3D: Character assignment!

In tandem with our cars, we had to make a character to drive that car. I present to you Penny Royal, punk cab driver possessed by the TV future ghost of Queen Elizabeth II! I wanted to stick to a very punk aesthetic to match my car, so sticking to a late 60s early 70s fashion and shape language was very important. The television set was a bit of a wildcard idea for me; originally she looked like this:

 But I thought a television would give me a chance to have fun with materials as well as get some hard surface modelling in.

Sculpted in zBrush, normals and diffuse painted in 3D coat, and a final handpainted topcoat done in Photoshop, Penny Royal is one of my more favourite projects of this semester. I'm always a huge fan of handpainting things, so this was a chance to really dig my teeth into it!

 Here's what the television set effect looks like:

and here's a warning to pay attention to your UV layout when you import...

GD: Maya Python Script Ideas

So it's time to start brainstorming what sort of scripts I want to build in Maya! In Programming we've moved on from particles to learning about serious coding, and we're being versed in both Python and MEL. For these tools, though, we're primarily using Python. But what sort of tools would be useful for me in Maya?

1. A toolbelt: combines all tools made by other GAD students into one easy-to-navigate UI with iterable functions for easy adding and subtracting
2. A tool that senses if two verts are close enough together, to merge them without needing verts selected
3. A simple prepare-for-FBX-export tool: freeze transforms, delete history, merge close verts, smooth all edges, bring mesh to dead centre of grid, centre pivot at bottom of mesh (all optional)
4. Take the selected mesh and 'convert it' to UDK measurements: if, for example, you want your mesh to be 3ft tall in UDK, it will scale your mesh appropriately. this will have a UI where you imput the desired size of your mesh.
5. Turn all pivots within a rig to face a certain direction
6. Flood the skin weight influences of an entire rig to 0, except for the selected pivot which has a 1 influence
7. When separating previously combined meshes, ensure all individual meshes have a centered pivot (something Maya strangely does not do)
8. Rock generator: take selected cube and move verts about randomly
9. Easier access to constantly update materials from Photoshop when editing the textures (so something like 3D coat that automatically updates when you save the Photoshop file) (this may be a tough one)
10. Save reminder, or incremental save update

GD: Racing Level Post Mortem

Come Monday and come resubmits, I'll be essentially done with the building aspects of my level! It's come a long way since the first concept, so I'll go through some of the new iterations, what made and what didn't make the cut. I'll start off with the original concept of the level:

First off, a moment of silence for the Beginner's Boost that didn't quite make the cut. Unfortunately, the constant rising and falling of the platform made it so the player could be flipped over too easily, and access to the London Tube was just too difficult to finagle into the final track shape. What a shame! However, a few things still remained the same:

The Crown Jewels Hall is still alive and pinging: in the final iteration, by running past each signposted area by the bumpers, you unlocked a ramp that would lead up to a shortcut. First, though, you have to make it past a power-mad Evil Mecha Prince William!

(Once you hit him, he explodes in a shower of sparks and lost limbs. He's not that much of a threat.)
There's also a lack of bumpers now, as there's too much of a bottleneck in that area. Instead, I put turret-activated tanks that fire at will on any passing car!

The London Eye is still there, but in a slightly different form. I couldn't get the track to curve around it (the player often had too much trouble turning that quickly) so I used it as a 180 device to book-end the linear quality of the track.

The pistons are now London buses, as per the very real danger of traffic in central London.

And finally, the Houses of Parliament serve not only as a place of visual interest but a place of danger! For debris will tumble from the rooftops into the path of an unsuspecting passer-by, trapping them.

Overall I wish I had had more time to work on this level: I put a lot of thought into the game play itself, but in the end because I didn't put as much effort into the visual aspects the game overall was hurt. Never underestimate the power of strong visuals!

GD: Attract Trailer Research

Now my level's pretty much done (post mortem coming soon!) here's some research for the attract trailer!

MarioKart 8's coming out soon, so of course Nintendo's trying to garner up as much hype as they can. All of their trailers are bright and shiny, like their games, but the focus is entirely on the gameplay. MarioKart is a well-established franchise, so Nintendo wastes no time on setting up the narratives of the courses. Instead, it's all game play-and-display, showing off all the new things they've implemented. The camera angles are those of most in-game footage, so the viewer feels like they're already playing the game. New items, new race course styles, and new vehicles are all shown as integrated parts of the game, giving them enough focus without making the trailer entirely about the new instead of how it fits in with the old.

GD: HUD Design Process

So for another aspect of our game level, we have to design the HUD! Using Kismet and draw sequences, we can tell the user how fast they're going, what lap they're on, and how close they are to boost.
First off, I had to do some research about speedometers. I wanted to make mine look like the one inside my car, but Austin FX4 dashboard images are surprisingly hard to come by! The closest I could get was this:

Which doesn't really tell us anything. So, instead, I decided to just do a basic 1960s design, using some old speedometers as reference.

A lot of old speedometers read left to right in a linear fashion, which works well for me as it's more difficult to implement a radial speedometer in kismet. I also researched a lot of 1960s graphic design to inform my shape language.

Everything's very geometrical, with clean edges and a simple design. This should be very easy to emulate! Finally, I took a look at some previous racing game HUD designs.

Which are all, similarly, very minimal. I wanted to come up with a design that was simple and unobtrusive, so here's my first pass!

3D: Particle Effects Showcase

Another work in progress series of shots on the particle systems I've made in UDK! The framerate is a bit wonky, but I'll try and upload a better one soon.