Feb 2015 3D stuff

Here's 3D Saltire as done as he's going to be. He's at a point now where I could keep tweaking and fixing things forever. 

In the end, it's not really turned out as well as I'd have liked and I had planned to do some better renders and build some environment around him but I am itching to do something else. 

I have learned a lot through doing this though. Especially x-gen hair. Once I got to grips with how it was working it was quite easy to get some decent but basic looking hair rendered. 

I will definitely be using it again and trying to include more of the x-gen features now that I have an understanding of the basics.

Likewise with Augustus. I'm happy with the results and I could do more but I would rather just do better next time.

Some of the new bits I've made for Lapin in with the old. I sort of want to just keep going and make a wee village heh

The game definitely needed a bit more on the light and environment side of things. I'll keep plugging away at it and see what difference it makes.

Jan 2015

I've still been doing freelance games work I can't post unfortunately/fortunately. It's been a nice mix of low poly modelling and something a bit different. It looks like it's going to continue for the next few months as well which is great. Hopefully I can post some of the work up soon.

I discovered Manga studio over the Christmas holidays - what an amazing program for doing comics.

I'd had a script from a friends (Chris McKenna) short story for a while that I'd wanted to draw as a comic. I edited it into a comic script over the hols and started working on it early in the new year. Here are the first pages done completely in Manga studio 5.

I will be working on this when I can over the next few months as I'd love to get it printed. It's a great wee all complete story in 20 odd pages.

I got started on a bit more Lapin work this week. It's been sitting on the shelf since October last year but with different things happening it seems a good time to crack on with it again.

In my free time I've still be messing about with 3D hair. These are some really hideous renders of my first go with xgen, ignore the beard with default settings... (I've finally admitted defeat and given up on Maya hair- it's truly awful) in Maya 2015. 

I'll find a bit of time soon to add some extra flair to it and see what I think. If I can get it looking decent for Saltire and all his hairy goodness Augustus should be a piece of cake with his wee tuft of hair on top.

I also got back to the life drawing now that I have a bit more of a routine again (til the next deadline crunch lol). Just a couple. The first ones I did were mega ropey. Theres were a bit better.

Dare 2014 Week 6/7

Pretty much in the last week now. We've a couple days next week but that'll mostly be for last minute preparations. We'll have a decent build by the end of this week with everything we wanted to include implemented in time for Protoplay. In the last couple of weeks I've been mainly focusing on getting all the extra UI/screen info ready and working on the game trailer. Here's the game trailer first.

Wish I could say I've enjoyed the UI design anywhere near as much as the character design but I can't. It's something I always feel I struggle with and this lot has been no exception.

Here's the last model I completed at the start of week six. We put this up on twitter around that time but I've since fixed the roof  which was way too large. I couldn't see it til it was pointed out! Was a strange one.

Theres a couple more small bits and bobs to add to this one too but this is almost all the 3d stuff we will have in the game for Protoplay in one shot.

I finished up the start screen today Quite happy with the overall look. Shortpaw will be the 3D model with some animation over final screen. This was mostly created using existing models obviously with a couple of extras modelled and textured then the whole thing was comped in Photoshop with extra painting on top to tidy up some areas, add depth and add a bit extra detail to some parts.

I made most of the UI over a mocked up shot of the game so I could get an idea how it was going to look in-game.

The icon is a bit of a failure actually. The initial one on the left here was way to busy for an app icon. I sort of hope we get some other use out of it. Even with the gradient fading out the background I think it's a bit weak. If I get a chance I'll have another crack at it before the weekend. 

Below is a bunch of the UI and game asset stuff I made. All done with Photoshop.

Dare 2014 Week 5

Had a tricky week 3 working out how to best texture the environment elements but seem to have it working with the characters now. 

Here are some renders of the models and textures. So far we have the main character and the frog enemy animated and working in the game with the rabbit enemy nearly there too.

And a bunch of development sketches for the worm enemy. This is the process I've used for all the characters for Lapin. A stage of rough idea sketches, then discuss with the team and take the best ones forward for some refinement and further development to arrive at a final design we are happy with.

The environment is a textured ring. Actually only a quarter of a ring but I did it like this to do seamless textures.

The idea being we can procedurally load in different texture maps as required and have the seamlessly match up while that segment of the ring is off screen. This should hopefully allow us to have some different environments at some point quite easily.

Below is a render from Mudbox and an example of the ground textures as seen through the "camera" of the game.

I also got some renders done for our poster. Layouts were done by Gary. Went to town with the render settings but I'm not sure it was worth it for what we ended up with even though it's pretty nice quality. 

Might have to colour correct the frogs to separate them from Shortpaws trousers a touch for the actual poster.

I'm going to be cracking on with environment elements for the rest of the week and probably some storyboarding for the trailer video.