HUGE ART DUMP

Huge art dump below.  I needed to get back in the habit of posting regularly so I figured the best way would be to post everything I missed out on. So there it all is. Enjoy, and come back for some more fun.

Updated Beauty Shots

I added some stickers and tweaked the grunge, spec, and reflection on my car material a while back. Here are some updated beauty shots.

And here's a close up, without so much perspective, of all the heavy metal band stickers I made up

Race Track Materials

Here are some materials I threw together for my track. My theme is kind of a near future, semi- Blade Runner in ruins inspired track. So, I'm going to have the chance to make some interesting futuristic/ scifi materials.

This hologram is for the finish line of my level...

I've been having a lot of fun with this material. There are a few things I want to tweak with this material but it's pretty close to done for now. Lighting in my level might force em to change some things. This whole material is made from two textures, grey-packed to the brim. So much power from something so little.

This arrow material was made fairly hastily with the mindset of anyone being able to use it in their level. I was able to mess around sine and cosine waves to make tangent waves, say whaaaa. Again, the material editor is crazy powerful and super fun. I'm going to mess around with this on esome more to fit my level better and not look so 'arrow' generic.

I just started making this force field material for some triggered aspects in my track. It's not really turning out how I originally imagined, but I also haven't spent much time on it. Here's what I have so far.

ZBrush Progress

WIP of my character. It's coming along. I'm very slow at ZBrush, which I suppose should be expected. I really like it though. It's something I can get lost in doing.

Programming CH6 - Force Fields

Challenge 6 in programming class was to use force fields to create an interesting contraption or event. I have these crystal shards revolving around this big mother shard. Once the player wanders too close the little shards become alert, flying away and then dart towards the player, damaging them on hit, until they are dead.

 There is a cylindrical force actor based in the center of the mother crystal which the shards are attracted to at level start. After the trigger volume is tripped, a countdown begins leading up to a radial impulse actor that pushes all the shards away. Once this happens another force field is activated, a radial force actor, which was attached to the player at level start, and attracts the shards to the player.  The shards themselves are ridged bodies.

I made the crystal shader and threw it on a crystal mesh (haha, crystal methmesh) I made real quick.

The material as a whole could have turned out a little better but I learned a lot from this one. And the focus of these challenges isn't really on the art, I keep using that excuse because it makes me feel better about myself.  I started messing with sine waves to mess with the distortion. The sine waves opened up a whole new set of doors for me. That material editor is supa powerful and I haven't even scratched the surface yet.


After looking back at this post I realized I could take a better picture of the crystal... doesn't really show it off as well as it could. Has to do for now

Programming CH5 - PhysX Lab

Challenge 5 was to make a convincing apex destructible asset in UDK using NVIDIA's PhysX lab. I decided to make a concrete pilar using a fracture map. The PhysX Lab is really cool but it takes a lot of tweaking to get the asset to fracture just the way I wanted it to. I added a particle system to spawn when the asset is being destroyed and it adds a lot.  I wanted to make my on particle system, but for the sake of strict deadlines and not very much spare time, I just tweaked one of UDK's built in particle systems.  It WORKS how I want it to and that was the important part of this assignment, hah.

Programming CH4 - Joints

Challenge 4 was focusing on joints. The challenge was to make a contraption using joints, and cloth if you wanted to. I made this crazy spider thing that slams his leg down on this seesaw and launches some balls onto a piece of cloth. I used hinge joints and matinee for everything. I put a physical material on the balls so they would react they way I wanted them to.

For the material in this challenge I wanted to tackle and animated material. Which is incredibly easy, to my surprise. All I had to do was take my video, courtesy of Brendon Small and his wonderful show Metalocalypse, and convert it to a .bink file. Hook that up to emissive and that's it. I played around with some bump offset, fresnel, and powers to make it look more like a screen. The material is huge, 25MByte, but it's a neat little experiment.

Programming CH3 - Ridged Body Phyics

In our third programming challenge we focused on ridged body physics. The challenge was to create 2 convincing ridged body assets that damaged the played based on what type of material is was and what velocity it was traveling. Physical materials were also assigned to add sound and make the asset more convincing.  The ridged bodies were to be placed in a fun level people could drive through and be challenged.

I chose icicles and metal balls. The icicles slide around on the ground which you can see in the video below. The metal balls just destroy. The kismet for this is pretty much all trigger volumes and modify health with some float variable stuff to modify damage based on velocity.

The material i did was the ice/snow material. I made it following a 3DMotive tutorial, which is why I won't post a screen grab of the material layout. I will, however, show what the material does.

The material uses up vector math to always put the snow on top of the mesh. I can rotate any mesh, as seen above, and in real time, the snow moves so it is on the up facing sides of the mesh. This makes set dressing reallllly easy.  The material is also highly parametized (?) which I think is a really good habit to get in. There were seriously like 29 parameters you can change within this one material.

Programming CH1 - Spiky Room

For our first Programming challenge we had to create a spiky room trap. It is a room you enter, locks the player in, then triggers and event to move spikes in and kill the player.

I made a riddle for my room. The art isn't the best but all of the programming works and it's a little riddle game. You enter the room and hit a trigger volume which drops statues blocking you in. Hit the button and the riddle hologram appears. A few seconds later the spikes are triggered, entering from the sides. Choose the right answer and the spikes are reversed allowing you to live. Proving I was able to kill the player I added the back section so someone definitely dies.

In these challenges I try to do something new in the material editor for an extra challenge. In this level I made a hologram repeating the bump offset expression and adding some panning smoky textures in the background.

Intro Video

For an intro video of my track I want to loosely follow the template of this game's, Blur, intro.

Open with a few beauty shots of the track, setting up the theme and art direction of the track.. After the beauty shots I will introduce cars racing. From here the video will basically be a fast-paced montage of cars racing and encountering mechanics of the track.