Week 7

1/3/10 - Monday was mostly taken up with meetings; at the show reel group meeting we brainstormed and came up with some ideas for transitions between clips. I created a document with the information we have obtained so far concerning students' work for the show reel; unfortunately the list is still only half complete at this stage.

2/3/10 - Today I wrote an in-depth plan for the dissertation, with the proper layout including table of contents, abstract, declaration etc. Each chapter has been planned out with notes and I've roughly split the word count across each section.

I also made some changes to the heavy ant model after receiving a detailed model guide from Abi. Here is how he looks now:




I think he has much more personality now. Once this initial model has been tweaked and approved, it will be UV unwrapped and taken into ZBrush for smoothing.

4/3/10 - Today I worked with my Professional Practice group on a show reel for the Grad show fundraiser and collated the data for everybody who will be submitting something for the final show reel. I also UV unwrapped the heavy ant, who will soon be ready for detailing, and optimised the generic ant so that he is now just over 500 triangles.

I also experimented with rendering using Ambient Occlusion; the result can be seen below.

I'm tempted to try baking Ambient Occlusion to the texture map and use it to aid my texturing, since at the moment my abilities in that area are not very strong. It's also useful to look at ways of rendeing characters nicely, as good setting really can make such a difference.

5/3/10 - Today was our development day, so I spent time further optimising the ant model and I also used baked ambient occlusion to create detailed textures for the small ant and the soldier.



Baking ambient occlusion has added some nice detail to these otherwise simple textures, and I think it looks quite nice. Hopefully it'll still make a difference at a small size.

6/3/10 and 7/3/10 - I spent the weekend adding detail to the heavy ant, creating the dark version and building a heavy skeleton. The original heavy ant is rigged, but the dark heavy isn't at the moment. I also created and textured a low poly version of the dark generic ant. Below are the dark heavy ant and low poly dark generic ant.

The dark ant is instantly recognisable by his bright colours and spikes on his limbs.

Dark heavy is also recognisable by his spikes and will have the same bright colours.

I drew up a list of tasks concerning character creation, since this will be the largest part of my project; I'm keeping tabs on which characters have been created, and whether their low and high poly versions have been textured and rigged. Low poly models have priority since they will be in the final game, and at this point I am still unsure if all the characters will be ready for submission.