Thursday, March 27, 2014

Bugs! Improper Weights! Derp Car!

Building any game is complex and a lot can go wrong. When you're building a student game.. Well even more potential for bugs. Sometimes, those bugs are really funny.

Our class particularly had a lot of issues when we tried to rig, weight, and create skeletal meshes with our cars in UDK. Most of the issues were pretty funny to look at. Those bugs were too funny to leave off youtube. So, I took this video of one of my classmate's cars derping it up in my level. I decided to see if it could even make it around a single lap.

This is also kind of an interesting demonstration of what happens when weights are improperly painted. So not only is  this car hilarious it's also kind of educational.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Alpha Milestone

We just passed the Alpha milestone for our level. This means that all of our art has to be at least "First pass" level and all of the game design elements like stunts and obstacles must be functional. Now we're in the phases of finalizing our art and fixing bugs in the level. I still have a lot of texturing work (especially those canyons, which are pretty terribad right now) and I want to create more artistic element.

I wanted to create the bulk of assets for this level myself and I'd say I accomplished that. I believe at least 80-90 percent of the level is my own work. With things like the bumpers and pinball rails and that go throughout the level being create by other students.


Here are some progress shots:

City Overview

 City closer view

Entrance to spinning UFO

Spinning UFOs that players can drive on


Overview of Map



Tuesday, March 25, 2014

High Poly Character

So, a while ago I posted my prepro process for the character we would be making to match our cars for our racing game. I tried to make a character that would fit both in my "alien invasion pinball" themed level as well as my car so I came up with an alien hunter who sort of becomes the enemy when she puts on her racing helmet that looks like an alien head.

I consider this my first "Official" zbrush sculpt. I've messed around with some zbrush tutorials and did a few candles for my level last semester in zbrush, but I feel like those were just trial runs. I'm finally starting to not feel lost inside of the program. There are still some problems with this, but I did a lot of it in a single sleepless night.. and for my first "official" zbrush sculpt I'm pretty happy with it. 

I'm planning on iterating on some of the notes I received in critiques, and eventually we're going to be retopologizing and texturing this character so I'll continue to post progress soon.

Final turn around:


Sunday, March 16, 2014

Particles

We're learning about particles in programming! I'm super excited about this because it means that my UFOs and Aliens in my racing level  may have super bad ass sci-fi effects. So, my level could really benefit by a lot of particle systems, unfortunately I probably won't have time to make every single one I would like to, but I'll detail here all of the ones I potentially COULD make.

For my UFOs in particular there are two particle systems I would like to create. One, would be the kind of "antigravity beam" but perhaps a little more exciting. This kind of effect would be perfect to implement in the part of my level where flying UFOs hover over the canyons and break off rocks that rain down on the player.









My second idea for particles that could apply to my UFOs is the effect of a destructive laser beam hitting the road and or an effect on the UFO where the laser fires from. 

Here's a really cool laser show video that could apply to both these effect ideas:




There's a specific pattern that the lasers make in this video that is really interesting that might be a fun aspect to layer into the anti-gravity beam.

Here is a clip from Howard the Duck. 

And here's an example from League of Legends. Troy Adams The senior FX artist at Riot did a presentation for GAD students of the particle systems he made for the champion Vel'Koz. The second attack option where the ground splits would be interesting to adapt  to the UFO's laser hitting the track.

Tutorials for that:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/AnimTrails.html



Some tutorials I found to help me along in creating my first particle systems:










Thursday, March 6, 2014

Programming: Destruction!

Final for the destruction project in programming class. This wasn't really my favorite project so far, but eh it works so I'm happy. This isn't my current racing level, but the theme is very much the same.  This map was  made was specifically for this video to show off my destruction. 

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

History of Game Art Presentation

For History of Game Art class one of our big projects is the group presentation. The class split up into groups of 6 and each group picked a game to create a presentation about. My group chose Half Life 2. It was a game I hadn't played before, but I knew how big of an impact it made in terms of physics, engines, and just in the community in general so I was happy to learn more about it.  

Here's the link to my group's presentation, I hand made all of the slide backgrounds and the title screen. My contribution to the presentation was the section on visuals and defining the game.


Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Hero Prepro


We're starting characters in 3D! I'm super excited but also terrified because this will be the first character I've ever Zbrushed. For class we were asked to create a character turn around and a "call out sheet" that gives an in depth view of the materials we'll be modeling and  texturing on our character.

The idea is to have our characters match the cars we just finished modeling. But as a personal endeavor I thought it would be fun to have a character match both my car and the racing level we're currently working on. My car is a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro and my level is alien invasion in a dessert setting. This combination made me think of old grindhouse movies, so that's the idea I based my character around.

Meet Alice the alien hunter. She's not actually an alien, that's just her helmet.






Saturday, March 1, 2014

Final Car: 1969 Camaro

Since the beginning of the semester we've been working on modeling and texturing a car. It's definitely been a process that's made me realize how much I have to learn about modeling and topology. My car is defintiely not great, but I feel like I learned a lot from the assignment which I suppose is the essential point. 

Here are some shots of my final car.