Creature Animation Review

The creatures will have six limbs, not including the tail. The two closest to its head will operate primarily like arms and be used for attacking while the hind four will be used to scurry around the station. It will be able to raise its head to approximately 8’, or keep it low to the ground. This variety should add tension as the creatures is able to raise its head to spot the player, or remain low and out of sight as it searches.  It was modeled in Modo with an emphasis on modelling for animation. Edge-flow allowed for proper deformation in all six extremities as well as the two torsos. Revisions had to be made to shorten the back section of the monster in order to work with the pathfinding programming. This ended up helping to reduce polycount which was another issue that arose during development.

For future work, creating character sets to allow for all animation to be brought into a single file will be considered from the start. I was unaware of this technique until the issue of having multiple animation files arose at the. There are other ways around it but they were not compatible with the programming structure in place.

Changing on texturing

Thank to CrazyBump, I don't need to do a lot of the shading and bumping by myself.

That's why I'm trying to add OCC map to the texture and hope that it would make the result more polished.

OCC map makes everything looks more dirty, when doing modular level building , dirty is good, because you can hide seam this way.

The way I handle seam is by purposefully leaving it black. See the black line runs across the picture? There is a seam and no matter anything wrong with the game engine, this seam will blend in beautifully.

Starting on Texturing - Week6

I went on my quest to study how to do environment correctly, it's totally different from how school taught it. I cried a little bit inside to find school works were not so helpful:

This is a picture of almost finished tunnel:

And thanks this awesome app CrazyBump, bump map has never been so easy!

Look at my texture map, bump map and specular map:

I'm now looking at 

Progress On Environment Modeling -- Week 04

This is the first version of a energy room model I made. And it's also the first room model I made for games. I say it's looking not bad.

We decided to make each trunk of the environment by 10s. This room is made out of a 30 by 30 box. I cut all 4 corners to make it a 8-sided room.

The benefit is pretty obvious, I can make things and duplicate them by 90 or 45 degrade angles.

Just heard from Dylan that the pipes are too high poly, I guest it's time to smooth things up!

Creature Modelling Progress

This is the progress towards the creature model so far, Some issues that have been encountered include the polycount with which I was a bit to liberal, and the potential need for the model to be encompassed within an upright capsule in order to function correctly within once of the navigation softwares. Oh, and it doesn't have a head yet, but that is the most straightforward of these issues. All things considered, I'm glad that this work was but in early to allow for these revisions and considerations.

Progress on Environment _ Week03

As I'm doing modular environment design, I find the more I try to make something continuous, the harder for me to model.

Making the transaction piece

2 way done

3 way done

Solution for Environment Modeling

First of all, this article is the Bible for level design:

http://blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html

After seeing a few tutorials, I came up with a way to make level design modular.

First, I figured out how to snap to grips and line up objects perfectly in Maya:

(keeping the pivot at a corner is a good thing.)

(I seamlessly snapped two plants to a cube by selecting constrain to grid and point in Maya)

Since it's a horror game and the levels only feels right by testing them and play with them, I created 9 20 by 20 Maya unites tiles for level designers to work with( two sizes of doors, a floor with a wall, a straight corner, a floor, a wall, a curved corner, a block, a staircases):

While level designer can play with those tile. I may start learning some more texturing techniques and start painting something.