September - October 2012 [Updates]

Not much has been going on other than University the past two months. Next week is the start of end-of-year exams - so holidays are in sight. I guess this post will just be a roundup of the past 2 months worth of random projects & works.

So as far as current projects go, I've felt a lot of motivation towards this sci-fi horror game, to the point that I've put plans in motion to have it appear at the Indie Games Room at AvCon 2013. Every year I go to the IGR I end up wishing I entered a game, bout time to step up and actually do it. At least 1 game is the goal, if anything decent comes from a Ludum Dare I'll consider throwing that in as well.
Some old & new screenshots of some SciFi level assets:

A mockup SciFi hallway with experimental shader(s)

 

Staircase section

Modular floor panels with added
details (such as spinning fans)

Ludum Dare 24 was missed, due to a pretty heavy workload at Uni that weekend. But Ludum Dare 25 is almost a month away, nicely placed before the Christmas New Years rush. So all going well I'll be enjoying 48 hours of madness starting on the 14th of December.

On the 3D printing front a new (and pretty major) order has been placed, theres some interesting non-Minecraft items in this lot, including a Raspberry Pi case I've been wanting to print and design since my Pi arrived. Theres also a few other interesting items which could lead on to some more business opportunities  and of course a couple of new Minecraft figurines. The Enderman has been requested more times than I can count...

Solar flyby - ingame

I also started working on a Millennium Falcon mod for Kerbal Space Program, inspired by some images I saw a while back where people had imported full 3D models of ships from Aliens and Prometheus and so on into the game so people could fly them.
I didnt want to just import some model and set it up to be pilotable, instead Id rather have a set of parts to build a ship from, not to mention the ability to spontaneously de-assemble. Its much more effort, but Id say its worth it - especially for a ship like the Millennium Falcon.
At this point in time the low poly is done and imported into the game (which took a ton of work to setup all the node positions), I'm now working on the high poly mesh for normals, AO and texture baking. Once exams are over its one of the projects I want to focus on and wrap up first.

Armour Platin'
Greebles ahoy

Roman Ludus Cinematic Project - Finished

Finally!
Ive battled with numerous issues, from the project file messing up to loosing the UDK screenshot sequences and having to upgrade my laptop's HDD half way though putting together the final cinematic.
Its been a frustrating effort to get this project wrapped up.


So in summary: This is the final product of my 2nd year (1st semester) project for a digital media class at university. We had to work on an architectural visualisation and I chose to mix things up a bit and use a game engine for the rendering which lead me to UDK and to the 11 day level design tutorial. (Id never used UDK before, but Ive had several years experience using Blenders inbuilt game engine)

The building and surrounding environment is based on the Roman Ludus and terrain from the TV series 'Spartacus Blood and Sand' and 'Gods of the Arena'.

Id originally submitted a rushed version of the final cinematic for the actual assignment, but wanted to tidy it all up a bit more before uploading to youtube (thats the part thats taken so long to get around to doing)

Ive mostly used 3Dsmax for the modelling, but did a bit in Blender as well. Level blocking was done in UDK and Gimp/Photoshop for 2D texture work.
I did a lot of preproduction, including drawing up some blueprints for reference from scenes in the series and an entire design/planning document to refer to throughout the duration of the project.


And finally heres the cinematic:


Now, time to get into other projects :)

UDK Level progress

So I spent a decent whole day working on this Tuesday (samples of raw footage were required for the university assignment Wednesday afternoon)
For the most part Ive finished the majority of the level design, lighting, basic details, postpro effects and managed to animate and test render some camera movements using Manitee.

Heres a teaser of some of the better external angles so far:



So whats left to do? - Polish and detail mostly. Theres a lot of objects I havent modeled and added to the level yet, some stock ones from UDK I want to replace with my own and a lot of the textures need rework and tweaking. Then its time to render some more interesting shots and compose the final cinematic.