The Characters

Unfortunately, I forgot to the previous week to include the revised version of the main character Frea. Her colour scheme has been changed to reflect the look of a young girl.

Last week I finalised the Villainous Clown.

However I am not too happy with its texturing and if there is time at the end, I will try and revise it. Adriaan Pointed out that the Shoes do not match the nimble frame of the clown, being both clunky but I feel that the character moving around quickly in such things would add to the fear. I also like the connotations to the old frankenstein monster who always had overly large shoes.

Two things have cropped up recently concerning the FMP. The first is maintaining a good Pixel density balance across all assets, as to keep things from looking blurry or using a texture size unnecessarily large. To solve this I created a checker pattern pattern in Photoshop and flood fill a 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024 so each texture maintains the same density and apply them to the buildings.

This will insure a balance across texture maps.

The second issue is that the Nintendo Wii only handles a screen resolution of 480i, 854x480. This makes having large texture maps on objects pointless as it will rescale down due to the draw resolution

The last two weeks I have been working on the Circus Tent and Ferris Wheel for the FMP.

The Circus tent went fine, however the first incarnation of the Ferris Wheel looked too bulky.

It was suggested by Adrian, our lecturer, to refine it more into a spider web shape. This posed a problem as every time a web shape was made, with arcs between the "Webbing", the shape just read as being a star pattern. Adding in more turns made the shape hard to read. I ended up simply using a spiral with a few arcs to try and suggest a web.

The Start of the Final Major Project

This week I had scheduled myself to build and complete the model for the Coconut Shy. However due to not having an Art Style pegged ment that some time had to be spent creating a style. Also part of thursday was lost due to a discussion held by the course lecturer about the previous Pre-Production Assessment.

During the modelling stages of this model, I decided to add in faux eye sockets in the folds of the Coconut Shy's Roof. The decision for this was to try and make the tent itself seem more imposing and scary. It was also inspired by Oogie Boogey from "A Nightmare Before Christmas" and the Sorting Hat from "Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone". The reason for this change was simply that when someone feels uneasy or scared, their imaginations tend to lead them to see things that aren't really there.

One note, the store seems empty as there will be "Prizes" within the stalls shelves but these are to be repeated countless times on other stalls so will be modelled as individual props. The Sign on the front however is not complete but until the Helter Skelter is complete, it will have to wait to be finished.

With regards to my schedule, I am only one day behind my sheduled plan, which I believe will be easily caught up with as in two weeks time I have two days scheduled for catch up, Thursday and Friday. The delay with this weeks production was necessary as the art style for texturing needed to be decided on and learned.

The Art Style for the Buildings boils down to a simple colour layer, overlayed with a real world material, with some of the nuances painted in by hand.

Next Week I have Scheduled the Circus Tent and starting on the Ferris Wheel on Thursday.

The Ace is on the case!

To practise high detail modelling I decided to make a base mesh of Ace Ventura.

This model turned out to be about 1300 tris and took about two and a half hours for the body and an hour and a half for the head.

However when Msmoothing the model, the loops on the face mess up. Also the loops around the eyes end too abruptly and start crossing the nose.

The points on the jaw do create two pinch points which if I was to animate the characters mouth would be a hinderance. So in future I need to be aware of this.

UDK

This week I have been playing around with UDK to gain a basic understanding of its operations. I quickly mocked up a box version of the concept for my group projects game.

The scale is completely wrong. I should have looked into the Unit scaling for a character in UDK.

Rigging.

Last week I spent a few hours attempting to rig a shoulder since one of my weaknesses is rigging. Here were the results:

It looks kind of ok but there seems to be a increase in mass of the under arm as it stretches up, mostly because the bones are still influencing the chest a little too much as the arm goes up. I will have to do some more experiments as well as investigate how games over come this.