Job Fair

Today I attended the job fair on campus, I spoke with TT Games / Pandemic about careers. I even had the chance to show some of my work, one of the staff were particularly impressed. She said it looked as if I were aiming for a similar career as her as a Gameplay Artist. At any rate, she was very pleasant and even gave me her LinkedIn details.

I also saw and attended the presenation by Soccer Manager, this one wasn't as good in all honesty. The presentation was simply an overview of their company structure and positions within (which is nothing new).

So overall a decent day, look forward to getting in touch with TT Games further down the line.

Stage Progress #1

Progress on the stage is gradually getting there! Overall I'd say there are about 6 areas to create, the first being this park area. The 3D Max scene for this part is de-cluttered too, which now allows me to create a better whitebox map and keep building from that.

Fun fact: There are a total of 58 (and growing) trees in this tiny area alone :)

Because of the high number of trees I think I may need to look at other software to help, such as SpeedTree. I already have a huge number of assets to model and texture so not having to do them myself woudl help quite a lot.

Track Splines Continued

Some more progress has been made with the splines. I had a few attempts but each has distortions from the original track model I lifted the spline from. To get around this, I flattened the original track, so it lost all it's height information. I then recreated a spline from this mesh and bingo! Well.. almost bingo.
The track still had some rotation but this time it was based on an angle integer on the spline modifier. for soem reason I cannot get it to be 100% flat, but I'd say its 99.9% there and no one will even notice.

In the image above, the red mesh represents the original track I ripped from the game and modified. The yellow mesh is the new spline, which I went through and made all the straights align perfectly (this took alot of copy and pasting X and Y values). The new spline also has the correct mapping co-ords, so that's no longer an issue. All that's left now, is to add back in all the height information and make sure corner banks have the right angles.

Here it is in-game, as you can see the mapping is completely spot-on now on. it use to be more prominent on the corners, but thats no longer an issue.

Track Splines

I have been modelling the first track based from a model ripped from the original game. but after some consideration it seems that texturing the road will be somewhat ineffective. After some discussions with colleagues, I've decided to try alternate avenues because I think UV mapping wouldn't provide the same high quality result I'm after.

Step in Splines...

I've not used splines an awful lot, but after a quick search I believe it may be what I'm after. It does mean however that non of my current track assets will be pixel perfect, I have the terrain and track aligned perfectly via vertex snapping.

Depending on the result of my spline experiment though, I will have to create an actual terrain in game (which as added benefits such as better foliage). the rest of the assets will just have to be place however, which isn't much of an issue because their placement doesn't need to be perfect anyway.

The above image shows my current model with a basic UV map paramater on it. It doesnt look great and it's tiling, alignment are completely off.

After a bit of a play, I found out that you can actually create splines from meshes. I was lucky enough to create an edge that ran through the middle of the entire track, to allow for better curvature.

Using this line I created a spline and made a new track. Whilst it's almost spot on, there are issues, for example all the roads are rotated a bit now, so I will have to re-align everything. however the result so far is very promising!

As you can see, the track is porperly textured and follows the path exactly as it should as apposed to the first image above. I will try a few more things, but if nothing works this will be fine, I'll just have to manually align most of it.

Flying

After a couple of days of trial and error, I've managed to get the basics of the engine working. Now any vehicle can manoeuvre mid-air!

It's far from perfect and lots of tweaking is required to get it to a satisfactory point such as car specs, weight, rotation speed etc. But as it stands, it's at a decent stage that I'm happy with.

1st Model Finished

UV Unwrapping & Texturing

Since my last post I've decided to continue re-creating the main vehicle of the game. Figured since I've got a foot-hold with the engine, I should really focus on the assets since theyre the most time consuming aspect.

Last time I posted about the car I had finished most of the modelling. I've had to recreate the car's engine because the original cylinder was skewed / squashed and didnt look right.
Now I have moved onto texturing it. The model is completely unwrapped, as I'm using symmetry I can allocate more UV real estate to better inprove quality. Here is the progress so far:

(Full model UVW map)

(Almost fully textured UVW map)

As you can see progress is being made! It takes a long time, constantly switching between Max and Photoshop to ensure things look OK. Once it's imported in-engine and has a reflective shader applied to it, it should look rather good.