Environment: Stately home wip1

Working on the Stately home option for the environment piece, decided to create high poly versions for most of the models to make it a lil easier deriving decent diffuse.normal maps etc, I went to a National Trust property and it was nigh on impossible to take any pics, all the ones i did take were blurry. I did however buy the guide book - which has one small pic of what im doing.

Working on the fireplace at the mo will post in a few days when i have some more stuff

Kardboard King

Ok, its pretty funny but certainly not funny enough for dicks on youtube to go about bitching about it and frankly some of the comments are more than a little disturbing, stuff like his age went way out the window there...

Although I have to admit i did have a wee burst of laughter when he started tea-bagging an invisible corpse and i realised he was running through the games animations for every weapon he picked up - give him some clay and the boy will go far

Train of thought

Been playing with the material editor in ue3, trying to follow up with this idea a few of us had, the model on the right just uses a standard diff/normal shader while the one on the left uses - witchcraft...

I've noticed a few things in producing this shader in how to correctly produce a texture, its heavily reliant on the underlying diffuse texture being quite flat with fairly consistent solid blocks of colour that maybe alter to reflect shadow and the like. The texture in use, a 256 no less, was heavily pixellated and had many high area's of noise with give some area's an almost 'frosted glass' effect. To get the desired 50's look simpler diff and normal textures may be required with any other details physically modelled in

'The desired look'

Oh yeah and i moved the one on the left as a crappy way of showing how a charecter model would look with it applied without baking it all in - gonna try applying it to an actual charecter tomoz

A happy cake

So I've just got ahold of the pictures of my glorious queens building cake made among a few more cakes by Louise and Caz, lookit!

It made the entire process worthwhile, if i was rewarded with a delicious themed cake for whatever i did i'd be a different man and most probaly diabetic

Group project can can

Ah finally, tommorow the group project will be over and my constant cycle of working for 2 days straight and lightly resting on the third is at an end - hoorah.

I was planning on typing up a big essay type thing but frankly i now despise this fsking project and how its sapped me away from doing any decent art and im tired and still need to slip in some relaxing Bioshock before i go to bed, so I'll start with the positive and end with the negative, like a battery(!)

Okies,

Positves -

+ I learnt the Unreal3 engine! this is probaly the biggest pro that dosen't involve ppl or social structures and the like and means i can bring that knowledge onto the third year and my final project

+While the quality of my modelling may not have improved the speed has, something which would take me an hour or so now takes me around 15 mins to create and unwrap

+This weird culture ppl have of creating a single model, say the van or tree and then spending weeks tweaking it has finally been smashed after they realise they had to do 10 models or whatever in a week

+I've learnt a fair bit about colour theory and techniques constantly refering to the colour wheel chris gave us

+Using the engine meant i could try stuff like lighting and compistion of scenes,in greater clarity and detail something i would have really struggled to do in 2d

+Having created all of the surface and wall textures I think im pretty good at making textures and creating tiling surfaces, in fact making textures was something i found i really enjoyed and im already looking foward to making loads for the third year project - bit sad really

+I found that a models silohuette and general colour is more important than any niggly details on the texture, once its in the engine and lit most of the detail is lost anyway

+Although a bit of shambles this time around, I've learnt how to better prepare myself for potential future group projects and what might go wrong

+I would either be mad or a complete and utter bastard now if it wasn't for Ben reining me in now and again

Negatives,

-Peoples imagination and enthusiasm getting in the way of realism and logic only for them to realise later they were too ambitious

-Spending weeks doing concepts before we had a solid art style guide so they in effect became useless after one was picked

-How i reshaped and modeified the entire shape of the Queens building and never had anyone, perhaps the 2d leads, give me guidance or say perhaps its actually a bit cack

-The group working in a hugely linear fashion, spending weeks working purely on 2d concepts and completely ignoring any 3d concepts and experiments and then completely dropping 2d and working purely on 3d - the two should have evolved and bounced off each other i feel

-A solid art style not really ever being decided which lead to problems in what to include on the asset lists and all the way down to the final lighting for the level - guesswork is no subsitite for proper research

-People working in a completely fractured way and not coming into a centralised location such as the lab where something as simple as a model could be passed back and forth in a few minutes as opposed to a few days

-Peoples constant reluctance to come into the lab even when texted

-The importing process being completely ignored again and again with me and Ben having to resize textures, reset pivot points and so on over and over again

-The same model resized does not a new model make

-people purely interested in where there teeny weeny model was and why it wasn't in yet and never taking an interest in the the bigger picture and why it wasn't in yet

-How even though it was never my job i ended up creating and concepting the entire lighting for the level as well as the layout of all the models, something i felt the art leads potentially should have helped me with

-Reluctance on the part of some people to just get on with it, expecting input from myself for something that wasn't my area before they would do anything



And finally i think the biggest negative is how massively the whole project has dug into my 2d, 3D engines and modelling and so forth are something i pickup pretty quickly but art is something i really want to improve upon and i found myself constantly having to go back to tweaking this and that in the engine because people expected it, leaving me literally no time for the 2d
side of the course which more disheartens and saddens me than irritates me

So it became a bit of a bitching fest there but whatever thats what makes me tick, while i certainly would not like to repeat the experience again I've learnt an absolute wealth of information i can take into my third year and later life

Not a penis

Just been going through my computer looking at some old stuff and i came across this half complete texture for that crab thingy i was working on, suddently hit me its leg looks like something else altogether

Engineer: Dispensing an erector!

Okies been spending an odd day or two trying to learn the source engine so i could make, hopefully, a half decent Tf2 map. I've got a plan scrawled down on paper so im just following that at the mo while encountering a fair few of Hammers bugs. The pics show the Red spawn with paths branching off to the A and B points. All wip although im pretty happy with the lighting
Also: sorry Dave but i had to use it :0

This is schilly..

Well Vista's bettered itself this time, didn't think it could get higher than 33 hours but its smashed the previous record with a close 5 day record(!)

A matter of pride

Goooo!

Righty, blog time

With this group project I've been thinking more and more about how people interact with each other and the methods in which they deal with various problems and now because getting a job and getting myself known is playing more and more on my mind what potential future employee's would think of there attitudes and there ability to work in a group.

Im becoming increasingly worried about, not my ability, but promoting myself and the methods in which to do it - i would never consider myself a loud person and if theres one thing that irritates me more about people its people who blow there own trumpet even spouting off complete crap as it makes them look more knowledgeable even while im thinking to myself its complete crap this is usually solved by me wondering around from person to person explaining why said person was wrong - i would never directly confront them, one because they would simply talk over me and turn it into an inane argument and two, because it would affect there pride if i said there wrong in front of there 'audience'.

This system works fine in a closed environment but when your trying to promote yourself to outside parties namely Blitz and certain people within Blitz, Mike can fairly easily censor what work they see and who's work is shown ultimately destroying the gap between me and a potential employee again its the same thing when people's work is shown on the projector, my stuff is never shown and it really degrades my pride when i ask myself 'well why isnt it there?' and know full well its probaly the same work shown to various parties and I come up with no decent reasons apart from I don't shout about my work, of course I could just get into contact with them myself but then the people who have had a headstart from Mike promoting them are more likely to get a position

Im certainly planning on making a big deal of the work I've done, Im far too self critical at the moment and i do need to thrown myself to the lions as it were. I've done a crap load of work for this group project so hopefully it should reflect in how Mike views me and in turn hopefully get mentioned when its most neccesary

I've not forgotten rather its been a constant knife-like stabbing reminder

Guh, been so preoccupied with getting this group project into a workable shape I've completely neglected my blog - well no more!
Hopefully gonna have a few sporadic blog posts when I've grown tired of the Queens building, which after pretty much wrestling it from the more lax team members is thankfully alot less than it was but i digress, blogs follow in 3, 2, 1...