Monday 22 March 2010

Week 10


22/3/10 - I started drafting chapter 4 of the dissertation. So far, the original structure seems to work so this chapter will consist of 3 subchapters:

4.1 Introduction
4.2 How the platform affects game design
4.3 The importance of visuals in the context of game design

I found that a case study of Resident Evil: the Umbrella Chronicles came in particularly useful for chapter 4.2, as the game has clearly been tailored specifically for the Wii platform and its audience. It's a perfect example of the platform having a major influence on game design, especially considering that Umbrella Chronicles is part of a well known franchise.

With the jet plane ant model approved at mid poly level, I proceeded to UV unwrap him and add a very basic texture. See below!


The next step is to smooth the model and perhaps add some more fine details, before rigging in preparation for posing.

23/3/10 - I smoothed out the jet plane ant in 3DS Max (not ZBrush). Smoothing wreaks havoc with the UV co-ordinates, and it is made so much worse if you smooth in ZBrush too. There are still some fixes to be made with the UVs, hence the model below is untextured; I also added some extra details which will need to be assigned co-ordinates.


Look at all those rockets!

24/3/10 - I finished Chapter 4 of the draft dissertation and drew out a texture map for the high-poly jet plane enemy after fixing some of his UV co-ordinates. There are still some tweaks to be made, so I will not show a progress shot for the time being; there are more important things to be getting on with, such as texturing the other enemies and building a rig for this one.

25/3/10 - Today was spent rigging the jet plane enemy and drawing textures for all the high poly enemies we have so far. I did the texturing for practice really, since it is one of my weak areas. It also means that Abi doesn't have to texture any of the models if these ones are satisfactory.






These ants are asking for hugs because I'm going to leave posing them for near the end of the project, when I will put together nice little videos of character turnarounds.

26/3/10 - I worked with Unity some more and managed to get animated models working. It is really simple to import, separate and play the animations! Here is a quick video capture of animated enemies:




There are some issues with backface culling, which I shall look into however it might just mean that I have to make some of the planes double sided. Removing culling from the shader did not seem to work, however I will keep trying.

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