Setting Up Shop

Treboc and I are working this week to set up an online store for licensing of our 3d game content to 3rd party game developers for use in their games.

We hope to have that up and running soon!

I'll keep you posted.

Before and After

A fellow indie recently came to me with a level that he had done, but needed some fine tuning. The above is a before and after screenshot of that effort. The whole level ended up having to be reconstructed from scratch because the DIF exporter for Torque couldn't handle a lot of errors in the original model. I think that after lighting, the final product came out quite well.

You can click the image for a full sized view.

Note; I used stock textures for this project and modified them as needed. This greatly reduced the time and effort needed to complete the level quickly.

When It Rains....

When it rains, it pours. Within about 48 hours of election day, I got 4 new contracts. I'm wondering whether the changing of the guard made people feel more optimistic at some level.

At any rate. Tarly has been helping us test the Weapons pack for Realm Crafter and pointed out that some inventory icons would be very helpful. So, I whipped up some icons and they will now be included in the pack.

We have yet to hear a word back from Solstar Games (The folks who make Realm Crafter) so at this point I can only assume they are not interested or did not get the email. That means finding an alternate store for the product.

I forwarded 3 of our completed 3D weapons content packs to the folks over at Realm Crafter today, to see if we can't get them into their online store by the holidays. Looking forward to hearing back from them, AND looking forward to these assets generating a little revenue. Corbett and I have been working on them a very long time now.

Next, I have to polish up the versions for the Torque Game Engine and get those over to the Exis online store.

Hey all!

Finished up another guild hall for Crowns of Power.

Working on a new fantasy MMORPG game called Mystral, being created with the Realm Crafter Engine and STILL working out vendors for our 3d weapons content packs.




Here is a screen shot of Mystral in progress....

Chrysalis

It seems like everything has been in a state of chrysalis the past couple of months waiting to metamorphose and be reborn.

After numerous technical hick-ups, delays, and changes, Rampid Games finally approved the Guild Hall they commissioned (see WIP pic). It is being used in their new free to play mmorpg - Crowns of Power.


There were a few technical problems with the piece, the first being scale. The player avatar used in Crowns of Power is significantly smaller than the stock engine avatar I scaled the model too during construction. Since my model is very complex, none of my rescaling methods proved effective without a massive rework of either texture UVs or the geometry. This is in part due to the way the graphics program I used to create the model snaps points to a grid. The model is to be used in the torque game engine and can have no concave surfaces, but when scaled way down, each minuscule offset is magnified many times. Thus causing the points to arbitrarily jump points and creating unpredictable concave surfaces or bad brushes. The textures appear to loose their UV mapping to some degree and also don't always scale with the model. This translates to hours of work painstakingly checking and reapplying UVs, and aligning them properly to adjacent texture maps so that all the features match.

This meant that the model had to be rescaled in-game. Unfortunately, the collision data doesn't seem to scale well in the engine, and player characters were unable to navigate the stairs - Which lead to a complete re-work of the stairs a couple of times. Eventually, they were scrapped in favor of ramps in order to solve the problem in a timely manner. Another issue was that the lights wouldn't scale with the model when scaled with the TGE exporter plug in.

Then there was the mysterious texture issue, where several textures just would NOT export. I tried a number of remedies for that, remaking textures, removing them from the editor and reassigning them, using new textures. Eventually, I eliminated all the geometry with bad textures and the bad textures themselves, and rebuilt those sections.

Lighting caused some issues. Only the default light settings and color could be used, any other changes such as range, or intensity caused the game engine to crash on relight or just crash when you attempted to place the object in game via the game world creation editor. I suspect that this was a failing on the part of the torque exporter. The extra light data probably wasn't written into the exporter, so it... (with out going into a detailed technical explanation) fudged the works... The default settings just were not acceptable in this case, especially since there were scale issues and the lights refused to scale with the model. left at default, they created numerous excessive blooms and artifacts. I deleted all but the light in the main hall for the delivery model. This is quite a shame, I had some nice lighting and shadows set up in the render version.

There was also the top dome. Once again, you can't have any concave structure/interior geometry in TGE. So TGE really didn't like the dome I placed on top of the tower. Garage Games 3d editor for structures (labeled "interiors" for use in TGE), flat out refused to recognise the dome at all, and while I did get it into the game using a different 3d application, the first few tried were rocky, with some of the faces appearing invisible or the game engine crashing on relight. Eventually, for whatever reason, I got it to work.

At any rate, that is done and I hope to get the go-ahead soon to begin work on a second guild hall for Crowns of Power.

Also, this month I was supposed to begin working part time for Synthetic Tech Inc., which is developing the sci-fi RPG Fantasci. Synthetic tech Inc., has commissioned a number of works from me in the past. However, they had some stuff come up and our arrangement is now up in the air.

On the Golem Graphics front, Corbett and I are STILL in dialogue with potential resellers. The main hold up is communication, and getting responses from people. We did decide not to go with a couple of 3d content stores who had contacted us, mainly because we felt they didn't have adequate traffic to make it worth our while. Out of the various entities we contacted, to date, we have only formalized an account with one and are still awaiting final approval. Oddly enough, new products don't seem to be a priority for many stores. We have also discussed making our weapons packs available in the Garage Games online store with Garage Games, however, they requested we re-texture the models, and this will take some time. I would like to do that with ZBrush, and am still bringing myself up to speed on it's use.

OK, well this is turning into a novella, which I guess is what happens when you don't blog for a month!

More soon.

Until then, take care, and thanks for stopping by!

Vacation

Well, it's that time of year again, and I find myself on the shores of Lake Amston on vacation (visible here past the industrial utility wire fuse and lines).

I was supposed to leave to head back to Erie today, but am being held a vacation hostage until Monday.

On the graphics front, many cool things are happening. The weapons content pack has interest from a couple of parties, and I have been quite busy with other work as well.
I have FINALLY gotten a license for ZBrush, and am looking forward to what I can do with some AAA industry software.

Ah well, I'm back to the beach... gonna work on my sunburn >_>

Slow Motion

We released an Alpha version of the Weapon Content Pack Lite to most of the testers about 10 days ago. Ed from Fantasci got back to me with a couple of issues and had some nice things to say about the pack in one of his blog posts (Thanks Ed!), but we have yet to hear back from anyone else. I sent out a feedback questionnaire last night and am anxiously awaiting a response on that, although I expect it will take some time before folks get back to us. After an exhausting push to get the pack out to testers, it seems that everything is now moving in Matrix style slow motion.

I initially had attempted to email the content pack to the test group, but one or more recipients email systems rejected the 35 meg file, so I had used Pando as a fall-back to get the pack out to them quickly. I received a couple of complaints from users about Pando installing quite a bit of spam and ad-ware on their systems. In response to that, Corbett obtained a Golem Graphics SVN account with CVSDude. Until a distributor or host has been decided upon we will be setting up user accounts and making the pack, patches, and updates available there.

As far as the pack is concerned, I'll be making an update and posting that as soon as I have some additional feedback from the test group.

Got a couple of other interesting projects on the table. I don't want to spill the beans on any of those until there are some beans to spill though!

The Night Before Christmas... Well, Sort Of....

Well, after months of hard work, Corbett and I have managed to compile a limited pack with over 50% of the intended models complete.

I think I see now why many content packs complete at 50 or so weapons, it looks simple enough, but there are an incredible amount of details to attend to in producing a quality, fully functional and tested library of assets this size. I expect it will take another 2 to 3 months to complete the remaining 45+ existing models yet to be included in our intended full content pack. When we started this pack, neither Corbett or I dreamed it would take 6 months to complete!

The limited pack features 55 richly textured 3d weapons complete with LOD, and over 60 pages of accompanying documentation which includes poly counts, node, and texture information.

We are making the pack available free of charge for a limited time to active finalists of Dream Games 1 year game contest in exchange for testing and feedback, and hope to have that out to them in the next couple of days. Although we designed the content pack specifically for use with the Torque Game Engine (we even scaled each item to the Torque Orc!), Kevin has offered to test the pack for compatibility with the Realm Crafter game engine, which may increase the packs market appeal.

Our short term goals are to get the Golem Graphics website and forums out of the place-holder stage and up and running, and maybe get some feedback from potential distributors.

In the mean time, I personally have about 12 hours of audio post production work I committed to doing for Nick over at Indie-Zen Radio, which I will try to tackle before starting in on my next 3D contract work.

Moving Along

A more updated compilation screen shot with some of the weapons featured in the sidebars to show how the weapons content pack is coming along.

I ended up pulling some of the textures I didn't like, so not everything is shown here. As mentioned, Corbett is very close to completing the modeling work (100 weapons and such), and has acquired a web host from propacket for our newly formed partnership Golem Graphics.

I'm going to make push this week to see if we can't get this done!!!

Missed Milestone

Work on the Weapons Content Pack continues to progress nicely. Corbett did an interview discussing the pack for Indiezen Radio yesterday. Not yet sure when that will be out of post production and available for public consumption.

Corbett and I also had a long talk about business form. I believe we left off with the pack being produced under the auspices of Golem Graphics, which is Corbett's business entity, instead of Indie Graphics.

We seem to have missed our "end of June" milestone for completing the pack. If I don't get too much contract work, we are going to shoot for getting it finished by the end of July.

What's New?

I have been meaning to give Indie Graphics a home of it's own for a while now. FINALLY got to that!

What is Indie Graphics?

Well for the moment it is just me doing freelance 2d and 3d freelance artwork, so far it has been primarily for Torque Game Engine users, as I have become fairly familiar with the graphics requirements of that engine.

In between contract work, I have teamed up with Corbett, a former team member of another project. Together we are producing a 3d weapon content pack specifically for use with the Torque Game Engine.

The side bar graphics shows the content pack at about 50% completion. We are shooting for 100 or so fantasy style 3d weapons and textures. The models will contain nodes and collision meshes specifically designed for TGE, to include LOS collision, mounts, and particle effect nodes. We also plan on scaling the weapons to the infamous Torque Orc (although not all orcs are scaled the same), and testing each in TGE show for proper mounting and facing. The pack will come with the original meshes in ms3d and obj format. For those who are interested in the pack but do not use Torque, we are considering .X, .OGRE, and possibly Collada formats as well. A detailed PDF containing information on each object (such as node names, poly count, UV map etc.) is also planned.

Ideally, this pack will be distributed through a 3rd party and licensed to developers so that they may quickly add quality ready made 3d content to their games.

After the weapons pack is complete, I think I would like to dedicate some time to doing an Aztec motif interior content pack. "Interiors" refers to a special 3d format known as .MAP files used in the Torque Game Engine for large objects or building/structure interiors. They are ideal for this purpose because they render quickly and cast shadows and such. I won't bore the laymen with talk of portals and detailed lighting. The problem is that this file format is a little temperamental to work with and doesn't like things like concave surfaces or curves in general. I've developed a bit of skill with the format and would like to try my hand at making some modular, ready made levels in an Inca or Aztec style motif for use in games.

I'm also planning a software upgrade as soon as I can swing a spare $1000. At which time I have a couple of very short animation films? (for lack of a better descriptive), I would like to do.

Well that's news! I'll update on the weapons content pack and post some more pictures when I have something worthy of post!

Until then... Thanks for stopping by!

-D