Here's another status update on what I'm calling "Parks" for now, a low poly art project I'm playing around with.
After a little more work, here's the final set of portraits to be used for the football sign I mentioned in the previous post. For any 49ers fans out there, do these guys look recognizable to you?
One of my former coworkers at CytoSport commissioned me (with beer) to create an illustrated sign for her for an upcoming 49ers game. Here's a work-in-progress image of some of the player portraits for the image.
This is another graphic I created for a podcast I frequently listen to, this time for How Did This Get Made? You'd have to listen to the Monkey Shines episode to get the full context for this graphic, but I recommend it - it's a great podcast all around.
This image was created as an idea for a t-shirt graphic and was unsolicited.
This was a graphic I created for one of my favorite podcasts of the moment, Matt & Mattingly's Ice Cream Social. The quote at the bottom of the graphic is a quote from the show.
I created this unsolicited and sent them the artwork when I was finished. I hope they use it for something fun!
This is a quick render of a Blend file I've been playing around with in my spare time recently. I was feeling inspired after seeing a simple landscape painting at one of my wife's relative's houses.
The idea I'm pursuing with this project is to organically add things to the scene as I see fit. I'm keeping everything to a relative scale, but not worrying much about keeping things on the grid or being precise about placement.
I'll post more later as I continue!
When I create WordPress themes for my website, I usually add a silly screenshot, so when I view all the installed themes in the back end of the site, I can tell which is which easily. This is the image I created for the current theme (2014). Enjoy!
I'm not sure if many people (or anyone!) noticed, but I recently updated this website to have a more modern look, and to better represent the work I've done over the last few years.
So far, so good, I think. I like the way everything looks and functions, and in terms of updating old content, I'm about 95% there. As of this writing, all that's really left to do is update my "techniques" page, and maybe update some of my old GameMaker examples/tutorials to GameMaker: Studio.
Speaking of GameMaker, part of the site changeover had me going back and reviewing a lot of the old art and games I've produced, and that got me feeling nostalgic- particularly the part where I went through all of my old GameMaker Community forum avatars. That really took me back and got me thinking about all the fun I had at the GMC back then. The personalities of that place! The goofy games everyone made! The strict rules of the forum! Ah, man.
I created my first big game, Hover Tank 3D, and released it on the GameMaker Community in January 2006. I had spent the better part of 2005 working on that game in my spare time. I even briefly gave up on it at one point when the online system I was using, which depended on another user's web service, suddenly stopped working, and I was faced with taking the entire multiplayer portion of the game back to the drawing board.
During the time I created Hover Tank 3D, I had a really crummy job. Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but the pay was terrible. One of the perks of the job was that my boss would let us skip lunch and then go home early, so I got quite used to going home early and having an extended afternoon of game dev. And even though things are a lot better now than they were then, I do still look back on the amount of time I had to devote to my game development efforts with a little bit of envy.
I have gotten to load up some of my old projects in GameMaker: Studio lately, and after finagling with them to make them work in the newer version of the program, it's been fun seeing them come to life again. I have an idea about merging the new physics engine with a game like Hover Tank 3D to make something a little more accurate than the old game... but we'll see if I can find the time to put it together. In the meantime, it's been fun remembering all the fun of the past.
Anyway, if you do happen to read my blog occasionally, and you've come back to check out the new design, I hope you like it, and thanks for reading. And if you have any fun stories about the old days of the GMC, feel free to post them in the comments. I'd love to hear them!
Though I don't personally use Google+ much, my current job requires the use of Hangouts, so I jump on from time to time to chat with my boss. During some of these visits, I've occasionally added people and organizations to follow there, just so the "wall" isn't quite so boring.
The other day, one of the posts that appeared highlighted the release of a newly open-sourced rendering engine that is compatible with Blender, called Nox. I've never used Nox, and I'm not sure if I plan to yet, but they had posted a test image of a three-ringed torus with a wood texture, and I liked the look of the material they'd created:
Since I've been freelancing, I've used Blender's own Cycles rendering engine quite a bit, and I've gotten really fond of the node-based shader system it employs. I thought this might be a good opportunity to test my skills with Cycles, to try my hand at recreating the wood material from this render.
I got a basic scene with a curve-based torus shape, backdrop, light, and camera set up, then grabbed a wood texture from Good Textures, did a little bit of Photoshop work to make it more seamless, and got to editing nodes. Here's what the basic scene looks like in wireframe:
After spending some time getting colors right, utilizing the details of the texture for bumps and specular highlighting, this is what I came up with:
My torus is a little chunkier than the Nox torus, but I like it like that. It feels sturdy to me.
Although I'm happy with where I got with this texture, I didn't get it quite the same as the Nox render. The shiny highlights just aren't there yet. It's a good start though, I think.
Some of you might already know this, but back in September of this year, I ended my job at CytoSport, Inc. to pursue other interests. So far, things have been going well for me, and I have been doing a lot of interesting and challenging contract work. Much of that work has been in Blender, software which, at this point last year I'd barely touched. A lot can change in a year though, and as it happens, Blender is now one of my favorite pieces of software. It has completely replaced my ancient copy of trueSpace for 3D development.
I'm still in the process of learning more about Unity for game-making, but in the meantime, one piece of software which I still like to dabble with now and then is GameMaker. Though I never seem to have enough time for personal game-making as I'd like, I still get a kick out of firing up GameMaker: Studio and trying ideas out.
Recently, I've been bungling around with GameMaker's 3D graphics again. I know the program isn't suited for anything particularly grand when it comes to 3D projects, but I like it nonetheless. One issue I kept running into though was getting my 3D models out of Blender and into my game.
Traditionally (even as described in one of my tutorials) this is a somewhat convoluted process. One would have to make a 3D model, save it to a format one of the many 3D programs / scripts people have written over the years would read, and then use one of those to load the model directly into the game, or more often the case, convert the model to a format GameMaker would understand, and then load that into GameMaker in a separate step.
Along the way, all kinds of odd things had to be done, and the software one chose to use had to suit those needs. UV maps had to be flipped. Models needed to be rotated 90 degrees this way or that. Normals were often lost in translation or reversed. I often found that my models wouldn't turn out exactly right - somewhere in the process, the numbers describing the locations of the vertices in my models would get rounded off! Worse still, one had to jump through each of these hoops each time a model needed to be updated or added to the game. Slight revisions to geometry or UV map would take a long time to implement. In short, it was not a lot of fun.
So, with my recent work in Blender, and my lasting interest in GameMaker, I decided there had to be a better way to do all of this. I searched around for examples of export scripts for Blender, and after finding a suitable starting point and reading a little bit about Python, I cobbled together something that works much better than the convoluted mess I described above - I've crafted a nice little export script for exporting 3D objects directly from Blender to GML.
It wasn't a particularly hard project, and I'm sure the script lacks a lot of the finer points that someone who really knows what they are doing might have done, but it works, and I'm happy with it. And I'll have a link up on the site soon.
Basically, this new script will let you select an object in Blender, triangulated or not, and with about two clicks of the mouse, export it as a text file which contains all the GML code needed to create the model in GameMaker. If one wanted the model to exist externally from GameMaker but still in GameMaker's native model format (which is very quick to load), it would then be trivial to save the model and from then on, use the new external file.
A lot of credit for this script is owed to Jeff LaMarche for his work on a script he built for converting Blender models to a suitable format for Objective C/iOS development. I used his script as a template to write my own, and I could not have created this without his as a starting point.
Anyway, I'm going to have to write up a bit more about how to use the script, but I'll have it online soon. I hope that it makes it easier for people to get quality 3D graphics into their games!