Semester Done

So we have finally come to the end of this semester. Remind me to not take 17 credit hours again.

Anyways, we made our presentation today and it went really well. Brandon and Pc were working on a really cool level that would spawn a squadron of enemy ships and attack. Then once all the enemy ships were dead, a capital ship would also appear. But they were having some issues, so we had to present using the old level we used on the last presentation two weeks ago. Bummer.

Anyways, I can finally catch up on my sleep because I haven't had much of it in the last few days.

I didn't really do anything else other than what i posted last night. I was going to work on the texture for the enemy ship today, but Charlie already had a texture ready to go, so we just used his texture.

But just because the semester is over, it doesn't mean that we get to do nothing for the next few weeks. It just means we now have more time to dedicate to the game. :( We won't be working on it as much as we have during the semester, but we are still expected to keep working.

Charlie said that I should UV and texture all my ships because they are most likely going to end up as enemy ships. Then if I really don't have anything else to do, then I can either make more space content (debris and stuff) or make more ships.

Also, after class I went down to L130 and reviewed a game called Break Limit. I can't remember who it was, but someone in our group said to try and review games that have to do with what we are doing. Even if I was somewhat constrained on what I could/should review, this game seemed fun from the description that they give.

Prepare to go mind-numbingly fast as you Blast, Smash and Break Limit through every one and thing in your way! Powerful weapons that get stronger as you play, will help to power a ship that becomes an invincible wrecking ball while accelerating. Alpha Centauri will never be the same! Featuring online scoreboards for Gold subscribers, and local scoreboards to prove you’re better than your siblings!

It actually turned out to be really fun. I spend around 1 -  1 1/2 playing the game before I realized what time it was. I wasn't really good at it, but it still kept me hooked for a really long time.

Anyways, that's all for now. Thanks for reading!

The End is Near

So tomorrow we have to present out Alpha version of the game to the class.

I've been working on the enemy ship for the demo, but it wasn't the one that I had originally made. The one that I made was funky and had triangles in it, which we can't have. So Charlie game me one of his models that he had made a little while back and I cleaned it up and tweaked it just a bit before I started to work on the UV mapping.

I don't think that I've said this before, but I hate UV mapping. Its time consuming and its hard to get it just right. I was trying to take a shortcut and used Maya's auto mapping tool... huge mistake! It did an OK job at mapping out the UV with out distorting them too much. The only problem was that it had broke it up into a ton of little pieces.

So thinking that it was still going to save me time, I sat there putting together the pieces into bigger chunks. But it was taking too much time just trying to figure out which pieces went together. After almost 2 hours of work, I saw that I had made little progress so I decided to start over and do the UVs by hand. After another 2 hours of work, I was done.

The UVs don't look too great, since I just did them in a rush. Also, the lack of sleep might have had something to do with it. Last night I didn't sleep because I was working on a project for another class. I've had around 3 hours of sleep total.

Anyways, here are a few renders from the model the Charlie made and that I UV mapped:

That's all, thanks for reading.

Junk Space Ship - Reworked

So I have to rework on the junk space ship. To make it look beat up, I was trying to use deformers in Maya. But I couldn't make it look the way I wanted it to look, so I will probably have to work on it in Mudbox and get a bump map on it instead. But I will leave that for the next sprint in the mean time. We have to demo our Alpha version this Thursday, so I have to make sure that the ship we are going to use as enemies look as good as possible.

In the meantime, I'll just post the renders of the ship that I did before I used the deformers.

I've also started to work on making the enemy ship that we will be using for the demo. I had to rework the model because my original model's geometry was really messy. But fixing the problem was more difficult than I originally thought. In the process of cleaning up the geometry, some triangles formed. I'm trying to get some help in fixing the triangles.

Once that's taken care of, I will work on making the UV maps and a texture for Thursday's demo. 

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Junk Spaceship Done

So today we didn't have anything in class as far as a lecture goes. Bob and Roger left open for us to talk about the stuff that we want to do and just keep working.

I finished a NASA space ship and made it look old and beat up. I finished it today and I didn't have time to do renders of it, but I'll do them and post an update on my blog about it.

In the meantime, our last sprint starts today and I have to focus on making one of my ships really good since it's going to be the main enemy ship in the meantime. I have to finish it in the next few days so that I can layout the UVs, make a texture, and maybe even a bump map on Mudbox.

Thats it for now, thanks for reading.