How to Slay Your Leviathan.

Hey guys, today I'll be showing you a little something I threw together this morning that took about four and a half hours from start to finish (I was going for four, but things got a little buggy towards the end). I learned more than I thought I would from this, mainly a lot about prefabs and how to appropriately use "relative to initial" movement tracks in matinee. Anyway, check it out!

Oh, also, this was for Game Design 3. I'm basically proving that I can make what we're pitching, which is a game about climbing up onto giant sky-things and killing them. Hurrah!

-Will

Next project: Brutal Jak & Daxter.

Howdy. Today, I'm gonna show y'all the first look at my next 3D project, which takes place in the Jak & Daxter universe, but seen in a style similar to that of Brutal Legend.
 --
Here we've got the production painting from my "Drawing for Animators" class, along with an overhead map and a rough storyboard for how I plan to handle the camera for the environment's presentation.

 And here, the rough blockout of it in UDK.

That's all for now, I'll be back soon!

-Will

Oh yeah, youtube can come too.

Almost forgot about this: it's on youtube as well.

 

-Will

Realistic Reveal: Assault on the Fire Nation Palace

Well folks, it's done. It might not seem like much to you loyal readers (approx. 1), but this... this took a lot out of me. After a whole month of desperately fighting to work this up to my standard of quality and trying to work in a team of four artists with radically different styles, it's finally, finally over. Here are some stills and progress shots!

And here we have the finals. Two and two, beauty shots n' contact sheets.

Picture dump over -- see you guys later for Fantastic Environment progress. Get pumped for Jak and Daxter meets Brutal Legend! In THREE DIMENSIONS! --Will

Update on the Avatar project.

So things are coming along pretty darn well, I suppose. It's weird, if I'd gotten to this point on the first project we'd had this semester, I'd have said "oh man, this looks great! I'm totally done." but OH. OH MY LORD. How wrong that is. However, I'm definitely almost at the point where everything that I want in the scene has been placed and I'll be able to focus on color balance, post processing, and random fine tunings. With more than a week until turn-in, I'm quite proud of that fact.

Let's draw an environ-- characters. I meant characters.

So... for this project we're working on in Game Design 3, we're building up a world from scratch based on a couple of objects. We got a few examples of otherwordly paraphernalia; a voodoo doll, some dia de los muertos skeletons, and a deck of tarot cards to name a few. Now I'll admit that I got a bit off-task at this stage, as I was supposed to be sketching out some form of environment, but instead I really got into the kinds of characters that would inhabit it. That said, here are a couple of designs for the races that would populate our crazy otherworld-world.

It's been a while... kind of forgot this place existed. Back to posting!

Alright, so, I'm just gonna pretend I never left and skip all of that recap nonsense. Here are some pictures from the realistic environment I'm currently working on, a re-imagining of the Fire Nation palace from Avatar: The Last Airbender. My particular setting is a courtyard in front of the throne room, and as you can see, there's recently been quite a disturbance -- an assault by the Earth Kingdom. This phase you're seeing here is the rough blockout of how the destruction is going to be set up. I'm still working on making rubble pieces, upturned soil, and splintering trees.

And for kicks, here's a close-up of the detail-lighting window I'm using to set up compositions -- you can more easily see the player path I'm trying to project in this one; I'm still trying to figure out the best way to make it read in the textured version.

Take care, -Will

Puzzle Rooms

Some level design documents that I've come up with for my team's summer project.

Too early to make the level's boss... figured I'd at least practice. MOAR KISMET.

Here's a video demonstrating how to combat the yet-to-be-named miniboss in my platformer game. Below are some screenshots on how the kismet is put together-- as is my norm, it's bursting at the seems with matinees, but I applied a few new principals that I've never used before, and learned a heck of a lot from this guy.

Showin' off some kismet!

Alright folks, this will be a rather lengthy post (factoring in video duration), but it'll definitely give the most bang for its buck. The first item of interest is the main mechanic for my platform game, "volume". The general idea is that the better you're doing in the game, i.e. the longer you go without getting hit/more enemies you kill, the faster you run and the higher you jump. Here's a demonstration on a test barrel and some robots.

Just under it, you'll see the actual kismet for this process; the first image is all of the math involved, and the second image is a series of nodes that set different run speeds and jump heights depending on what level the player's volume is at.

-continued below

Showin' off some kismet! pt. 2

Next, I've got the kismet and a video demonstration pertaining to the robots you saw in the first video. It's mostly just a matinee and some hard attached triggers, but it gets the job done.

-continued below.

Showin' off some kismet! pt. 3

Finally, we've got a simple, reoccurring challenge that the player will encounter: "blowback amps". These amps block the path forward, and most are unable to be maneuvered around unless the player's volume level is near maximum. You know the drill; video, then kismet pictures below.

Hope you enjoyed!
-Will

Catchin' some Z's.

DONE. With the model, anyway.

So it looks fantastic in 3Dcoat, but terribad in UDK. Lessons learned, mistakes won't be made next time. Here you go!

So close... so close.

Finally working on the non-suck version of texturing the character. My only real concern is getting the emissive layer to work for the glowing tattoos, but we'll cross that bridge when it comes.

And on the 9th week, Will made man. And man looked gooooood...

Quick post updating my work in progress on my character... normals seem to have baked A-okay, so now it's on to painting!

Goals by the end of this weekend: the impossible task.

Alright, I'm amped this particular weekend because my eyes have been opened to the world of particles and materials; and by that I mean I've recently discovered that they're not as difficult to get into as I thought. Hopefully I can get all of my 3D for Games work done on Saturday (not likely, but possible), so that I can devote Sunday almost entirely to learning how to make, pardon my french, fancy-ass particles and swag-ass materials.

Just seeing all of the options, check boxes, and variety of nodes in materials made me never want to learn anything other than the basics when it came to them, but since making materials for my exploding barrels, I see it's not all that bad. Similarly with particles, after breaking it down with Jati and seeing that they're just a few 2D images and animations stacked on top of each other, I've been offered an opportunity to go over the fundamentals of particle making with Jati, and fully intend to take that opportunity. HOPEFULLY this can all go down on Sunday, otherwise I'll have to wait until the workload gets back down to a free-time-having level... which might not happen for a couple of years.

Fingers crossed!

Darksiders Project Progress.

So it occurs to me that, with classes back in action, I probably won't have time to finish this project, which is a shame, but it'll definitely be good summer work, in any case. In the first image below, I basically fused all of the qualities of the three previous weapons together that people said they liked the most, since no one could give me a definite "that one is the best" response. I really liked the way it turned out, until I received various critiques on the proportions of the weapon and distribution of color. The second image below is the 3rd and probably final iteration of the hammer before I'll take it into Maya and Zbrush to bring it to life. The only tweaks I might make would be very minor, like adding more girth to the top of the handle or elongating a beak or two.

So... enjoy that!

Darksiders contest... should be fun!

I've got a thread on polycount under Contests and Challenges (search for Jiece), but in case you're not down for that... here's some concept art EXCLUSIVELY on this blog! And by exclusively, I me only here AND on polycount.

Think it, build it, refine it... TEAR IT DOWN. Now build it better.

This may be one of the most tedious processes I've ever seen/utilized. Start with the incredibly nice, detailed model... and build a worse version so you can merge it with the nice one for a model that will look like a pristine triumph and artistry and work like simplistic mass of squares.

The attached screen it about an hour and a half in.

"Lego/Goldberg Machine" finally done

Realized that I've yet to post this video, regardless of the fact that I've had it on my external drive for a good week and a half now. HUGE brain-derp on my part. But anyway, here's the final version of my 3rd project from Programming for Artists! Special thanks to SEGA for the loop inspiration.

Character WIP

No introduction needed for this one-- we're all well aware of the character project in 3D for Games. Here how far I've come! Behold Jiece, Sultan of the Strings!

That's all for now, take care.

Platformer WIP

As my hordes of readers (up to FOUR people!) know, the platformer project in Game Design is gaining steam, and we'll soon be in the thick of it. Personally, I can't wait to get started on the UDK aspect, as side-scrolling platformers are arguably my favorite type of game. Anyway, here's a preview of the level layout for my tutorial level, and a sample of a mechanic I'm going to utilize.

Take care,
    Will.

Reminded of how insignificant I am...

Which is soon to be a daily thing! Now that I've set it up so that my homepage starts randomly on polycount, conceptart, or gamasutra, I'm faced with the daily reminder that I've got to step it up. What exactly do I mean by "it"? Everything, quite simply. It's always been frustrating to have a head full of magnificent, gorgeous ideas for characters, monsters, gameplay mechanics, et cetera, and not have the artistic or technological capacity to bring them to life. Previously, I've just been able to brush it off and say that I didn't have access to what I needed in order to bring my thoughts into being, but now that I'm surrounded by multi-thousand-dollar computers and a slew of professors and classmates to bounce ideas off of, the blame can be placed squarely on me and my lack of initiative.

I believe I suffer from a rare ailment known as "being in college", and thusly cannot force myself to press on after a day's work has been done. I mean, once you spend 6-10 hours in the labs one day, I just can't work up the drive to practice my digital painting or take notes on game design. It simply can't be done! Presently, I'm working on a method that will get even me to go above and beyond the call of duty, and once I'm able to articulate the process into words, I'll post it  here on the internet for all to see. It wouldn't be fair to keep such knowledge to myself, now would it?

Goldberg Machine ACTIVATE!

Hello again, friends. Today, I've got the work-in-progress of my Rube Goldberg machine (the third iteration of it, anyway), which is a piece we've been working on for the last two or so weeks in Programming for Artists. Currently, we're trying to script a sorter for the different colors of balls that travel through the machine-- in mine, you can see that the blue ball is treated a little differently from the gray ones. Check it out!

Programming... simultaneously the most rewarding and frustrating activity in existence.

The title pretty much says it all; I used to do some programming in other, simpler languages back in the day (nothing too intense, though). The main thing I remember from that experience is continually failing again and again and again, then finally achieving some minor success by being able to print a sentence in a certain font and color. For some reason, however, it was the most satisfying feeling in the world to print that sentence as I'd coded it, like a victory after a long and grueling war with the computer.

Kismet programming, or more correctly scripting, is equally frustrating and rewarding-- the battle with the logic puzzles it presents at every turn is a hard one, but such tiny victories as remembering to add collision or getting matinee to do what you want it to do make it all worth it.

Overall I'm understanding all of the material in the class as it's presented, it's just a matter of remembering where all of the settings I'm supposed to be messing with are. Eric says that as we continue on it'll get easier, and if he's right then I'm not worried one bit.

3D for Games is has a vicegrip on my soul...

Two things about this class have absolutely ruined me: character concepting and Zbrush. For those of you who don't know, those two items of business pretty much make up EVERYTHING we've done so far in the class, so this means that the course itself has absolutely ruined me. At the same time, though, it's some of the most fun I've had since coming to Ringling, so... I'm... not really sure where that leaves me. Could be awful, could be great; we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Zbrush is easy enough to describe-- an interface that was very difficult to understand, for me, anyway, and the sheer amount of creative control you get over your work is just intimidating as hell. Character concepting, however, is a bit different. You see, the reason why that's got me in a rut is that a week after mostly everyone else has finalized their characters, I'm still here building up new heroes from scratch. First we had rifle-paladin, then we went to undead-hunter in the employ of the Vatican, then a lich-hunter, and pretty much all of those were shut down in one way or another. I've finally settled, though, and it feels like a massive weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.

I've decided to go with a recurring character that I've been iterating since I was in sixth grade-- a magic bard by the name of Jiece. Not only will the rigging be significantly easier than it would've been for my paladins and hunters (who all wore long coats), but I feel like I'll be much more focused and passionate when it comes to my work with him, as was pointed about by fellow GAD, Spencer Curtis. Hopefully the next few weeks turn out less work-intensive in this course; I love my work, but too much of this stuff is unbearable.

JUST remembered how to find this site...

And now it's bookmarked, so we won't have that problem again. Time to post all of the posts I've been thinking about posting but kept forgetting to! First thing's first: OH GOD SECOND SEMESTER ALMOST HALFWAY DONE WITH COLLEGE WHAAAAAT. WHAT. What.

The difficulty of these classes, or just the workload in some cases, is really much more intense than I'd bargained at the beginning of this semester-- it's time to buckle down and get sh*t done. Here's to becoming the greatest asset to the game industry since Miyamoto! AWAAAAAY!

    Cheers,
        Me.