Peter Harries

Last night Jase got in touch with me with some finished tree models, we decided to get the textures on and get them in engine. A maya shot, complete with texturing problem! No Alpha :( Alpha with dodgy edge :( wahd out textur and no lighting built :( Lighting built, almost there! And some grass! ------------------------------------------------------ and done :D Let us know what you think we love to get feedback! oh and we also have a website (although I've been told by my good friend Max Jensch that a single page with a couple of links on is not a website) sorry max! www.fatpancake.com

adding more props, decided to stick with the snow theme, also some shots of what the 2 Ollies have been up to! Preliminary character concepts by Ollie E Ollie L's modular archway ( @ OllieLudgrove ) Me experimenting with the archway! and some shots of how stuffs looking.

After the presentation last week (that I think went quite well!) it's back into production. Over the next few weeks I feel we need to really focus on a couple of things. #1 - Getting a working prototype out the door. This is so, so important and thus far we haven't managed to do it. I wouldn't say it's any of our fault that this has happened. But we have such a nice mechanic and at the moment we don't have the technical abilities to pull it off. In short we need someone familiar with programming and is possible scripting for UDK. Now we have two options, hunt for someone who can do this or one of us learn to do it ourselves, possibly sacrificing other areas of the project. So I'm stumped. We have a meeting tomorrow so hopefully we can discuss a solution then. #2 - Having a defined art style in engine. By this I mean something within UDK that shows how are game is going to look. At everything apart from the actual static meshes is out of the box UDK (textur...

First off I would like to introduce my new website! http://www.peterharries.co.uk/ It's still under construction but there are a few interesting bits on there to have a look at. Including a development diary and post mortem of the pre production stage of Double cross. Here's a direct link to the preproduction development diary and post mortem. So please have a look and let me know what you think :) Since my last post I've mainly been working on those documents but I have done a bit of modelling, you can check out below: I'm realy tired so I'm going to go and play minecraft some more, then maybe sleep.

So I've been trying to get textures down just to cover stuff. It's messy and not finished and still needs tweaking but at least I can get an overall picture of where it's going. Getting a bit sick of texturing now, have 2 days to go before I want it done so just trying to get stuff done.

So I'm going to do it a bit different today and instead of making multiple posts just update this one with my texture progress! Here's the first shot, pine end of the house, Haven't done the stones at the bottom of the wall yet.   update #1: got bored made this out of parts of the main building!    Update #2: Just got a comment on Polycount about how the wall texture is grainy, I do agree so I may bump the texture up to 1024 for the bigger parts. Here's a texture shot of what it's like now. (actual size). update #3: Door done! update #4:WHat I've done today, may revisit the wall texture but I want to get it finished in the next few days so I'll use it for now and hopefully have time to go back to it later. The roof texture needs working on as well.

Yes this and my previous post are a reference to lil jon & the eastside boys musical masterpiece that is "get low". :D So I've unwrapped and done a first pass on the textures, so most of them are big ugly block colours. Still pretty happy with progress and confident I'll get it done in the time I've set myself. There are a few dodgy shadows, I'll try and figure out how their sneaking in soon. Could just be the Ambient Occulsion being weird. anyway here are some pictures of what I've been doing.

So texturing isn't my strongest point and I find it really tricky and difficult. Especially when working with anything under 512's. I'm quite happy with them but will probably re-visit them later. Having to do the artwork with a mouse at the moment because I don't have access to a tablet, so that's a bit of a pain. May go hunting for a cheap one tomorrow. Overall happy with progress, was hoping to get more items unwrapped today but don't know how many I'll get done. anyway here are some screenies. And a shot of the texture.

Broken the house down into seperate assets. Hopefully this will let me re-use them if i decide to create a full scene with this, will also let me tinker with the model as I go along. Edit: Here's the re-assembled version!

This morning I've been adding some details. Plan for the rest of the day is to finish that up, then start breaking it down into sections for unwrapping and texturing.

So I've been pretty quiet on here recently! Mostly due to the fact that a lot of the work I've been doing has been paper based design and dissertation work. Some of which is quite interesting and hopefully I'll get a chance to post about it on here. But I much prefer to post visual stuff when I can, gotta love pictures!! I'm back in Newport Gwent now after spending Christmas and New Year back in Pembrokeshire with the family which was great! Now I have to face the looming deadlines and get the work done for them! Which does include some modelling work so hopefully I'll be posting regularly throughout the process. The last of those deadlines is on the 13th after which we'll be jumping straight into Double Cross production! Which I'm really excited about! So January looks like it will be busy! Happy 2011 everyone!

First some assets! These are WIP's. The barrels need a lot of texture work including spec and possibly bump maps. The sign mesh needs tweaking as it's a bit tri heavy at the moment. Mite play with the textures some more as well. We've managed to get our forums up and running and have finally found a programmer! Recently we've just been meeting quite a bit and setting up online stuff. We also had to prepare for a presentation as well so I haven't really had a chance to post on here much! But I will update soon!!

All done, now to give it some detail! This is going to take a while!   And here's a quick UDK workspace worskapce shot for no particular reason.

A bit more progress on converting the building into modular static meshes. It's a pretty monotonous job, exporting a scaled down version of the building from UDK into maya then exporting it from maya back into UDK. But once thats done it means I'll be able to edit the buildings details and test in UDK realy quick, like I've done with the airship docks building. It's getting there!

The crane's hook swings in the wind ^_^ love little details like that!

This shot was taken on one of the piers of the airship docks looking down towards the river flowing over the edge of the cliff. The airship docks is a building I've just started modelling with the idea that it was a place that airships could reach the city built high in the mountains. It also gives the player to get a really spectacular view of the (as of yet un existing) scenery below and the mountain above the city!

This is my progress on the level so far. each building in white is a static mesh that has a Maya file and a .FBX file. The maya file can be edited so eventually these buildings will be detailed. I've started off by creating the smaller buildings as they will only have 1 maya file corresponding to them. However the taller buildings will be done modularly allowing me to use static meshes repeatedly. This will save me time and mean I can edit building size/height very quickly. This is already implemented on the two tallest towers. The very tallest you can even go inside and walk to the top. But this takes ages (lifts will be implemented! lol) to avoid the repetition being obvious I'm planning to use decals, props, texture variations and the occasional different modular mesh. For example a floor that has been damaged or has a different layout. Hopefully this will be enough to mask the obvious repetition. To get an idea of scale the red dot at the lower part of the city i...

Ta-da! www.doublexgame.co.uk (still under construction, hopefully live within the next few hours!) So things are shaping up quite nicely! At the top of the page you can see the logo I've put togeather for double cross, everyone seams to be happy with it, but like all things it's not concrete at could change in the future. So first I'll talk about the city I'm creating. I have it all mapped out in UDK and started to replace the BSP brush buildings with static meshes. I've tried to create a very narrow and cramped atmosphere when on ground level and dizzy heights when on top of buildings. I'm pleased with the results! I'm going to continue to drop static meshes into the environment. Next I have a piece of promo work I've created for the game. I'm hoping to be able to do a few more images like this to help promote the game. Hopefully there will be a future version that includes silouettes of our actual in game charcters. we do have a b...

This is a quick and dirty mockup I've done of the environmet for our game (now named DoubleX, as in double Cross!) it's ugly and rough but it does the job. It's purpose is to give me an idea of player proggression through the environment, whats in the environment itself and hopefully this will lead to being able to pin down game pacing and events within the game! This is a mega short post because I've got a load of stuff to do! but as soon as I can I will do a major update with all the stuff we have so far! /Ninja edit: a 3D view of the mockup minus the paintover!

  I've been trying to get our core game mechanic (or a rough version) working in UDK so we can start whiteboxing and testing our gameplay as soon as possible. This is what I've got so far. Picking up the shock rifle, makes the currently invisible blue sphere visible and spawns an enemy bot at a set location. This can be triggered multiple times, as other bots/ players pick up the weapon the mesh will become visible to them and another bot is spawned. This is when things start to get a bit mad. Picking up the rocket launcher does the same for the red mesh. Eventually I hope to have enemies in the level already and have them become visible when the player picks up a certain item. From what I can tell this will most likely be some sort of material effect using matinee but I'm still working on this! Here's a shot of our Kismet setup.