Global Game Jam 2014 and Unity Cookie Lights

Just finished the Global Game Jam 2014 today!  You can check our our game, Follow, here.  In short, its our idea of a blind person trying to find his seeing-eye-dog, who had run off.  He can only 'see' by sound, so this was our representation of the world as he might view it.

I got to play a lot in Unity, including some experimentation with HLSL/CG coding.  I ended up doing a lot of work with Unity's lighting, and animated it in-engine with the built in animation tools.  Thank goodness I did the characters from before.  I did some art direction, as well as some set dressing, and simple modeling.

We decided early on, whenever something made a sound, it gave off ripples and briefly lit the area, maybe a mix of echolocation and his mind's perception of what the area already looked like.  The problem was, we couldn't figure out how to do that in Unity.  Our solution was to just represent it with lights, and I went to work on trying to get a ramp shader so we could have some nice blown-out lights with harder edges than the quadradic point lights want to give us.  Think something like Closure's hard lighting.

On the last day, around 8 hours to the end, we found a way to pull it off: cookie lighting.  Weird name, I know.  It uses a map to put a sort of cut-out in front of the light, kind of like light shining through a grate.  I ended up using a point light with a spherical map, and I animated the light's motion.  There ended up being some weird issues with certain angles, and certain intensities, where it just acted like a point light.  I kind of wished I had used a spot light, but I didn't realize the origin of the point-light issue until we were too low on time.

I played a bit in a art directory sort of role.  I pushed the idea of the the fountain and statues in the park to be exaggerated, and had the people represented as bodies with giant lips and teeth; the idea being, a blind person can only see what they are, as he is, and he can't really feel a stranger to determine what they actually look like.  I would have liked to go even more surreal with it, but we had limited time as it was.

And finally, I have to give a shout-out to the whole team.  Our Unity Programmer god was Elio Feliciano, who saved us all when we were almost programmer-less.  Bryce Pelletier also filled in our programming team, mostly working on our AI while having never worked in Unity previously.  Rob Walker was our Lead and he filled in the all-important sounds in our game.  Angel Luis did our UI design and art, as well as writing.  Logan Blosser did a lot of design work, dialogue, and filled in all of the gaps; unfortunately, a bunch of his work never made it in-game, due to time constraints; but he was still indispensable.

And kudos to the artists for making a pretty awesome environment.  These were 4 artists who had to work together and autonomously at the same time, and I'm blown away at how well we worked.  We all played a part in modeling, and all played a part in set dressing.  Ivan Banche took the lead in building the city in Maya, as well as building most of the buildings.  Karen McCarthy sculpted most of the surreal stuff in the game.  Sean Buck modeled most of the set dressing (dumpsters, trash cans, signs, etc) as well as the cathedral and the construction site pieces.  I did a number of scattered objects (gravestones, trees, benches) and did a lot of scattered work in both the Maya file and in Unity.

Check out this beautiful little city made in just 48 hours.  Ironic that it's mostly in the dark, huh?

Nassa the Gnome, Painted Textures

Finally getting around to finishing her up (again).  You may think that Nassa has become my excuse to try new programs and workflows; and you'd be spot on.  I'm now working on her in 3DS Max to get used to Max's Slate Material Editor.  I'm also thinkin' about using 3DS Max's rigging and animation tool, but there is a good chance I'll go back to Maya for that, and do a new character in Max later on.

I added and changed a few things here, especially her two obsidian-like daggers and oversized pirate hat (stolen from a pirate.)  If you were playing the D&D campaign with me it would make more sense.  This is also the point at which I should link to our campaign log, but I'm so far behind on it, that it wouldn't explain it either.

Funny thing, I have been digging Paint Tool Sai recently, for how their blending brushes behave.

The good news is that I can deal with layered Photoshop files in SAI.  The bad news is I can't export tiff files, nor does Mudbox play nice with SAI's psd exported files.  I like using SAI more than I like texturing in Mudbox; though I am still using both programs back and forth.  Mudbox's Export to PSD features is great for getting all of the zones and shapes down, and then I can work with the flat textures for most of the detail, then take it back into Mudbox for cleaning seams.

The downside to working on this while playing the character is that she develops (and changes) on a regular basis.

I'm not modeling the panther cloak.

Painting Using Mudbox's Export-to-PSD Feature

It's a start!  I have been digging this paint-directly-on-the-model workflow for textures.  It just makes so much more sense in my head.

I want to texture using Mudbox's export-screen-to-Photoshop feature.  It works a lot like Pixexix and ZappLink from ZBrush, but I found it to be much easier to use than the latter, and less buggy than the former.

When exporting to Mudbox, I had a lot of issues to fix.  Not surprisingly, it caught me for a lot of T-intersections and non-manifold geometry, both pretty much standard to a low poly model.  For the non-manifold geometry, I seperated those edges who were shared by a plane (such as in the hat), but kept them in the combined meshes.  I am going to swing back and clean up the UVs, before I jump back into Mudbox.

It really doesn't like dealing with multiple meshes at the same time (or perhaps multiple uv spaces at the same time), but that is a problem easily solved by working on individual pieces at a time, with some clever merging and unmerging in between.  I also ran into issues with overlapping UVs, so the simple fix was to get rid of the overlapping during the painting process.

Nassa the Gnome, Version 2

I wanted to experiment with animated textures for facial features, which was my original plan with the old Nassa model.  I've been on a low-poly model kick for a little while, so I decided this is the ideal time to create a new model.  The goal was to stay under 1000 tris.  I also intend to take this one through textures so I can test using animated textures for the face in Maya and in Unity.

I did consider working from my older model, but I really wanted to try applying everything I've learned over the past few months.  It's interesting to see how similar it is to my old model, but how the shapes are so much better now, with fewer polys, too.

The picture above is the newer sketch I was working off of for this new model.  I fleshed out my original idea and design, visually describing the materials her clothes were made of, and the individual layers of the clothing.  I leaned towards a more cartoony look, since I wanted to push the designs of our three DnD characters; one short cute female gnome, one big beefy human/vryloka, and one fat stocky dwarf.

Intrepid Cave Models

For funsies, here are some of the cave wall models I did for Intrepid.  They are all multi-sided (two sides of each being shown), so they can create some pretty cool silhouettes from very few modular pieces.  Click on 'em to show a bigger picture.

Nassa the Gnome Character Model

I just completed my Nassa the Gnome model.  One of the upcoming assignments is to take a character model and rig, animate, and mocap with it.  We were given the option to make our own character model, which I jumped on (after complaining to my friends that I don't have any time.)  Not having any other character designs available, I went with Nassa the Gnome from our D&D campaign, since I had several drawings of her already, as well as an image fleshed out in my mind.

This is technically my first complete character model that I built from start to finish without anyone else handling it in-between.  I tried to focus on making it low-poly, both as a challenge and to save painting-weights work.  I ended up at 1243 tris, 243 over my 1k tri limit.  I could easily cut it down by removing from the head and hands, but it was only a soft goal.  The head ended up getting about 1/3 of the tri's, since the head and hair were important for identifying the character.  I also modeled the whole thing without orthos to see how it would feel.

The outfit on the model is slightly different from the sketches I had drawn before, as she got a new set of armor towards the last few sessions, and it gives me an excuse to not have to deal with cloth.  I may come back and add textures, but the point of the piece was the model and animation, and less on finishing the model.

Metroid-Style Ship Model

Like the missle, we were given a concept before-hand, though the concept we were given was a silhouette, and we had to fill in the details ourselves.  After several redesigns, I finally ended up with the following ship.  I also have a much greater appreciation for using specular maps to make things look cool.

Metorid-Style Missle Model

We were given a choice of several missle concepts, and were to model, texture, and present the projects with our own little tweaks.  Here is the result of my project.

Lutra Modeling WIP - Part Two

EDIT: I've moved this project to a permanent hiatus.  Perhaps I will revisit Lutra one day, but for now, I'm focusing on other projects.

Finished up a lot of the body, and face is started

I feel like I might be using too many polys in the body, since it really is quite simple.  Perhaps I need to alter the silhouette a bit, but that will come after I finish the head and hair.  That will be where a load of the silhouette comes from already.

Lutra Modeling WIP - Part One

I finally got a chance to work on the model, as the summer is drawing to a close.  I had some 3D 'sketches' done (in blue), but almost all of the actual modeling progress was done today.  Between full time work, a car crash, and moving, I've had little time to really sit down and model, so today has been really refreshing.  For now, I have this teaser.

I do want to say, Max is very nice for hard-edge modeling, but it feels great to be back in Maya.  I do like hard-edge and organic modeling, but I think I slightly prefer the latter.

Trumpet model - Final

I've been sitting on this for several weeks now.  I originally planned on UV'ing and normal mapping this, but I think I'm ready to call it done so I can move on.  Especially with me working 40 hrs a week modeling/texturing/UVing, I don't really want to come home to the same style of work; I'm ready to work on my character model for this summer.

I merged most of the pipes.  Then, I just applied a blinn shader to the parts, and added it to my archives.  Now its time to move on to bigger and brighter things!

Trumpet model - WIP Part Two

I am getting close to the finish line.  Now I'm working on marrying all of the parts together.  I'm running into a lot of trouble with the pipes, because they're hollow, and weld doesn't like getting as close as they are thin.  More to come...

I must say, I do like Max's object coloring; it makes organization rather easy.

 

Trumpet model WIP

This is another project to familiarize myself with 3DS Max's controls.  I got a job for this summer (and perhaps longer), so I want to get practice in.  It's doing hard-edge modeling, and it is important that I work on internals as well as the overall look.

I've been working on this for a few days now.

High Heel Boot with Textures and Maya camera in 3DS Max

I finished up texturing the boot and call this model complete!  It's just textured directly from the orthos I had; it looks okay, but more importantly, it was quick.  And with that, I'd say I have a good grasp at modeling in 3DS Max.  I'm ready to move onto the next project.

Another great step, I found a free maya-style camera for Max script.  If anyone else has this problem, check it out here: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/plugins/mems-max2maya-maya-viewport-navigation-in-3ds-max

I believe that one should learn the controls of a program, rather than try to replace them with another.  However, since I've been going back and forth between Maya and Max so often, this became a godsend.  Really, I'm comfortable with both styles, but it's good to be able to stick with one, just so there isn't that minute of mental lag when trying to get back into a project.

Lutra Orthos

Just finished up the orthos for Lutra, my League of Legends style character.  Unfortunately, with the chaos going on right now between school and potential work, I won't be able to start until the summer.  C'est la vie;  part of the battle is already won!

High Heel Boot

This is just a low poly model I threw together in 3DS Max, as a way to familiarize myself with how the program works.  I used box modeling, and a photographs of a boot as reference.

The transition between Maya and Max isn't too bad, but there are some things I'm used to that may be hard to replace.  The biggest thing is camera controls; camera has to be second nature, and I keep second guessing myself now.  Also, it feels harder to do planar modeling in Max, but that may be because I don't have experience in it yet.  Next step, texturing!

Flower Story Facial Rigs

Here is a demo of the facial rigs I did for both of the Flower Story Characters, as well as a sneak peek at what we've got going on in the movie.



It was my job to finish up both of the face models, and make sure that all of the edgeflow was in the right places.  I also built the facial GUI from scratch to my own design.  All of the controls were done using (60 or more) blendshapes.  I was interested in using joints, but when I looked into it, it would have taken too much time considering where I was in the process.  Perhaps my next character will have a more joint-y face.

ZBrush Practice

Been working with ZBrush digital sculpting. This is one of my early successful sculpts. Guess which famous hip-hop artist this is!

Sansa e200 rendering

Rendering of a Sansa e280 media player.  Modeled, textured, and lit from scratch.