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

Poképeople

A little while ago, I started drawing people I knew as pokémon. (No YOU'RE a nerd.) The rule was the person's name had to sound like the pokémon in question. For instance:

Dave Rigley + Wiggleytuff = Rigleytuff

Alex + Snorlax = Snorlex

Lisa + Hitmonlee = Hitmonleesa

And here are some unfinished sketches of Snorlex, Rigleytuff, Poliroth (Dan Roth + Poliwrath), and Garyados (Gary + Gyarados)

I enjoyed these; they were just the right combination of terrible wordplay and stupid artwork. I may do more.

-alex

Starving Artist Gifts

One of the classic plights of the artist is to be asked for free artwork; the request is innocent enough, but sometimes born of a misconception that drawing isn't really work. This conundrum is turned on its head on gift-giving occasions, when the drawing that was really work didn't result in an abundance of real money. The fallback gift? Free artwork of course!

This one was for my ladyfriend on her birthday not long ago. Yeah, I know. Unbearable.

These were for my sister; the occasion of the first I forget, the second was for her birthday.

This one was a mother's day gift, for my mother. It's a drawing of my siblings and I. The faces came out a little creepy, but she liked it.

-alex

Rigging, part 2

Here are a few videos outlining the functionality of the Dan and Alex rigs. My internet connection being as feeble as it is, I had to reduce the size of the videos by half to ensure they would upload sometime this year.

First up: Dan. This video also contains an introduction to the subject and some anecdotes about the process. Dan was an interesting undertaking; I wanted to build a rig that could do whatever the students wanted. Naturally, this proved daunting, but ultimately very educational.



Next: Alex. Building on the feedback I had received with the Dan rig, I set about building the Alex character; trying to match the style and essential functionality while eliminating features he wouldn't make use of.



Finally: Boot hat. I wanted to include a snippet about this rig because while he uses elements from the previous two, he was designed for very specific purposes; built to be sturdy and work well in my pipeline.



And with that, I bid you good night.

-alex

Rigging, part 1

One of my big responsibilities at the GAIF was teaching Rigging; a task which involved learning a great deal about rigging, for starters. In the process, I recalled a major qualm I had had with my own education; that all students interested in animation were expected to build and rig their own models, or locate such rigs online. While this was good for building generalist skills, it resulted in talented animators working with inconsistent, unreliable rigs; and generally deciding they didn't want to be animators after all.

Enter these guys: Dan and Alex.

Working from a sketch my co-worker Dan Roth drew (he draws himself in a specific style, which I wanted to re-create.) I constructed the model of Dan. Later, loosely based on that style, I built a model of myself. (Note: the huge muscles aren't just a result of an absurdly high self-esteem; the students needed a character with different bodily proportions, and my scarecrow-physique wouldn't have cut it.)

I'll post more about the specifics of their rigs and a little about how they work later.

-alex

Boot Hat, Continued

And I am back! Here are those renders I promised.

I built him a simple but effective rig, for some nefarious, animation-related plans I have for him. More on that later. Also, here's a closer look at his horrific little stabbing implement.

-alex