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

So here's a video of what I've done so far on my little puzzle / adventure game. There's are a few game play bugs that need working out, especially the checkpoint system. I also need to get some characters in there but as I suck at character modelling. The environment needs fleshing out as well, more models, textures, better lighting, particle affects and interactive items. wow just realised that's a lot to do! Anyway aiming to get this section of the game playable so people can have a go at it and maybe even enjoy it! also start working on DoubleX again on Monday! wwooop!

So doing some tests with a ship model I made. When I'm done modelling it I'm going to smash it up :) at the moment though it's in UDK, you can walk around it, it has 5 floors and 2 crows nests, still needs a lot of modelling work. It also rocks about in the wind. Been trying to put rain battering the ship in but hasn't been very successful. It also needs textures doing. Just added this texture for now to stop the normal's going invisible on me. If you want a clue to where the smahed up version will end up look at the right hand side of the picture in my last post ;)  Update! added this lil pic, you can see an earlier version of the ship on the right.

I should be doing my Dissertation, but this is more interesting. Trees are interesting, right?

Another one!

A screenshot from a little side project I'm messing aound with at the moment. Models & textures are placeholders. But I do like the super simple style.

So this is what it's looking like! I want to use this in a submission for the Blitz open day and the deadline is the 10th. My disertation is needing a bit of work too :( So may leave it as it is for now. I will however keep working on this after the Blitz submission. The things I want to change are: - re-do the main body and tower textures, change them to 1024 maps. - add more geometrical detail to the edge of the roof of the main body, tower, porch and both extensions - tweak the geom on the edges of the pine end of the roof and the tower to get a better silhouette - create emissive textures for lamps and windows - create a smoke particle affect for the chimneys - work further into the roof textures, especially the edges. Get all the walls and roof. - add some weathering to the roof tiles.

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 managed to do some work today, I'm happy with the outcome. First time I've done something like this. I say outcome even though it's miles from finished! As it stands the mesh is Bad... Very Bad. Loads of un-needed topology and lacking llooaaddsss of details that I want to add. I want to go for a pretty low poly style and hopefully hand paint the textures so the end result will be Warcraft/torchlight-ish. Today my plan was to nail a base concept and I feel I've got that. Next I'll be playing with details and seeing if i can make it more interesting. Then I'll figure out a colour pallet and start texture work. I've given myself until the 10th! wish me luck!!

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!

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!

Here I was trying to work out an architecture style for the buildings in the city. The environment is on the side of a mountain so space would obviously be limited, so buildings would be built upwards to get as much real-estate from the area as possible. I was also thinking the city would be heavily involved in the mining industry because of it's location, so this has also influenced my design. The City will have been abandoned when the player enters it so this should show through in the environment. There would still be power within the city so several lights would still be working. But the fact that the city is borderline derelict needs to show through. I'm really happy with this as my first piece of concept work in colour :)