Breaking the Ice

I realized just today that I hadn't posted this yet, I had "finished" it this past week after several critiques and wanted to show it off. So here it is: the ice rocket! Just in case you didn't know what you were firing I added a label, though that's really just for show in a menu or something. I doubt it will be visible within game-play.

This entry will make five items now that are modeled and textured with at least a diffuse[not counting the shield, I want to go back over that again].

[click the links below to view the related post]
low tech: turret
low tech: light plane  [scroll to the bottom]

high tech: turret
high tech: light plane

I just received a list of work for my internship, so I'll be heading back into the depths of that for a while. Hopefully I'll soon be able to show some of what we've been doing at L7, I hate that my blog has empty spots in it during the months I'm on the project.
At any rate, stay tuned and I'll keep you posted as to what I'm up to!

Like Fish in a Barrel

After 250 something applications, the only company to actually want me was Allied Barton. Good thing I was able to refile for my D-License without having to take the whole class all over again. So while the job thing was getting started up I was able to find time for a weekend project. Yes, just one, but I'm happy to be able to do this stuff at all.

I had been playing a little bit of a beta test on the PS3, and that's where I got the idea for the weekend project. To make a sort of simple object over the course of several hours just to keep it plausible to work on what I love in the free time I have. The object was a small barrel of energy, so I took a few screen shots and began playing in Maya. All things considered I spent about 12 hours on this piece with all the distractions of the internet and my cell phone at home. Without those distractions I don't know how much time I would have spent on it. Here's how it turned out, and good luck guessing what game inspired me to build this.

I actually had a lot of fun with this barrel, and ended up adding it to my "top secret" project which I'll show details on if I get time to work on it. It's a rather large project so I doubt I'll be able to get very far with it. One thing at a time though right?

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.