Progress Journal
check on what I'm up to and what work has been completed for the project. Most Recent
week 3 - post 1:
Doing the basics for the website. Ideation for the team project is well under way.
22 January 2010
week 3 - post 2:
website is now up. For the project it seems we may have found our idea so now we need to focus in and flesh out the details. I felt like doing modeling instead of working on an essay thus the look of the banner. I used a head modeling video as reference
24 January 2010
week 4 - post 1:
We met this week and dug into brainstorming. We came up with an idea of a man who wants to go to the moon and does so by solving unrelated puzzles. The player exhists in a sort of strange mansion space. We decided to split up and design each space separately.
28 January 2010
week 5 - post 1:
During our time apart I was in charge of designing some rooms related to trying to find the source of a musical melody. The player would be navigating a small series of hallways and rooms eventually opening up to a room with a tiled floor. They would then repeat the melody by moving to particular tiles on the floor. If they succeed they gain access to the upper levels of the mansion world.
I drew a concept scetch for what they might see when the get to the upper level:
I also drew a floor plan for the passageways leading to the music room:
Lastly I composed a breif melody that could be elaborated and used if everyone likes it:
2 Febuary 2010
week 5 - post 2:
We were working a lot on our doc today. I'm glad we had the extra time! I had to figure out the puzzle "Don't Waste Water" because we honestly had no idea how it would work. I wont tell you how to solve it but here's some of the stuff I needed to do in order for me to get a grasp of what should happen:
Here's a concept scetch of the valve:
Here's an orthographic view of the entire garden:
Garden - Orthographic Concept Sketch
4 Febuary 2010
week 6 - post 1:
So now we have some intense and specific design decisions to make in regard to the specifics of our architecture. I revised the floorplan for the musical hallways. The music room is going to be done in the style of a classical ballroom (hopefully) and I am currently working on the concept sketch for that.
Here's the revised floorplan:
I did another song experiment:
10 Febuary 2010
Olympic Break - post 1:
It took me longer than I thought but I finished the storyboards for all the puzzles. This is going to be used in our pitch to help demonstrate interaction. It was fun because it is a bit of concept art at the same time.
Here's the storyboards:
puzzle 1, puzzle 2, puzzles 3 & 4, puzzle 5
Here's the images individually (.zip):
12 Febuary 2010
Olympic Break - post 2:
We all got our hands dirty doing gray boxing. I was in charge of the ballroom. UDK is really really annoying and completely foriegn even to people who know maya.
14 Febuary 2010
Olympic Break - post 3:
I started playing around with the z-brush interface. The snake brush is really fun. I still have a ways to go in order to get used to it.
Oh, and I posted my long critiques, you can read them at my Writing/Critiques section.
24 Febuary 2010
Week 7 - Post 1:
I am working on the broken statue that the player can knock over and found to my surpise that I needed a hand, so here's what i've modeled. The rest of the statue is practically done so i'll post some images of it once i merge the hand in and before i move the model into ZBrush. For the hand i took some valuable hints from this video on proper hand topology.
2 March 2010
Week 9 - post 1:
WHEW that was a tough couple weeks! I havn't updated since the 2nd! But I did get the statue modeled over that time encase you want to see it:
I'm thinking about adding a robe or something and of course all it has on it right now is a marble texture from maya so it still could benefit greatly from some Zbrush, but he's good enough for now.
This weekend I was finally able to dig into the project and I've got lots of ballroom goodness done. First off I had to add a bit more explanation to my concept sketch and also I did another specifically for the entrance:
Then I started using our handy asset list (that I helped contribute to writing) to start the darn ballroom so here's some images:
waaaaaaay easier than doing this whole thing with booleans and no undo in UDK and I can get to do some fun detail work. All in all, this is really relaxing and fun compared to all the essays i've had to do. Every SIAT student should have to take poetry classes to gain some perspective (if not for other reasons as well).
21 March 2010
Week 10 - Post 1:
I just finished my first mesh to actually be used by Sam in UDK! Although not that substantial this is a good milestone because it marks a shift from designing our process (asset list, naming conventions, file formats, exporting issues) to actually using our process. Things should go faster from now on (I hope).
The completed object is the quintessential "everydoor" including a semi-decorative frame and a handle - both as separate meshes (the handle is separate because Sam hopes to animate it in UDK).
24 March 2010
Week 10 - Post 2:
Now the ballroom is really underway. On Friday I did the balcony and all its peripherals (still have to do the accessible one though). I've had to resubmit the door twice with little tweaks I hope that isn't the case for every mesh when we export them!
28 March 2010
Week 12 - Post 1:
The ballroom meshes are done and now I'm just working on integrating it with the garden facade. There were some interesting design problems in this regard. You can view the iteration here from shot 1 -> shot 6.
I've done some other models as well and we will hopefully get the rest of the modeling FINISHED middle or late in the week.
In the interest of time I don't expect to be posting much more on this journal until the project is finished.
5 April 2010
Week 15 - Post 1:
After completing all the models we began the tedious process of texturing. What we had to do was create a duplicate of each model and then add extra edge loops so that when Zbrush loaded up the models you could apply uniform subdivisions across the entire surface: example.
Here is a dump of all the textures and detailing I did as they appear in Zbrush:
some stuff that didn't make it into the final game:
we had planned for the breaker switch to be found in a utility room. Here are some of the utility room assets that didn't make the cut:
ballroom wall as it appeared in UDK:
It is really hard to maintain the ZBrush quality when you bring the textures into the Unreal Engine. Part of this is to do with not being very efficient with our texture space when unwrapping (due to time constraints we just auto-unwrapped everything) and part of this was underestimating the strength of UDK to handle pretty high poly models (we modeled with low polycounts). Also if we had more time we could play with lighting more in UDK to emphasise details.
All of My Textures: (specular, normal, and diffuse)
Sound:
I almost forgot! I also did a bunch of sounds and we were able to include 3 of my songs in the game. Im pretty happy with how they turned out. If the catchy jazz song sounds fuzzy that's because its being picked up by a radio on the moon.