Welcome to the WIP Blog
These are the projects that I am working on, the processes involved in workflow and the eventual pieces for potential portolio work. I am constantly trying to keep updated with workflow efficiency and standard triple A workflow procedures.
My First Experience with Game Development
Hey everyone, just want to give a quick shout out to a mod for TES IV: Oblivion I released a few years ago. This game and its TES: ConstructionSet Engine is what motivated me to begin chasing the dream of Game Development. Oblivion is arguably my favorite game of all time and this ambition to start development began since. So I will leave this at the top to remind myself that I came a long way from then, and this was the the beggining. If you mod Oblivion and still play, please feel free to download it.
"The Perfect Underground Armory" Link Below for Details (Still being downloaded!)
Plan getting my hands dirty in Fallout 4 now that I have all this information on how to do it right
http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/33213/?
Mobile Meltdown
This project is a mobile game application currently in development by my team. It is a smiple game for mobile which you activate the nuclear reactor by depositing atoms with the touch of a button.
I am currently the lead programmer and 3D artist.
My team consist of another programmer/technical artist, a concept artist, and an animator
Concept Sketch
Here is the initial sketch the concept artist gave to me for the look of the tubes and layout of gameplay as discussed in the team meeting. We decided to go with this sketch and model the assets due to its simplistic design for testing, we had programming working and the primitives already functioning with the programming
Testing in Real Time
Once the tubes were integrated and the programming worked with mouse input, we started testing with an Android in real time and the results went great as Expected
Gameplay Screenshot
We were happy with the results, we managed to pull this off within a week or so. Everything was working but the models were not feeling so great. I had some complications with the shaders and unity does not take spec maps (Note we are using 3.5x)
It reads the normals and it wings a spec map from that. Also,
We were not happy with the inital sketches of the core so we redesigned the core and amped it up to the future, so with these changes, these tubes were redesigned and this time I will make sure to bake the models so that we have a nice spec map that responds to a new crisp normal map in accordance to the faked out AO of the textures. Soon more updates to come
Tommy Gun! (Thompson-m1928)
Along with the project above ^, I am working on a Low Poly Thompson. This bad boy below is the High Poly WIP. I will then bake it to a low poly and render it in a Game Engine. I am working on this to make sure I understand the baking process and have a fully ready next gen quality game model in my future projects. I am proud to say it is coming out beautiful and this will only motivate me further. Until next time!
Update #2 (Thompson-m1928)
The High poly gun is pretty much done. 642k polys- 325k verts PHEW! Now all I have to do is check the mesh for minor adjustments and begin on the low poly. I also have some ideas to spice up the look of the gun, such as paint or minor decals. Guns are fun but I am sure that bone stock gun models are plentyful and can get boring so I will texture up some designs I had sketched up to give it more personality.
Update #3 (Thompson-m1928)
So after some tweaks, I manged to bring down the gun from my goal of 5k tris to about less then 3k. I kept managing verts I did not need and get better than expected results. The HP as you can see is about 352k tris so this was a good win. It also made the unwrap a bit easier. Its deforming in some minor places but the more adjustments I made the more the heavier deformation would be. I want to keep the uv's stiched as much as possible to be able to texture properly and seamlessly. I must say that keeping texel density even is probably the task that took me longest. I kept hearing its extremely important but I could not figure out how to do it nor find a solid explanation on what it means. I unwrapped everything and did not bother to rescale. So when I went to pack my UV's, I noticed my bolts were bigger than my slides and barrels and that's when it hit me and I realized what managing texel density is. So I went in and manually adjusted the checkered uvs until the UV islands checker patters matched. In addition, I must add that this extra step frustrated me a bit because I noticed it would add more time to my workflow, however, now the models I produce will be MUCH more polished and my time efficiency will only increase the more I do. Now to bake and texture.
Well this is going to be a lengthy page...
After the completion of the thompson and some rework of the mobile metldown, I had started my job in Cubic. During that time I had lost both my laptops and my backups got corrupted in the process. Bad luck I guess. So I lost all of the work I had for Mobile Meltdown. Now it was not a total loss because the code was fairly easy and could have used more tweaks and those assets needed to be reworked but I did not want to lose time reworking it. I just wanted to get out and working ASAP. Now that I am reworking it, the code is MUCH MUCH cleaner. I learned more about coding structures in C# and was able to apply them such as Delegates and of sorts which narrowed down my code exponentially. I've also been fighting to learn how to propely bake with as little adjustments as possible and going back and forth with the polycount community. The workflow differences are just so much. Anyways to be short I will update this as soon as I have a small prototype :D
Models, Code, and a playable window will be here.
So Progress Update. This is the final button model. I created the high poly, retopo'd into 2,100 polys and baked the normals which you will see the results below. The object has use of modular components such as pipes and pipe connectors just duplicated to save UV Space.
What is missing is the tube that the particle game objects will flow through. The reason for that is that the nuclear reactor has to be modeled first and based on how that model is constructed will determine how the pipes will flow into it.
Below you will see a rough sketch of the scene so you have an idea of what I am going for as far as the main gameobject layout.
#note The camera in game will be static in front of all game objects. The player will never see behind them or too far to their left or right. So the 3/4 view will make the model look a bit odd in cretain places but that was a design choice to save memory in game with less details on the object.
The next thing would be to integrate these assets into unity and the scripts I have already created in C#. So next I will provide the scene screenshot with the code I have built for procedural gameplay outputs.
Third Person Controller from scratch.
