Final Car and Character

Here are the final turnarounds for my car and character. His name is Gunnar and he drives a 1974 Gremlin X.

Here are some turnarounds:

I tried to get APEX cloth to work to give my character some sweet greasy long hair, but apparently there is a bug with the APEX plugin in maya right now. I tried dozens of workarounds, but couldn't get it working. I got pretty close, so I'll probably revisit the hair and get it working.

Attract Trailer

Final edit of my attract trailer for Sophomore Spinout 2013.

This video is a compilation of action shots from many of my fellow classmates tracks.

Tattooooooo

Another sketch and almost finished tattoo for my character. Classic grim reaper to be placed on the shoulder.

Summer

I started concepting a little project to keep me busy and fresh over summer. All I have now is some rough sketches and a bunch of notes and ideas. I'm just about ready to start a nice concept painting to work from. It's looking like I won't have the painting done until school gets out, but that's fine.

So the project I'll be making is a small environment using the same Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, UDK workflow I've been used to. I may try and throw some 3DS Max in there.

Short version explanation: A huge cave space. In the cave space a smooth granite bridge spans an inifinite chasm. Across the bridge, an alcove houses a giant fragmented shard that is mechanically harvesting the essence of this cave, which is being absorbed into and body of water underneath the shard and then into carved grooves in a flat section of the granite wall.

Long Version explanation: The idea of this environment is a granite, cave-like space. The walls of this cave will be organic and jagged granite, with a transition to a super smooth, highly polished walking surface. This surface leads to a bridge, made of the same highly polished granite. The bridge leads over and infinitely deep chasm and into an alcove hollowed out of the side of this huge rough, granite wall. Extruding from a hole in the ceiling of the alcove will be this huge shape made up of fragmented pieces of this granite stuff, arranged in a cone, or wedding cake layered style. Each layer will be abruptly rotating in opposite directions. They will rotate a quarter-turn and stop, then begin again. I want that movement to be very harsh and mechanical. I want this object to feel like it is harvesting this essence stuff from the granite. This big fragmented shard will be suspended above a small body of water. Out of the cone, shard thing this essence stuff will be absorbed into the water, which it will then travel over to a big smooth piece of the granite wall with grooves carved into it. The essence will be sucked up through the grooves into a receiver of sorts. So this big cone object will be harvesting this essence which will be collected by the flat section.

It is probably pretty convoluted right now, but I'm still working some stuff out. I'm setting this project up to allow me to spend a lot of time on the shaders and in matinee.

Here are some rough sketches, which are also probably pretty convoluted:

So you can see a semi-thumbnail in the center of the page of the bridge leading into this alcove space. Also, some ideas of what the shard extrusion will do and possibly look like.

Another thumbnail of pretty much the same thing. A little bit more detailed than the other, but it's pretty much just a re visitation of the previous page of sketches. I think it's a little more clear what's happening in this 'thumbnail'. I really need to work on the read-ability of my thumbnails...

Once I spend a little more time on the design of everything and get a solid painting started, I think a lot of this will be more clear.

Programming - Exploding Crate and Barrel

Here are my finished crate and barrel meshes we had to make for programming. I ended up using these in my race level quite a bit. 

Check out the attached video to see the panning textures. In this material, and the crate material, I continued using sine, cosine, and tangent waves, along with competing panners to make some cool stuff.

 The first image is for the front and back of the crate. The bottom image is used for the remaining 4 sides of the crate. Same ole song and dance with masks, vertex math, and panners. I've gotten into the habit of making everything into parameters, so I'm able to change color, speed, size, and tiling of everything on the fly.

The basic kismet hookup for the barrel explosion is:

Damage threshold parameters to start the event on a trigger encompassing the barrel (If you shoot the barrel twice it explodes intead of 'charging up' for a few seconds). MIC on the barrel to change color and speed of the panning textures when damaged. Smoke particles activate on damage. Then the mesh is destroyed after a few seconds of 'charging up' and an explosion particle goes off. There is also a radial impulse that goes off with the explosion, damaging nearby actors.    

The crate is a prefab of rigid bodies. A trigger encompassing the crate activates a small impulse actor inside the crate prefab. When damaged, the trigger fires the impulse actor causing the crate to break apart, or explode. There are rigid bodies, in this case the little crystal things, inside the crate that also are activated when the crate explodes. These crystal rigid bodies are destroyed on collision with the player and a custom HUD counter appears, with an image of the crystal, in the corner, making it seem like the player picked up the item.

       

New Beauty Shots

Here are a couple more teaser beauty shots from my level. I'll have a sweet flythrough and an attract video up here soon. For now:

Here's a tattoo I finished for my character. Pre-grunge pass.

And the finished Murder Wizard patch. I'll probably revisit this and touch it up. Again, pre-grunge pass.

Finished Level

A little peek at my level.. Ebethronis Circuit. Everything was made by myself. I wanted to see how much I could get done alone. I would have liked to have more set dressing and lighting done, but I am pretty happy with how much I got done and how much I learned. More good stuff to come.

Murder Wizard

A little WIP of my character textures. I still need to do a  grunge pass, add some tattoos on his arms and neck, give his jacket some patches, and get his luscious locks working with that sweet, sweet APEX.

Here's a little preview of the kind of good stuff that will be on his jacket. This one will be the biggest patch, right in the middle of his back.

I made up a bunch of metal band names for my character to worship. This is the WIP logo for Murder Wizard. The 'Wizard' text will be down in his great beard.

Attract Video

Pretty soon we'll be making an attract video for our tracks. For now we are supposed to research some videos of existing racing game attract videos and get an idea of camera moves, mood, etc.

http://www.gamespot.com/f1-2012/videos/f1-2012-attract-mode-trailer-6396221/

The formula is basically the same for all these videos:

Short shots, action packed gameplay, and some nice vistas. Pretty much just showing off all of the coolest parts of the game.

Fascist Scum UDK Vertex Paint

Not cool UDK...