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!

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.

Game PRoduction [month 17]

Time for the "art test", where we either deliver the goods or we go back a step, so I did what I could and let the rest happen as it always does.

Project 1: Create 3 low poly items for a game that you might find on a nintendo DS or something else really small.
Item 1: create a melee weapon under 350 triangles. I chose to do a mix between a machete and a chinese dao sword.


Item 2: create a scene prop under 500 triangles. This amount was later changed to 350 triangles, but by then I'd already done all the work ... so I just deleted some of the bolts and textured in some fake ones. It still came out okay, but not as good as when it had the bolts geometry.
Item 3: create a humanoid under 500 triangles. I found a mech pilot turn around sheet on google, and decided to loosely base my color scheme/clothing design on that character. It wasn't until I was texturing that I realized just how hard it is to paint on a character with enough proper geometry.
Project 2: after getting approval for a scene, model it out for use in UDK. I went ahead and planned early for vert painting on the walls so that they could be easily reusable without the problem of looking like they're being reused. Our classes never really covered exactly how to vert paint, though they all recommended we use it, so after digging around I found a nice tutorial on how to do hard line vert painting at:

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/3D_Tutorials.html

I used his techniques on both of my walls, meanwhile I used a standard soft line vert painting technique on the floor between the sand and the wooden planks.

After everything was modeled out, I slapped some textures on and threw up some quick lighting.
Then I got a critique and was able to identify some problem areas and move on to correct them.
I began playing with glass ...
... and some different angles ...
... but overall it all looked like it was coming together.
Then I fixed the over-saturated light bounce problem, a little bit of scene desaturation ... and a sky dome with some fog blending out to it.
Played with desaturation levels and fog lighting density.Then I came upon this nice balance of colors that shows color details and still allows for the textures to blend together nicely.

My final piece looks like these last three shots.
Things I left out was a problem I had with the sky dome and light passing through it to cast proper shadows inside of the room. My project turn in for this piece didn't look as good as this as a result of that. It took an additional two days for me to discover how to fix the problem through an extensive case of trouble shooting and doing render pass after render pass.