can get.