lördag 28 mars 2009

Week 5

This week ive continued to work on the main character Skye. All the highpolystuff is done which will translate into a nice normalmap has been done, also the lowpolymodel (which you will see in the game) is nearly finished. We had a big meeting monday and a big meeting Thursday. We decided to name the game Sanctum for now. We also got our wiki up and running www.sanctum-game.com. And the nex week we will finally get our room at the university and the work will step up a notch. From here on we will sit together and work at the university. I will start making the first mob next week and iam planning to finish him in about 2weeks from now. I hope earlier now that i got the pipeline down. Iam very exited for next week

lördag 21 mars 2009

Week 4

Alot of work has gone to the main character this week. We had a big meeting at the beginging of the week discussing schedule and other important things. The only problem i bumped in to was the attatchment of the head and the body (and still keep the detail). But after some time i managed to figure it out. I exported the head which i hade retopo inside of zbrush and then the lowpoly to maya, fixed up some small things in the topology over there, and finally i combined the highpoly head and body with subtoolmaster and exported the highres version to maya around 2.5milj polygons, right after i imported it to maya i exported it back to zbrush. Why i did this was due the fact that when i imported the lowpoly back in zbrush the size didnt match up with the highpoly, i have no clue why, but it seems that maya automaticly resized the lowpoly. Thats why i imported the highpoly so maya could resize it like it did with the lowpoly retopologized version. Back inside Zbrush i had 2versions (with the same size), one lowpoly with good topology and attatched head and one highpoly with bad topology and separated head. With retopotools in zbrush i did a projection to take the detail and apply it to the lowpoly.

After the body was done (its not done, its allways more fixing to do) i started on the armor. One problem we saw with the design was the huge hip armor, Its gonna be a big problem when animating her. I talked to our concept artist and art director and we came to a conclusion to split the armor piece into two pieces
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lördag 14 mars 2009

Week 3

First thing this week on the agenda was to go through the custom weapon pipeline. I made this in one day, i made a nice catgun as a placeholder. Basically a rifle with a cathead at the end (just for fun) I didnt change the weapon type just imported own grafics with own animations. The weapon type is up to my designer companions though ive learned alot about UT3 scripting it is mainly up to them. The grafics was a rather simple thing to do especially after you had done the character pipeline. The only tricky thing was the firstperson hands with the rotaion and everything. I managed tog get a hold of some nice bones for maya that works with ut3 core characters. One thing thats really annoying which i aint used to yet is the diffrent world axis in ut3 and maya, and the fact that you can rotate your mesh inside maya, in scriting and inside the editor. Sometimes thats just confusing, espacially since the original weapons seems to be rotates completly wrong at first glance.

Next thing was to start on the main character. I began with the head and the base is now done, then ive worked a bit on the body. But the body isnt near finished, i will keep on working on the body next week aswell

tisdag 3 mars 2009

Week 2

Today i finally managed to overcome my problem with the aim rotation. In order to make it work you need to have the same bone names as ut3 does. At first i thought it was impossible to create your own character with own propotions and style. Because i thought that ut3 uses their aimoffset and that brought me to the conclusion that my arms would look wierd since my arms is alot longer then the characters in ut3, but somehow it seems to work even with my strange propotions on a character. Next step is to try the custom weapon pipeline since iam done with the character pipeline.

The rest of the week ive been working on getting our own towers in the game, which have worked out nicely. Creating my own tower meant some scripting which at first glance looked menacing, but after a while i started to get a hang of it. I managed to create my own tower with own animation and mesh, then i went on to sendning the towerplacehold over to one of my companions who is going to get som new guns on the tower.

I have also finally understood how the bones in ut3 engine works. One thing to think of when creating your own bones for ut3 in Maya is that they dont just change the joint oriantation infact they rotate the whole bone instead of working with joint orientaion.