Vertex Syndrome: Redux

Front Straps

No-one knows how this is going to pan out, this whole project.

BUT

Things are now rolling along, at least from where I'm sitting, at a nice pace. My god its nice to be worrying whether this or that vertice should be slightly more to the left, rather than worrying over Kernel's major plot points. So I've taken over the modelling of Leonard's body and he is done as far as the base mesh goes. Tomorrow I start sculpting! I have gone to painstaking lengths to make sure his torso is one single piece of interconnected geometry, hopefully making rigging easier. So each of those straps actually connects smoothing, even the overlap of his jacket is connected. Yeah. Proud of that one.

Back Straps

I made extensive use of the crease tool, something Georg showed me last year, which effectively lets you maintain hard edges on a model even when its subdivided. This saves adding countless edge loops to the model and, while the tool is a little buggy, its great for keeping the poly count low. But it is strictly a Maya thing as far as I'm aware so when I bounce it over to Mudbox it would retain all the hard edges. Not a problem in this case but it might be if you planned on sculpting around it.

UUUUUUUUUUUUVVVVVVVVVVVVVs

I used RoadKill (again) to flatten Leonard's torso out beautifully, I thought about separating the straps from the jacket to make texturing for separate materials easier, but this makes the unwrap less individual pieces so it should make texturing it in general: simpler.

In other news, the brain is done, so I can start working on camera moves and the next couple of shots for that sequence. It looks a bit like a syrup coated ice cream brain in one of these renders but otherwise its very close to the image I was using as reference. Very gratifying. Next I can start converting for use as a kernel bulb.

Reference: this is NOT me

Brain Freeze

Brain!

Next week: sculpting!

Pixel Propaganda

This is a really fantastic post from the writer on Bastion about how to create theme in, well any creative work really, but this is specific to games. Bastion was one of the most interesting games from last year and it exudes personality and theme. Though the gameplay itself isn't the most ground breaking it all fits together so well.

For anyone writing a dissertation on games, this piece parodies the various awfully predictable things you hopefully haven't ended up doing. Bonus points if you get all the references. And if you don't get all the references then there are books you need to read because while its a pastiche, its also a road map to essential videogame theory.

I found this interview when looking for games like Sleep Is Death that leveraged the player as the source of gameplay. Interesting, but Sleep Is Death is so much more interesting, even if its more of an experiment than a working game. Well it is a working game, just not very well.

People on the internet are angry and ignorant and vocal. People on the internet are also intelligent, knowledgeable, and really good at deconstructing the arguments of the former group of people.