Iguana Texture

Hi Blog! I missed you too.

So the last few weeks involved moving into a nicer apartment and scrambling to find a new tenant to take over my lease on the old one. The rest of my time has been spent engaged in fisticuffs with Mudbox; which is a handy program even for low-polygon painting, but cooperates only at gunpoint.

I'll take you through the process behind for now here's a quick render of our reptilian friend's color map, just so you don't feel too neglected.

Peace,

-alex

Iguana

On to new adventures! Next up I'll be working on this handsome devil.

I had a pet iguana as a kid, and I've always found them fascinating. I wanted to give this character a lot of personality without humanizing him too much.

His proportions are more or less iguana-like, and I modelled his hands and feet after the strange bone structure iguanas have. More on this guy as he develops.

-alex

Trade Nations

Another big project I worked on at Bight was "Trade Nations" for facebook. It was an interesting experience; I had been working on 3D assets but was sucked into the 2D team with almost no experience in that field. The educational value of that project was immeasurable: I learned about painting, pipelines, flash, GUI design. I got to work on pretty much every aspect of the game, and contribute huge amounts of artwork.

Everything in Trade Nations was made in photoshop and exported through flash; most assets were painted at enormous sizes and reduced. I only have a few of the source files in my posession, the rest are just screenshots.

I worked on so many assets that it is difficult to remember which ones I made; and to make matters more complicated I would often get rough assets from other artists, or completed assets that had to be animated, or fixed in some way. I've made an effort to post only artwork I distinctly remember creating from start-to-finish.

Resource Stages:

One of my biggest tasks was to create varying stages of resource camps, which could be unlocked as the player leveled up. Each of these had to animate differently, and change in appearance as it's animations were depleted. Each of the camps had a different worker guy too, and I did all the walk and idle cycles for all the re-skinned workers.



The first-stage camps I just had to modify and add stages of decay to; the rest I did from concept to completion. Above video taken from the game featuring most of the camp stages. (and yes, the final-stage sheep are Llamas, and I still can't believe I got that approved.)

Speaking of Llamas:

The quarries were probably the most intricate ones animation-wise. Here's a closer look at them

Decorations and Buildings:



The meat of Trade Nations are it's decorations and building upgrades. Above are all the animated decorations I can remember making; sadly there were a few cool ones that never quite made it into the game. Another big feature of the game was the 'premium' assets, which cost real money. They were always more fun to work on, since they were the most flashy, exciting props; but less people got to see them.

(The cat's sprite flipped every time it animated; this Gif does not do that.)

Here are some of the more mundane props. I was on statue and shrubbery duty for a week or so.

I was responsible for most of the fences and roads; they were an interesting undertaking from a mechanical standpoint, since they had to change appearances depending on their proximity to other props. This was a layering nightmare for me, and a minor inconvenience to the programmers. They turned out pretty neat though.

 And here are some sightly larger pictures nabbed from the build menu icons.

Aaaand speaking of icons,

Icons:

I made all kinds of icons for the game, it was weeks and weeks of icons. This is but a fraction of them.

User Interface:

The entire HUD was to be overhauled for an upcoming release, and all the visual concepting, heated brainstorming, and countless revisions were done by my co-worker Karyn and I. We both spent so long cooperatively hating this interface that I can no longer remember who did what; so here are some shots of the various menus.

It's a pretty decent system though, worth taking a look at in-game. There's lots of devious places where we swapped the typical location of "Okay" or "Cancel" with "Share," to get people to post things to their walls.

And that concludes this trip down memory lane.

-alex

Pat's Dice

Before I finally go to bed, one more exciting announcement:

A while back I made a virtual dice simulator named "Pat's Dice" (After the alchemist character I was playing in a dungeons and dragons campaign.) to teach myself some javascripting in Unity.

It turned out to be quite an undertaking, but having no scripting experience at all I learned a lot of fundamental concepts and started to get pretty comfortable with the process (Though my workflow still involves long talks with my friend Google).

My basic goal was to create a dice simulator that was driven by a physics engine but still perfectly randomized. The dice all spawn with randomized velocity and starting angle, and some custom scripts determine which side is facing up and feed that number into the GUITexts following the dice. Those numbers then get fed into the appropriate totals.

There was a lot of making arrays and parsing strings into integers and back again; but I'm proud of the accomplishment, since mere months ago I didn't know any of those terms. Most recently, along with some spit and polish on the art, I added the most-requested feature of launching multiple dice at once; as determined by the up/down arrow buttons.

Long story short: you should check it out. You can click here, or just click the page link at the top of the blog.

And with that, I'm off to make some pretense that I am not completely nocturnal. Later!

-alex

UPDATE: After some excellent bug testing by my friend Jeff, I have updated the html frame to extend for larger font sizes. If yours wasn't working, try it out now.

TNA Wrestling

One of the projects I worked on was TNA Wrestling. It was the first such project I saw from start to finish, and was in that respect very educational.

I did a little of everything on the project, all the props and environments, about 40% of the animations, some character textures and some preliminary character modelling.

The game was released for just about every smartphone and tablet available at the time; so one of the biggest hurdles was compatibility, the game had to be pulled back from the maximum specs of high-end devices in order to fit on low-end devices.

These shots were taken from an early-model iPad, so the the textures come through pretty respectably.

This is the IMPACT zone, the main arena. I must have watched 8 full hours of the show trying to gather reference for the room. Part of the trouble is the room's about the size of a small high school's gymnasium, and made to look larger. Like everything from the show; we based the game on what the show was trying to fake, not what it actually was.

I'd like to clarify my contribution here: I modeled and textured the arena and the ring, and created the signs in the crowd, as well as the 'human torch" character texture. The crowd itself and the character models were made by other co-workers, and the screens are displaying stock TNA footage.

Another setback was shifting client demands, so extra gameplay modes like cage matches and tag team had to be added on short notice. Here's the cage, also done by me.

You may have noticed some changes in the Arena's color palette; these represented the various events taking place during the career mode. There were additional arena dressings unlocked via in-game advertisement cooperation, pitched in this screen:

What's convenient about this screen is that I made that render, as well as all the assets. What you see there is a classic Hogan costume, (which got sent back once for revisions, through a huge pipeline of contacts, by hogan himself.) a Jeff Hardy-themed ring, and an America-themed ring. I did a lot of the upsell stuff when the project was winding up. 

My art director and I joked a lot about what we called "Douchebag Art," the sort of hilariously over-designed graphics often requested of us. The upsell rings were something to behold, so I'm sad I don't have more screenshots of them. I did however keep a screenshot of my favorite version of the Jeff hardy ring, which was sent back due to a licensing issue on the 'mask' logo.

There were a couple environments featured in the career mode that I made as well; in a lot of ways these were more fun to work on, since they were better-lit, and by that point I was sick to death of black.

This is Hogan's office. There's actually a pretty nice potted plant in one of the unseen corners. Thanks to limited camera angles; I'm not sure it ever got in the game. That's kind of sad. 

Below is the 'back stage' setting, where Christy Hemme interviewed the wrestlers. I ended up doing all of her animations, it was a jarring shift from the meaty man-suplexes.

Another added feature was the custom character builder. I got approval to do some of the more unusual color options; which was exciting, as we were pretty sure they were going to be cut. Naturally, I went wild.

On the same subject, I also did the tattoo art. There were some pretty ridiculous ones.

Last up on the showcase for now are the weapons' classic baseball bat and folding chair. Mostly all I have to say about them is that they are hard to get a screenshot of; when the AI kicks you you drop what you're holding.

I may be able to get some animation examples in the near future; but that's it for now. This was an interesting trip down memory lane.

-alex