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!
