Rocket Man ....

Next one's done:

    Low Tech Medium Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

A Quick Update on Slow Progress

I've spent the last few weekends mixing together more ancient aircraft to make combat vehicles for my teams, this time the red team will have pieced together the main body and wings of a WW1 German AEG G4, and the jet engines of a WW2 German Horten Ho 229. Looking back I tend to use a lot of older German designs to influence my own and I think it's just because they were really good at building interesting shapes and really pushing the design limits to get new properties in their planes.
With all that said, here's a silhouette test I threw together:

I so far have UV'ed the checkers texture onto the plane and then duplicated the body pieces over, but I think I'm ready to start rocking a rusty red paint job on there for the low tech's to head into battle.

Stay tuned and I'll have that up before too long.

High Tech Medium Plane

You may have noticed I skipped a bit of time again, this time my excuse is that I was building a sculpey maquette. I may or may not show that on this blog at some point, so for now just be happy with a new update from the game project!

I managed to build the High Tech team's medium rocket:

There's the traditional model/texture view you've grown accustomed to from my blog, but here is a viewer from Sketchfab for the 3D render view.

    High Tech Medium Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

I realized, before I uploaded this model to Sketchfab, I hadn't ever uploaded the previous vehicles for anyone to view in 3D on Sketchfab. So I took care of that as well as you can see below:

    High Tech Light Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

    Low Tech Light Plane
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

Thanks for viewing, and as always stay tuned for more updates!

Brain Power

I ended up working this one a couple times, like I mentioned earlier, but I think I finally found the form I wanted. This rocket is half the height of the other rockets, but 10 times as smart .. with brain power of course. That's how it works right? Adding a brain to anything will make it smarter?

    Smart Rocket
    by jason.n.hutchins
    on Sketchfab

Hopefully the new Sketchfab 3d previewer will work out for this blog, but just in case I'm still going to be uploading the old 2d shots of the items.

This should be the last of the rocket weapons, now back to the vehicles! I have a bunch of sketches from the previous years I wasn't able to spend a lot of time on this so I'll still be working through those to see what I can make work. The next items should be the medium fighters for both low and high tech teams.

Stay tuned!

edit [12apr2015]: I started back up on the vehicles, this time on the medium high tech and have included a silhouette test of the block-out below.

Ricochet Rocket

This one I did a few extra sketches on so the build went rather quickly, the idea is that the rocket will hit the enemy and have a small explosion which will release the two naval mines attached to it to bounce out and explode with whatever it hits. So I guess this weapon would be best used for attacking a stationary target like a base or something.

I added a chalk-like sketch on the side of the mines as decoration, I've seen a lot of people do that in the military. They'll draw on the bombs intended for their enemies with their enemies names on it. So this is a little nod to that environment.

The next rocket is supposed to be the final one for this game, and it should be smarter than the rest of them. Then after that one I can get back to creating the rest of the vehicles to flesh out the "character classes".

Thanks for looking and stay tuned!

Tesla Rocket

It's a new year, but I'm still working on the same game. For this build I wanted to make a weapon that would electrify the vehicles it impacted, after digging around for a while I decided the coolest way to do that would be a plasma ball that would electrically explode when it hits its targets. So I present the Tesla Rocket:

I really like the silhouette of the rocket and the arched metal around the glass dome, but wasn't too happy with the way the plasma ball cards came out. I guess it'll do though. This should leave two more weapons to build before I can continue to work on vehicles and environments again.

Thanks for looking at my work, and stay tuned for more updates. :)

Edit:
Here's the block-out sneak peek for the next rocket:

It's sitting at just over 800 triangles which isn't too bad considering all of the small details on this one, we'll see how it turns out once I start in on the uv's and texture.

The Last of 2013

This is really just a post to get a final one out before the end of the year, I started working on a nuke bomb-rocket thing while waiting for a critique from my night "job", and am a little over half through with the texture - nothing good enough to post though. So for now I present you with a tease:

Who wouldn't want a nuclear bomb .. ah .. rocket? I'll update when I finish the texture, see you then!

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!

The Year of the Dragon

Working at AlliedBarton is okay, though it leaves a lot to be desired as far as pursuing my chosen career path. Pretty much everyone I interact with doesn't even know how to spell it, but I have a feeling it'll be like that until I can get work at a game studio.
So here's this month's projects! I received another art test from Gameloft, this time in Canada, I got some work done on my first Fender Bender style vehicle, and I did a 2D background image for a friend working on a side scrolling game.

I was surprised when Gameloft in Canada contacted me with the same art test as their sister studio in New Orleans. But I gave it a shot anyways, and learned a whole bunch more stuff about 3ds Max. I used the same assets I'd already created, only tweaking them to fit more along the lines of mobile gaming. Then I even added a few simple bits here and there to help the scene close up a bit better. I never did manage to find time to show convincing rain like I am able to do in UDK, and I'm guessing that's one of the bigger things they take points off for. But it's all good, I didn't really want to move to Canada anyways. :)
Here's the render shot and video I submitted:

This is what 3300 triangles will buy you.

I tried to keep it around the same poly count and texture limits as our game, and to just have fun with it. I've labeled this one as the low-tech light plane, hopefully I'll get together a high-tech light plane before the end of February.

I was able to keep it down to the poly count limit we had for Fender Bender.

 
Since the game is still in concept phasing a lot could change, but I was really happy with the way the sky/background turned out.

I liked the way the heavy atmosphere looks, but it's still just a concept.

Stay tuned, and I'll keep working.

Game Production 2 - Beta turn in [month 21]

This month was shared with Game Cinematic Assets, so our planning ahead really paid off. All the extra art we made was finally implemented into the game with the code, all we had to do all month was clean-up and touch-up to fit with the code. Here's some of the updates and changes:


Fender Bender has new game modes in place and we needed a keep away item, since we already had nuts and bolts planned for the smash n' grab mode I thought that combining the two into a mega golden bolt-nut would allow the players to know it's important without having to put too much thought into what was going on. The bolts on this item are the same as the other bolt pickups below, but the nut itself was "up-res'ed" since this is a single focal point of the game.

With the shield code in place, I scaled the shield to match each vehicle individually. Later on we ended up opting out for less of a bubble shape and more of a round sphere shape. Since I didn't make the new shield I don't have that file to show off.


Smash n' Grab game play mode allows other players to gain points by collecting nuts and bolts from vehicles that they attack. These items fly off the vehicle as the vehicle is takes damage. As per the description, there's quite a few of these that fly through the level and needed to be kept fairly low poly.
The old ice cube didn't allow for the modulauncher to still attack nearby enemies, so I redesigned the ice cube a little bit.


Then I scaled the new ice cube over each character's vehicle to make sure it left enough visible for players to recognize the vehicle at a glance and still realize that they were completely surrounded by this pack of ice.The shield was done, but we'd forgotten completely about what the pickup should even look like! So I went to work at figuring out what it should be. In the end I decided a shield silhouette would work as long as the shield itself looked like tech. that might fit with the modulauncher.

Here's a short video of combined game play of our beta turn in:

Game Production 1 - Alpha turn in [month 20]

For the first month we got to work on our Alpha phase without the disturbance of another class, so we tried to knock out as much work as possible. After tons of work and revisions we successfully turned in our game and presented it to the other two groups as well as the three groups a month ahead of us.
Since we knocked out a lot of Beta and Gold items in pre-production month, we were able to look at fleshing out the level to look as good as possible. The only thing we didn't get in that we needed to was visual effects. So no explosions, muzzle flashes or anything like that.
Here's what I worked on for the month, it doesn't seem like much but after I textured and modeled them I worked on item placement so I was able to stay busy all month.

We got a critique on my tires, I updated the texture to be more recognizable from far away.
Small rocks were added to help make the large rocks seem more like part of the level and not just a boundary item.

Road signs were created and placed throughout the level to help immerse the player into the world of the parking garage.
Road lines were made to help add an atmosphere of flow for the players to follow as well as immersiveness.
Pot holes, simply more background noise for the environment but it helped to make the environment look older.
The pickup cubes are all combined into one cube here, they go around the pickup item itself and help to illuminate the item as the pickup bobs up and down.
Parking lot lines were placed to help fill in the ground breakup, it doesn't always make sense but it made the repeating texture for the concrete seem as if it's non-repeating.
Oil stains fill up every parking lot in the world, so our has them too.The ice cube goes with the ice rocket, though it's not in the game yet it should be during this month for Beta release.
Grass sprouts appear all over the level and in different sizes to help with the varying height levels of ground breakup as well as to add more color variation to the level.

Cracks are flat and are barely noticeable in the game, but they're there. Mostly to help accent the pillars and ground rocks, these decals show up on the floor and the ceiling.Our team also has a website showing several game play videos hosted on youtube.