All is lost

Unfortunately my hard drive died last week and I found out the hard way that I don't back up nearly enough. So everthing I have been working on but not putting here has gone.

The strange thing is that now I am back at the beginning I have started thinking about the types of things I would like to do again rather than avoiding all the half started projects. However this will not bring back 10 months worth of photos.

Anyway I am open to suggestions on what projects I should half finish this year.I am develping some new none game based modules for our MSc programmes so I may focus more on that stuff rather than games.

Cool Thom York 3D printing thing

Saw this when looking up some videos on Meshlab



code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

Meshed with Point Cloud Skinner script for Blender

blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=144504

Cleanup in Meshlab

meshlab.sourceforge.net/

.. and voila! :)

Update: See the video at vimeo.com/7489094
   
full page here
 
 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1218

Download the STL and have a play.

Gravity Runner

I have just done a concept for the new icon for Gravity Runner on IPhone. If you have not played this game and have an IPhone what are you waiting for BUY IT. It is great fun. Anyway here is the icon. Hopefully it will make it in.

It was quite good fun trying to get something to look alright that is 57x57 pixels. It was a bit like the good old days  (without reverting to 16 colours).

Find out about Gravity Runner

http://www.wearecolin.co.uk/gravityrunner/

U2/UDK - Pillars first Pass

I have created my first past for the main pillar that will repeated throughout the model. Each side is unique so should be able to be rotated to give the feel of it being different pillars. It is by no means finished, I still have to complete the details in the textures, spec normal maps etc and i still have to add the detail on the top but it has proved my workflow so far.

I created a basic model with reasonably consistent divisions so that it could be subdivided in Mudbox and provided an even distribution of polys without getting ridiculous in size.

From this I sculpted the surface to give a worn stone feel. General roughing up and taking chunks out of the surface. I decided to avoid putting really fine detail in as i will add these later after i have textured it and can see what needs to come across. It also means i could keep the size of the high res mesh down to 748800 polys.

I created a new game model to transfer the high detail onto. I looked into Topogun but as I don't have a license for it so I did not pursue it. It looks pretty good for this job but I reverted to doing it in Maya.

I started with the base mesh (too many subdivisions for a game mesh) and removed all the excess geometry that was used to help the sculpt. I then overlayed it over the High res sculpt which i had imported form Mudbox.

I made the high res mesh live and then move the verts on the low res mesh to snap to the surface. I then looked at the areas that need individual geometry adding to help describe the form and cut in extra geometry. to make it fit better.

I sent both models out to xnormal and generated an Ambient occlusion map and a Normal map. For a first pass these seem to work ok. On top of that i have added a base texture but have added not detail yet. I just wanted to see how it might come together.

Mudbox performed beyond my expectation and i think i prefer it to ZBrush for this type of task. In the future I would do more tasks in Mudbox but i reverted back to tools I know better. Same goes for Topogun.

I am getting there though very slowly. Also this is way more detailed that what they actually did for these pillars in U2 so i guess i am not going to follow it that closely at all.

U2/UDK - Blockout Playtest Building 01

The blockout done I just want to check it looks ok in udk in 3rd person.

U2/UDK - Blockout

I have put together a collage of some of the main features of building 01 to highlight the challenges i will face in UDK

I compared and scaled the previous composition (using Nathan Drake) against a UT3 character to get a relative scale comparison for UDK. I also compared the UT3 model against the UDK 3rd person model and realised  that the characters were not the same size. I ended up scaling up the UT3 character in Maya to 1.2 to compensate for the difference. This is the mesh that I then used to measure out (not too scientifically) how big the first building should be. Of course ultimately this will only be validated when we play the map but it is a good ball park!

Based on this I made the first stab at a block out mesh. I used the grid system in Maya and resticted it 8 units so that it should be able to be  buit ultimatley as static meshing combined   ( although I am still not totally convinced as to how far you should go with this approach). All the seperate components are represented by basic building blocks.

Now to get it in UDK to check it doesn't look wrong!

U2/UDK- Building 01

I looked at a few ways for trying to map out the space for this level. I don't want to to be down about the plan but i am not sure how far i will get into this so i am going to do it one building at a time.

I played through the level and decided the best place to start was the main street section (after the bit where you get chased by the truck).

I am pretty sure i will not follow this level too faithfully as i want to explore what UDK can do and U2 was not made in UDK and was optimised for PS3. Also i want to source my own texture ref if possible and i don't live in Nepal.

I looked into ways to capture footage and screens from the level but anything HD based seem to be pretty expensive so i ended up taking photos of my TV (really). Using the character as a scale ref i have started piecing together something that should look about right proportionately as a block out.

Here is a comp of the first building i will be looking at (taken from U2)

Here is  my Comp of the ground floor using the Nathan Drake as Scale ref. I was careful to try and keep him on the same plane so that the objects behind him in every scene would be proportionately similar. This is all a bit of a guess though.

For this to translate to UDK i think i need to look at making this fit the a grid system (i suspect this was not originally built this way). I know UDK likes modularity and much of what is in the level is repeated so it is possible i am sure. The extent to which i do this will depend on the model and possibly my own laziness.

Anyway on to the blockout