Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Tower In Action

I'm finishing the tower level tonight. It's mostly the little things that take the time. I had to make a quad for every torch, some for portal detection, etc. Here is a shot of the tower level being played. This is the stairs.


Here you are in first person mode standing on the roof.


That is a Verizon Droid phone if you're wondering.


Monday, April 26, 2010

Tower Power, Shared Texture Space

This is the lightmap layer of the tower level for the game I'm working on with Rob of Battery Powered Games. This is the final level, the Tower, where the big show down with a magical wizard takes place. The game should be out in a month (estimated release second week of May, 2010). It's called [NAME TBD].


I've been using blender solidly for about half a year now and I have developed a number of tricks. My favorite trick thus far is baking textures with shared texture space. Essentially I design a symmetric scene, set up the lights and UV only part the model. I then use this part of the model to create the rest of the scene, but I push their UV's out of the main UV space. This is a trick, since Blender won't bake the textures for these faces (when they would normally cause problems), and they are technically in the same place if texture mode set to repeat.

Here you can see the UV texture space. The faces pushed to the top are part of the stairs design, while the parts pushed to the right are levels.


In this image you'll see that the stairs have essentially the same texture mapping from one level to the next. What is really nice is that since they are the same, they share the same UV texture space, I reap the benefits of the resolution only doing it once. It might seem really weird but its backfaces only. This means you see through geometry from one side, but not the other. So you can see the stairs through the walls so to speak. It's so natural to me, but I expect some won't know what they are looking at.


Here you can see I've highlighted the portions of the texture in the main UV space. Pretty good use of the space I think.



Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Fun in 3D, Tron Style


Rock Giant

Rock Giant Tron Style

This is my latest model for NAME TBD. Obviously not going to use the Tron style version, but it gave the developer a laugh.


Monday, April 12, 2010

Low Polygon Characters



Here are a few shots of the characters I've been working on lately. They are a combo level boss. The knight is the first half. Once you beat him, he takes on his spider form.

He should be appearing as the level two boss in the upcoming Android game.