Texturing and More

I have faced the beast known as texturing and come out wiser and better for it.

It isn't too difficult to do, it just requires a lot of patience to do it well.  Unwrapping, sewing edges, making sure the texture won't distort.  I had the unfortunate lack of foresight to make my model a Hork Bajir rather than the human we were supposed to be modeling, and it's legs were... an absolute mess to deal with.  I had to go back to them after I had more of a handle on it.

It's definitely something useful to practice, however, I'd also really like to get into actually painting textures.  I think it will likely frustrate me a lot at first, but there's quite a bit of power in texturing and it's a skill I'd like to have.

Might be good to look into it more for our final project and get some practice in.


In other, slightly outdated news, a few weeks ago I purchased both Pokemon White and Dragon Age II, and I have to say I'm enjoying both quite a bit though I feel a bit guilty for starting on Dragon Age II while my copy of Dragon Age: Awakenings that I got for Christmas is still sitting there in the plastic.... probably feeling very unloved.

I'm not particularly far in either due to dividing the little gaming time I have between the two of them, however they're both quite enjoyable so far.  Dragon Age II still feels quite buggy and slightly unpolished however, but it's great fun, I love the characters just as much as I loved the cast from Dragon Age Origins, and gray morality!!  Thank you Bioware for making me think beyond "Do I want to be evil or good this time around?".  I also like the fact that the dialogue options have tone indication, you can be blunt and forceful or lighthearted and sarcastic, or diplomatic and pacifying.

And pokemon... goodness, every time a new game comes out I go on such a pokemon binge.  It is my guilty pleasure, I admit it, but I just love the series.  I grabbed the oshawott, named him Derpymaru, evolved him into a dewott and I'm currently looking for an everstone to prevent him from becoming a samurott (I like dewott's design much more).  I still love pokemon after all these years, but I have noticed their designs seem to have gotten unnecessarily complicated over the years, they were much simpler in the beginning in general, nowadays they have so much extra crap on them.

Anyways, I suppose it's time to wrap this up.  To end things off, I'll leave you with this trailer for an upcoming movie...  It may be of interest to you, after all future events such as these will affect you in the future :P

Character Modeling

So this past week we started character modeling in Maya.  I find it rather interesting, especially considering before I joined up with my fellow future Game Design students, I was kicking around the idea of designing and modeling a creature for my final.

Despite teachers constantly talking about the importance of not saving over the same file, making new files so that you can always go back to a previous version if you bork something up, I regrettably rarely listen.  However in Maya, I can definitely see the usefulness of this.  Particularly because as you work on your model and make it more complex in order to get the shape you want, you do risk winding up with far too many vertexes to be able to work efficiently.  I know myself, and I know that I could easily end up with a mess of a model, too complex for a newcomer like me to be able to really work with it.

Over the past couple of days I've been looking at low poly models to try to get a sense of how complicated it would be to create our own zombies from scratch for our game.  It's interesting to see how people fudge details on models by using textures; why painstakingly model wrinkles, folds in clothing, curls of hair, etc. when you can simply texture it to make it appear as if those things are there?  Textures are powerful things, and I'd love to be able to add it to my arsenal of skills, however we've only covered some of the basics last term, so texturing is still a bit of an intimidating creature in my mind.

Thankfully I believe we'll be tackling that beast next class.

Extra Credits

Wonderful little videos relating to the game industry and game design:  Extra Credits

They raise some wonderful points, this one is particularly interesting, it looks at game design as a whole and what it takes to be a good designer.  I also like their thoughts on choice in games.

I have my first Maya class today!  Wheeee!  3d work!  These are entirely new waters for me, happy happy!