Fortune Dragon Update

Thought that I would post an update to the Fortune Dragon model that I am currently working on. As of right now I am just wrapping up my 10th hour on the bitmap texture creation with probably 2 or 3 more hours left to go before I have to move on. Here is what the little guy looks like right now...

LCD Colour Calibration

Last time I had a laptop (about 2 years ago now) I had an issue getting the colour calibration on the LCD display just right. The issue that I had is that darks really didn't end up dark and I didn't have the greatest representation of colours at the opposite ends of the spectrum. This of course resulted in a great bug with Lore Invasion where the ambient in the missions was so dark that players could hide in the shadows :)

Since I got my new Dell laptop I have spent a lot of time fiddling around with the display settings (via the nVidia drivers) trying to get that perfect, yet ellusive colour setup that I as an artist can be happy with. I have come close but as of yet haven't gotten it exactly as needed. So if anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

Fortune Dragon Update

At work Friday I was fortunate enough to have more time available, minutes a few emergency graphics tweaks that needed to be done, to work on the Fortune Dragon that I talked about in my last update. The day was split roughly 50/50 between tweaking the model and generating the UVW data.

With the model I spent more time tweaking the general form. Teaked the face so that he had pudgy little cheeks and big cartoon like eyes, adjusted the arms so that they were thicker, modified the tummy so that it was more pronounced and rounder, made the tail a bit subbier and lastly tweaked the legs so that they were rounder and more stocky.



With the UVW mapping, I had about 5 or 6 hours on Friday to generate all this data and align it up into something that I could work with. I decided to go symettrical with everything since I didnt feel that there were any important ports that needed its own non-symetrical mapping (as I would say on a human characters face). My main goal here was to minimize the clustering as much as possible. This resulted in the body, arms, legs and wings being broken apart into their own clusters so that I can paint the texture for this properly in Photoshop. I am so used to working with UVW data now that I find the most annoying thing of the process is packing all the UVW data in so that you maximize your available UVW space. Here's a smaller version of the UVW data that I will be working with.



Texture painting starts on Monday :)

Good Fortune Dragon

Here at work, day job work that is, I have been asked to design and develop a Dragon that will end up being a little 3D character that will swoop around and about one of our puzzle games that we have developed called Fortune Symbols.


A screenshot of Fortune Symbols for those of you who have forgotten what it looks like.

Initially our thoughts were to do a traditional Chinese Lung dragon since the game has a Chinese theme and feel to it, but this was eventually scrapped. The primary reason for that was that we needed the dragon to fly about, and in my research I have found that most Chinese Lungs don't have wings and if they do they are tiny. The second requirement is that we needed the guy to look very cute and friendly and that's not the easiest thing to do without having Disney on your butt for copying Mushu from Mulan.


A reference sketch that I had done for a Chinese Lung, kinda mean looking though.

In the end what we ended up with is a more western (ie. European) looking dragon that suits our needs and can be used within the game.



And here is the current work that I have done modeling the little guy in 3D. I have done about 6 hours of work on him now and have a couple of hours of refinement left before I need to move onto UVW maps and texturing. At which point you can expect to see another update.

Logo

I wanted to show off some new Realm Wars development shots of work that I had recently done but I won't have anything ready until later on tonight. As such I thought that I would show off a logo I just completed today for a game that we are working on here.

Max Trick - Moving Up/Down the Hierarchy

Here's a handy little trick for you Max artists out there when you are dealing with a hierarchy such as a bone chain. You can use the "PageUp" and "PageDn" keys to move up and down your hierarchy. This handly little feature has been in Character Studio for a while but it also works in 3DS Max and can make your life a lot easier for when you need to adjust a chain of objects and don't want to reselect them.

Guild Wars & PvP

I have been playing Guild Wars off and on for the past couple of months as I find time in between contract work, developing games and having my wife force me play World of Warcraft with her. For those of you who haven't played Guild Wars before its a pretty cool little game that mixes Diable with a MMO to create this interesting quasi blend of the two. The game is lush and very beautiful to say the least with some amazing attention to detail in both the art and code, although its combat system is a bit slow and annoying (but thats why I figure they put in a secondary motion system to simulate soft bodies such as player attributes). Overall it is a great game to play especially since there are no monthly fees and for the most part you can partake in the game on your own without worrying about MMO jerks.

My big complaint with the game though is how the developers are choosing to focus on the PvP aspect of the game as time goes on and players complete the main game story and get bored with making new characters. Every new update that you hear of from ArenaNet seems to involve new features that they are adding to reward PvP players including giving access to some really cool, rare and sought after stuff only if you get a good PvP ranking.

So I have to ask what the hell is up with this? To me as a casual player of Guild Wars I can most definately assure you that it's not the type of game I wanted to invest my time in playing. I want to kill monsters, go on epic quests and adventures, save the land from the Charr and all the usual fantasy themed crap that goes with it. If I get a cool item I want it to be because its something I busted my ass off in the game and earned through countless hours of toil to defeat some quest or vanquish some boss from the face of realm with. Not because I can enter into some lame ass arena battle with or against a horde of other players to see who's the p0wn the other guys the best. So I have to wonder why is the casual gamer who has no interest in tacked on PvP games punished or at the very least held back?

New Wireless Gear

During all the madness of trying to visit two seperate groups of families who both wanted to do something on Saturday I managed to setup some new wireless gear in my house.

The first and most obvious addition, well more of a replacement, was getting a new wireless router. I had a Dlink DI-614+ wireless router before but it only did 802.11b, but luckily Costco has a sweet deal going on right now for the DI-624 wireless router that does 802.11a/b/g. The router itself is roughly $98 bucks Canadian (everywhere else it goes for $127) plus good old Costco has a deal going with Dlink for a $30 mail-in rebate through Costco (which basicly means that you know you aren't going to get screwed on the rebate).

Speaking of Costco's rebate system, I love the fact that you can file your rebates online now. I had submitted the rebate form through their site on Saturday morning and by Sunday morning I had recieved confirmation that the form was in their machines for processing. Quick and painless.

The second, and coolest, wireless addition was another Dlink product, their Streaming Media Server (DCM-320) which I also bought at Costco (ya I buy a lot at Costco, you just cannot beat their no questions asked return policy if you don't like the product). What this media server does is it ties in music, photos or movies that you have on your machines on your network with your home theatre system so you can relax in the comfort of your living room. The device was incredibly simple to setup and get working on my wireless network even with the 128-bit encryption that I had done. On top of that from the amount that I have used it thus far the device works like a champ, it's super easy to use and thus far I have no complaints about it.

NASA We Have A Problem...

I think at every point in someones life when they were a kid they wanted to be an Astronaut, soaring in the vast emptiness of space and using cool gear. I can imagine though that if I were ever given the chance that I would probably do something like this Discovery Astronaut in this photo.

Insert your best cheesy caption as a comment :)

Life at Adobe

Over at CGChannel they had a link in an obscure corner of their web site about a little photo-journal review that someone over at PhotoshopNews did regarding their recent visit to Adobe.

Obviously the page doesn't leak any information but its dammed cool looking at the day to day operation of Adobe and some of the perks that their employees get like free beer in their own private "Cafe Adobe". I have to say that Adobe looks to offer some of the coolest "little perks" that I have yet heard of, everyone does pop, but a cooler full of free beer is just awesome!

Cool Art by Stanislav Szukalski

My friend Lucas Feld threw me this URL earlier this afternoon for some cool images to check out regarding a Polish sculpter who does some amazing work that is very Aztec inspired. You can check out these cool images for your self at Laughing Squid.

The August Long Weekend

Here in Canada the first weekend in August is a long weekend which is there to celebrate "Heritage Day", which in theory you are supposed to spend doing cultural events depending on what you family background is.

Here in Edmonton we help celebrate this long weekend by having "Heritage Days" which is basicly a big showcase of any/all cultural groups in one of our larger parks here in the city. Its one of those things that you always want to check out but never get off your ass to go do it, my friend James participates in it every year with his Kenjistu class who does a pretty impressive demonstration of their skills (I get to see the VHS copy of this every year, its pretty awesome). OK well I sort of side tracked things here explaining why we have a long weekend, so I hope it was a bit of an educational experiance on why Edmonton is North America's "Festival City" (which is because we have something major going on pretty much every weekend of the summer).

Like I said I didn't check out Heritage Days, instead I spent much of the weekend goofing off with friends and family. On Saturday we did a LAN party as a sort of "stag" for a friends brother who is highly religious and is marrying into an even more religous family, so that meant no booze, no shenanigans and worse yet no strippers or even a strip club. No this was a 100% dry geek stag going from Noon to 2am. To make matters worse summer decided to come and visit Edmonton this particular weekend, which normally is great news for a long weekend, just shitty if you are trying to do some gaming in 32C weather. Over this course of time we played a variety of games including Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Enemy Territory and Swat 4. Swat 4 is an interesting game made by the same guys that brought us the much maligned Tribes Vengeance and also uses the Unreal engine. What makes this game intersting is that its very polished in some areas (ie. overall nice levels, nice art, pretty solid code) but in others its pretty nasty (ie. many of their game types are pretty boring or just dont make sense, some of the worst UI I have seen in a game since MOO3, unreal netcode that allows you to shoot through doors, poor lighting). The coolest thing of Swat 4 is that its basicly Rainbow 6 but sexy, it made for some interesting LAN play though.

Sunday I ended up heading out to the in-laws cabin to go golfing. It was the first time that I had hit a ball all year and I shot a nasty 123 over 18 holes (73 on the front and 50 on the back). Needless to say I reenacted some of the scene from Happy Gilmore out on the links with my poor play and bad luck, but I had fun so thats all that counts. One odd note was that the golf course was infested with grass hoppers who decided to go and sit on the greens most of the day, you kinda got used to bug guts and using your putter to clear a path to the hole but after a while you kinda got used to it.

Monday amounted me remaining out at the lake and enjoying the fine weather with my wife and her family. It remained ungodly hot, as in still +30C, so we stayed in the shade, though we were wishing that we had put the boat in the water this year.



Overall though it was a pretty weekend of relaxing and doing absolutely nothing in particular. Its time to get back to the grind though and ensure that Realm Wars will be ready for LoreCon plus do some additional work for 21-6 on their latest project.