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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Helpful Mel Scripts

These two scripts together make a great team for stacking identical UVs and lining them up to match perfectly.

ShellStack by Nyro - A quick script to stack identical UV shells on top of eachother http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=867929

mUVsnap by Michael Paixao - End using the align tool! Use after ShellStack script. The tolerance is much like Merge Threshold.
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/texturing/c/muvsnap

To bypass creativecrash.com registration...
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/creativecrash.com

Monday, February 25, 2013

My Work For Intrepid


I was primarily assigned to work on character models and texturing and that is the majority of my hours. Tank was my first 'second' character model I have ever made, and I've learned quickly from him, and understand where it would have been wiser to decrease and place edges. Corgis are not an easy task, and the planeviews wouldn't be much help, and for a proper rig, some proper Corgi anatomy, particularly the legs, needed to be sacrificed. I would redo him after Vertical Slice, but didn't want to break the painted weights in the meantime.
 



Jessie is where I felt I took all I've learned from Tank, and got better with my polycount. She was the biggest challenge I've ever come across thus far. But I am pleased that my stylized silhouette shows through in all angles. There are a few changes that needed to be met, such as her hat needing more edges, and an inside layer as was later decided it would lift up in the animation, but again I didn't want to break the painted weights, with which Andrew spent countless hours trying to get right.
 



Onto texturing, however more often than not I had to re-UV assets as others were making them to speed things along while I was on characters. I wanted any way to avoid seams but there were situations where it would of been too much work and time to re-UV everything. Lots of terrain textures and patterns were needed as well, which cut down half the work on many things.


 


The cave pieces in particular were sacrificed in quality because of so many UV pieces placed in all directions and seams would of looked more obvious. I was hoping to revisit them after Vertical Slice and do them over.
 




 
It was finally decided we'd have glowworms which would be my last character model. I enjoy the challenge of making low poly models and relying on textures to make it really pop. AO baking also helped make the characters look better.
 

 


There were a few things that were cut before Vertical Slice. Such as the bat particles and lilypad planes. The Ending teaser was also faced with changes programmatically, but it felt great to offer the idea for an ending either way. 


 
I'm going to miss this team for all its support and allowing me to open up. I'm happy for all the content the game did have. Now that I know what a good team is, what good friends are, I'm going to tackle Warp Derby characters with my own ideas. I've been thinking of a scary gargantuan lady heavily inspired from Stagecoach Mary Fields.