Michael -Saturday 7th February

"Captains Log 7/2/09"

It was another week of concept art on my side of things. Some part of the week was spent touching things up while I also started a few other pieces of art including some sound diagrams and some weapon concepts as well. I havent had time to turn the most recent art pieces into JPEGs for this post and knowing that there are a few new drawings and also the fact that this blog handles images terribly ill post them in a seperate post soon. As for the project in general... Things are shaping up nicely and despite a rather lengthy yet enjoyable discussion into road cones and the potential for me to play the game in a less serious nature in order to get a few laughs everything is on track for the hand in date on Monday. Im anticipating that ill be working on placeholder enemies in the next few weeks and am looking forward to getting back into modelling in Maya.

So until then stay tuned
-Michael

Its all over red rover!!

And We Are Clear!!!!

Well not quite, but the documents are more or less done. They still need to be proofread and formatted but they are content complete aside from one or two elements.

Or TDD is roughly a whopping 160 pages of pure technical excellence. Our GDD is coming in at a close second place with a little over 100 pages and we even have a pretty looking ADD filled with shiny pictures.

oh and uh, just to throw it out there. Our games name may have changed
from Nightfall to Last Light. We will keep you posted.

The documents are due on Monday at 5.00pm so until then

ciao

Winding down

The pre-production week is finally starting to wind down and everything is going well. I was away last week so the beginning of the week consisted of myself getting up to speed with the current state of the design. I have to say that Eli did a great job sorting out some of the "iffy" points in the design. This long weekend I will be writing out a five minute playthrough description. Hopefully I will be able to post this by the end of the week. It is probably going to be quite long. Before I can do that I still have to finish putting the document together....joy, joy for word formatting. Anyways, keep posted for further updates.

Tame - Week 6

This week most of the work load went into creating TDD Documents for the Rigs, Bone LOD, Mesh LOD, Ragdoll Rig and the Endorphin Pipeline. These managed to be all completed except for the Endorphin one. This will be done over the weekend.

The other task was to name all the Animation Assets for the characters in the game, which ended up to have around 50 animations total. These should take a few weeks to block out then smooth.

And seeing as this is an artist speaking, there should be some art somewhere!

So, here is the rigged character from the Rig Document in a pose

As well as the same model animated doing the Hula Dance lol :)

Chur

Blake - Week 6

I was off half the week thanks to some chinese food in the weekend, but I didn't fall to far behind and managed to do a few more asset concetps

The Final Week of Prepro

So this is it!!! Monday is when we hand in our GDD, TDD and ADD. Things are starting to shape up nicely. I am having heaps of "fun" scheduling the milestones.

Everyone is basically wrapping up their sections in these documents. Stay posted to find out how this went down later in the week.

Effects in Gamebryo

Hey, been working on designing the lighting model in our game and figuring out how to get custom D3D FX effects working in Gamebryo. While attempting to move the rim/ink shader from my last post into gamebryo I ran into a few problems.

The effect running fine in FX Composer:
When applied to the model in Maya, exported to Gambryo and opened in the asset viewer:
With the inking removed:
So it appears the the Z-buffer is not reading/writing properly. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why. The Gamebryo documentation talks about turning Z-buffer reading and writing on from within Maya, so I tried that to no avail (read/write seams to be on by default)

The shader does work when loaded into the scene designer:
However the default values are not correct, the rim should be white, while the outline is black. These defaults are used correctly in FX Composer.

This dose create quite a cumbersome workflow for the artists, who will, if we can’t figure this out, need to apply and modify the shader in Maya, export to gamebryo as the shader is not rendered in Maya and then create a scene that uses the effect in order to see it.

Gamebryo’s semantics and annotations are also based on those used in Microsoft’s EffectEdit which is now deprecated. Unfortunatly many of these do not line up with those used in FX Composer, which is another slight annoyance.

ART UPDATE!!

For last week, I finished the following: Art Design Document, polished the images for GDD, Complete Orthographic drawing for the Scientist (Front, Both Side, Back). Aside from that I alo did some more rough concepts for the grunt and will try to finalise it this week. Heres some more Grunts concepts.

Cheers!

Gamebryo fun

Last week was a week of Gamebryo discoveries. UML has been needed to be modified to take into account a few of these discoveries. We've found that a lot of the technical synchronisation of gameplay elements between animations and sounds/particle effects/shaders are able to be offloaded to the artists which makes a lot of the gameplay coding for the team much lighter. The TDD is comming together nicely but we have lost one of our programmers to the handling of the GDD due to our lead designer being away for a grievence in the family. These setbacks are being taken in our stride and luckily the elements which were being covered this week are able to be moved around to supliment some of the deficit from a lost team member.
The team has been looking at what roles they would like to take over the comming months of production. The team is lucky in its diversity of interest and no major conflicts in roles has arisen.

ART!

Just some extracts of the conception process.