House interiors, project updates

As the year comes to a close it is inevitable a lot of projects slow down a bit; but it doesn't really feel that way to me! One project I am doing is taking a two week sprint approach, which I didn't quite get if it was two sprint one break or what hah. Basically I just work at my own pace and usually find something to model or texture. The last couple weeks I have been wrapping up some house interiors:

These are some shots in unity with just some standard shaders and unlit textures. By no means does this represent a final look to the houses, just a general idea. Once the shaders are properly set up it looks a lot better. I just have a test ground so I can get a general idea of something in unity (other people have the project set up on their end).
next up are some shots of houses with sections hidden to get a little preview of layouts:

This is where my CAD background comes in pretty handy when it comes to creating houses! Still I am glad house interiors are done at the moment aside from maybe some texture tweaks. I definitely like making creatures a bit better. There is just a lot less elements to a creature. A house has tons of meshes (walls, doors, outlets, stairs etc.) while a creature generally only has a couple (body and head, maybe some clothes/armor). Same goes for textures to apply. Generally a house has around 12-15 textures, I have learned the hard way not to try to cram too much on one UV map. I mean you can put everything you want on it, but you either make it a huge resolution or everything looks like something seen through muddy water.

Finally I also got a snake done. Textures still a work in progress though:

Overall not too bad, the scales look a bit rough and messy though. Too hand drawn without much blending together. Then again, might work out if a player can't view it too close.

Anyway that concludes the rather large update! Trying to take it easy as the holidays and end of year come rushing in. Still learning tons and hitting up Udemy when I feel up for learning new stuff. Just the other day I even got a neat collect stuff type game set up pretty quick with my own stuff in Unity (well aside from code) which was neat. Hopefully I will post before next year but if not happy holidays all!

Another late update... Ah well lol. This time I have been spending a lot of time learning some of the finer points of rigging. I can't rely on pre-built skeletons forever! Aside from that I have still managed to get some models done for my two projects:

Perhaps black is not the best background... anyways a lot of this was texturing using a combination of textures I took pictures of and the freebies on CG textures. Painted some minor details with my tablet in photoshop as well, but for the most part it was adjusting images to work well the the maps I had laid out.

next up was a dog for my less realistic style game:

This texture is hand painted with the aid of photoshop and my tablet.
Still in progress, as I need to get some information on just what sort of animations this guy will have before I can finish up some edge loops. Might have something to do with why I am learning rigging hah! Next on the list is texturing another house and learning some more about rigging. Maybe I can even get something animated with my very own custom rig soon.

Whoops went and forgot about the blog again... I am terrible at this updating thing. It isn't because I have nothing to post but more I am just so busy. Now, some things I can't really show because rather than rendering out animations and posting them on youtube I have been just previewing in unity. Let it be said that there was a lot of animation reworks and improvements on one game. Also, got some more house models knocked out, though they are not textured yet. We got a new guy that may be able to help with some of the 3D work and I am letting him take a shot at that.

So far we plan on getting stuff at least semi decent and possibly going to PAX for a demo. Wish us luck there. The submission deadline will be tight but hopefully we make it.

As for my other project... I can't really say much about the status other than progress is a bit slow at this time. I really hope some decisions get made and we can move forward with some things but alas I am not really a decision maker, I am just the guy who works with 3D assets. Here are some bunnies in the meantime:

Probably not all the variations but good enough for now! This week I will probably move on to another creature and keep an eye out for more animation work. Probably a good idea to check in tomorrow and see what is up.

Alright, almost got wrapped up in work and forgot to update this again. I want to talk a bit about my unity works scene I have been building... At this point due to various agreements it will probably won't be something most people can tour for quite some time. However, it is still neat to get an overall view of all the accomplishments this year so far:

It is actually starting to look like enough assets for a small game now! roads, houses, a building, some rocks. Too bad I would need to animate a bunch of stuff and program a ton to do that though hah; that is why I have been working with teams though. I do like walking through here from time to time just to see how things are looking though. Get a feel for how they might appear in engine. Most of all though it is cool seeing skills improving and stuff getting to a finished if not fully polished state. I might still come back to some and update textures or add details at some point.

Anyways enough nostalgia for now, and lets zoom in on one of the assets I have been working on:

Another house! I am generally really happy with the exterior here. The interior might need a bit more cleanup we will see though (I also am not sure about that white paint inside, even though it does look great outside). Overall though it is looking fairly good!

Anyways, that ends this blog entry. A lot better in terms of an update now that it has been a bit less busy. I try to model/texture something every day, though I also don't want to burn out on certain things. Doing mundane stuff like houses for a week on end can really take it out of you. Anyways I could ramble on about things but I think I will keep it at that for this update!

Well still a lot of stuff in the works but things seem to be quieting down a bit now. Had some challenging models the last couple days as well as some quick ones. A lot of hospital props done:

Still lots more to go. Probably moving on to working on houses soon. Feeling a bit worn out today, so perhaps I will take it easy. Just thought I would post and say everything is moving along quite nicely, and I am pretty happy with how my modeling and texture skills have progressed so far.

Whew tons of stuff done. It was interesting working in a basically on demand environment; most assignments were hey we need this now who can work on it? Another example was: you know, it would be really awesome if this could be done by insert date here. The other thing that was cool about the tight deadlines is we got to see a lot of progress as things were rapidly updated as well. The side effect of all this was a lot of rapid improvement and experimentation with the tools and pipeline to get content to a usable state asap. I don't think I would like to work in such a frenzied state all the time, but for short stretches it is neat to see so much being done in such a short time frame. Anyways, enough with the writing time for some pictures! We have texture refinements, and a new creature among other things.

this is a pic of a flat color stage of a sort of undead ogre concept.

as I moved forward with the concept I also looked at some grim reaper images and tried to incorporate that sort of look to it as well. So in the end we have a undead ogre reaper basically, hopefully he turns out to be a formidable foe hah. It was completed and rigged in a mere four days, so I am sure some refining might be in the works at some later date. Look forward to seeing our games progress even more this month on facebook at Age of Aincrad and Infinitude studios.

Tons of stuff happening. It is pretty much crunch time as a lot of deadlines in October. Anyways lets kick it off with some finished stuff then move on to some in progress:

We have a goblin chief and a hospital interior. Larges textures done, but need to fill it with all the nice details like wall railings and interior windows.

Also, working on some hair model/textures:

Still could use some cleanup, but the base isn't half bad so far. Hopefully have time to give another update before too long... but going to be buried in work the next couple weeks.

3D models new and old!

Whew, been a couple weeks. Most of the time was spent on a new building for a game project. At this time it is just a basic exterior and interior, and only the exterior has textures. Personally I find buildings a bit harder than characters. There are a lot more elements to make up a building, and I find myself thinking about a lot of those elements and how I want them to come together in the end. This hospital in its basic form comes out to about 40k poly.

The top picture is a more finished prototype for the game while the bottom is a different idea for the texture and some close ups of the details.

The other model I started working on a couple days ago is a leader for a goblin tribe:

it is modified from the basic goblin mesh with some accessories added on. The additions only add 400 poly as well; not bad! (the textures need to be fixed a bit, this is just a base mesh so far).

The next couple weeks look like more buildings and refining that goblin chief a bit more. Tune in next time for more updates!

Well time for another update! First up is a character concept I have been working on:

some various techniques at work here including projection mapping and my usual method of overlays and just trying to get a semi realistic look. No normal maps yet, but not bad so far.

next up is the beetles for my other project:

The 1st picture came out a bit better overall... I think the second beetle has too many colors which makes it look a little odd. More refining probably in order but we will see what the team says.

I prefer a less realistic style overall, but it is great to be learning about both at the same time with these projects. I definitely recommend a less realistic style for most initial indie projects based on my experience so far.

Alright a bit of a slow week this time around, mainly updating textures:

Added more detail to the car textures. Also, the people I am working with are setting up facebook and such at https://www.facebook.com/Infinitudestudios?fref=ts
Things are moving right along with the game and I look forward to seeing more come together. Currently working on a character model for them.

Next up is a bug model. Going to get this checked out and see if it will work. Might square off the bottom of the legs to make the texture smoother, but it is a fairly small creature.

Alright, still pretty busy despite finishing that contest game (could still use some votes! http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/235#.VcohgflFauQ). I know I said I would do a preview of a game in progress, but on consulting with the team they said it was a bit too rough to do that right now. We did purchase an asset pack and I was able to look at an interesting way to do textures, which resulted in more detail:

Unfortunately this meant I needed to redo this set of textures/uv maps. But it was probably worth it haha, still a matter of trial and error for me to get the right amount of detail in a large model like a house. Basically this went from 3 maps to 7.

As for my other project we have a nice simple deer that only took about 8 hours all told.

Keep in mind this is meant to be a cartoony simplistic style. Which means no sculpting or normal maps. The hardest part was probably getting the antlers to look decent. Onward to more models and textures this week!

After banging my head against the wall and fiddling with gameguru a lot I managed to get a nice short adventure cobbled together. First 3D game! The adventure is meant to be sort of a prequel for a much bigger idea (that is if the evil route is chosen). Some previews and even the game can be found here: http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/235#.VbuZ8PlFauQ

Wish everyone luck in the contest, but really it was great just to create a game in a short amount of time. Still have a lot to learn, but each model or project is one step closer to making that dream game a reality.

Oh and here is a car model as well. Very rough and lacking a lot of details, but coming along nicely!

The tires are a bit blocky, but we will probably remove them anyways. Main thing I want to improve is the lights and seats since a door will be missing as well! I actually need to fire up bandicam and get a good preview of this game up, that is next on the list.

Gameguru, my thoughts.

I have been taking a break from 3D modeling to actually prototype some game concepts that I have been thinking about. This was brought about by the Humble bundle and all those awesome tools my friend pointed out to me! I may even enter that 2015 contest, I certainly am making some good progress towards that end. That is not to say I am giving up those other projects, in fact one seems to be coming along quite well. The other is still really big an a distant thing but it has a lot of potential.

Anyways without further ado on to Gameguru the easy game maker and some screenshots of what I have managed to create so far:

This is an overview of my level so far. We have a cave, two towns and some ruins. I opted for trying to make a seamless game with less loading times.

Some shots of the cave area. I opted to sculpt it and most of my level out of terrain due to various AI issues. Basically the default AI can have a lot of issues with objects that are not terrain (mainly not liking to walk on or around them very well). Seeing as I have very little experience with programming I have had to design around what gameguru gives me to work with for now. Also, due to the limited time frame I have to work with if I want to enter the contest most of the content I made is going to use sound zones with my voice driving the story.

I decided to take gameguru at its word, and see what I could throw together with what I got in the packs for it. Something to consider is that since it was originally a fps creator, that is what the default settings are at. As such, melee weapons have to be treated like really short range guns, aka damage is done at the center of the cross hairs; you don't really have a cone or frontal area effect you would expect of most melee weapons. The player collisions are actually very well done, so moving around should be a breeze. However this has a downside: the player can get some very interesting places if you are not extremely careful with level design, especially terrain. Your best bet if in doubt is to make it so the player falls to their death or something if they are going somewhere you might not want them to go.

On to the default ai: Gameguru's default ai needs some work. My advice is to try some models/animations and see if they work for your game concept. Some hit boxes can be odd and very counter intuitive making some mobs seem invincible. Some mobs fall through the world very easily or get stuck worse than others. Damage can be kind of wonky too, even by tweaking settings I still have certain mobs one or two shot me. Again, experiment to see what default models/ai seem feasible. Most humanoid or close to human size creatures work fairly well.


Finally lets look at the models. I have to hand it to them, most look pretty dang good. No real complaints with them except the default AI issues. Some animations look a bit stiff or weird, but the texture maps seem fairly good.

Whew that was a book hah. Sorry about writing so much. If you have any other questions about my experiences with gameguru let me know and I will try to help. They also have a great community to fall back on if you are having trouble.

Too long to read version:
pros:
gameguru seems good for throwing together something with a fps type perspective.
terrain and models are quick to create/throw in and use.
you can create some enemies that move around and attack quickly.
trigger zones allow one to make events or play sounds easily
models look fairly good
simple interface

cons:
without programming experience you are very limited in what you can do on your own
can be hard to limit player movement (no invisible walls)
enemies can easily get stuck or glitched.
with a simple interface comes many limitations (positioning objects can be tough sometimes for example).
load times can be pretty long with multiple levels.

Wow... a lot has been happening the last week or so. Lets see... I finished up a couple models:

Hm, need a more up to date shot of the interior textures... we decided those were terrible and updated them lol.. Ah well I am sure I will get a picture eventually anyways. In addition, also got some animations done pretty quick too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKH8odIWKg

Overall a very productive period of time... And this isn't even all of what I managed to get done. Also did a quick rocking chair animation and shattered picture. Onward to more modeling and stuff!

actually thinking of converting this to a sort of video or play through update... I will let you know how it goes. Did a short demo of some of the things I have been working with and it seems a bit funner than just writing about it.

Thinking about making a sort of gallery of the work and allowing someone to "play" and look around on their own.

The usual late update hah. Still working with my teams but hitting some snags. One might switch over to blender for various reasons and the other is having issues with collisions in unity. Ultimately the decision about switching to blender is still in the air. It has a lot of advantages, but there is also the whole setback issue that it would cause since this wasn't decided at the outset. Its just a mess really. Working in blender is easy enough, but redoing all that we had will definitely be a hassle. And getting the appropriate license and re-saving is also a pain. Lesson learned? Make sure these things are planned thoroughly from the outset.

Anyways on to the pictures of progress!

This was the tentative textures we had for a sort of run down house. You will notice the exterior was really blurry and distorted. Not too bad far away but up close it had a sort of smudged paper look. This is because of too many UV shells on one map. Ultimately we had to split the house into three parts and their respective maps to get the details we wanted:

The walls there were actually made from pictures of a house up the street. Had that run down paint peeling look we were going for and turned out a lot nicer.

Working on some creatures. Keeping the style simple to give it more of an anime feel. Finished up a golem and goblin.

Can't wait to see them in action in game.

In other news also got some more work done on the arms and gun for the fps we are working on:

Fairly productive couple weeks. Look forward to more project updates soon! I am actually considering doing a quick video of what we got on the fps so far. Just some animations of a player and some zombies they can shoot, but everything starts somewhere!

Over the last couple weeks I was working on a building project that was meant to be a sort of tavern.

originally there were a lot of things that made it unusable for the project. However, I heard the problems and told them to give me a couple more days to fix the issues.

 I mean, we still needed this asset, and it would be the same if not more time wasted just trashing it and redoing. I like to think that overall spending a couple more days fixing it was better than starting something from scratch. This also gave me the opportunity to refine the design a bit more such as adding actual stairs and a guard on the balcony instead of going the cheap optical illusion and alpha channel route.

In other news I managed to get a lot of animation done for my other project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Tt0jUIW-s

Still improving those and figuring out all the animations we need but it is coming along.

Still working on various things. This week I got some fishing gear done for one game while I worked on gun animations for another:

There we have a low poly harpoon and net model with textures.

I am working on some arm+weapon animations for another game. Textures still very rough pretty much just placeholder or a base to put more details on. Running into a problem importing them into Unity though. The gun and arms come in just fine, but moving different parts of the gun is not working. Probably a problem with the base rig, but not quite sure how to solve it at this time.

Hopefully I will remember to update this more regularly someday hah! See you soon.

So originally I was working on a wolf and it came out like this:

Aside from the fact it could use refining in various areas they neglected to mention it was supposed to look more anime. So I took that feedback and made a very simplified fur pattern:

The mouth still looks a little odd, and there was some extraneous linework to clean up. But the overall design was approved! Later someone commented about the good UV setup, which was cool.

Last but not least working on a gun for my other project:

Lots more to do on it, but the general shape and look is coming along nicely. That is about it for progress the last couple weeks. I look forward to updates from my teams as we move forward with our projects!

Lots of new stuff going on over the last couple weeks.

This first set of things is a set of supplies for a game project I am working on with a group. Just some tools and food that a player can pick up.

The other project I am working on has re-tasked me to creating a wolf model of which I have almost got the basic model hammered out:

Next up with that is cleaning up the edge loops a bit and simplifying the model to cut the poly count. Lots of stuff to do! I find myself looking back and being pretty impressed with what I can do now vs what I could do when I started with these projects. Still a lot of things to learn and improve but even flipping back a few pages in this blog and then coming forward again it is cool to see what changes.

Will try to keep the progress updates coming! See you again in a week or so!

Whew tons of birthday stuff going on. People ask you: how does it feel to be whatever age this year? Pretty much like any other day, aging is slow enough to be hardly noticeable to the person aging I think hah. However, I do wake up and wonder where all that teen or even early 20s energy went sometimes. As for work, just working through lists with similar assets to those in the previous posts. Hopefully I will create my own library of that stuff, back it up, and just be able to re-use some of it later!

My friend dropped by and hung out for a bit, we brainstormed some game ideas. It is pretty easy to come up with some silly ideas, implementing them is the challenging part; since most of us are more programmers or artists and not often both. There are tons of tools out there to help, but it still is a daunting task to take on alone at times.

Overall a slow couple of weeks, but at least projects are still ongoing at this point!

This week I continued practicing textures and creating more stuff for the interior of one of my projects.

But what is really interesting to me is the talk of creating games in one of my facebook groups. A game called Wizardry Online shut down in the US a year or so ago, and ever since we have all kept in touch and tried to find another game to play together. Thus far that goal has not come about, so there is now talk of perhaps creating our own game. I warned them an MMO is probably a rough place to start, but it is an ultimate goal of mine to create one, especially if it is inspired by Wizardry Online which is basically like Japan's take on Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I have discussed my thoughts on this in a previous post, but I feel that a lot of dungeon games are missing something these days. Dungeons feel like stepping stones and not really an integral part of the game one visits frequently, especially in an MMO like world. Wizardry got around this by making the dungeons the only place to go outside town. Whats more, you often go back to previous dungeons to help friends or do quests that might be needed to change your chars class. You might even run into an old enemy doing the same which adds spice to the whole thing. On the flip side the lack of a truly open world has its own effect of confining chars to closed in dungeons and dark places. Still, I do like how it was set up overall.

Anyways, hopefully we can bring something similar to Wizardry back in the US for this group. If nothing else at least we can have fun trying and designing.