Reservoir wall

Little modelling update. more to come, but I was quite pleased with this. i intend to have the tower on the left fallen into the first two segments of wall to create on entrance into the reservoir behind it, making a nice opening to the top right spawn area.

There is however an exporting error with the tower... something along the lines of degenerate faces... faces with 3 same coordinates so perhaps that's a question for Ewan. I've tried the clean-up and merge verts/edges functions so it is an odd one. although I've noticed that extruding in two directions (once inwards once outwards) on the same side of an object (but a different face) seems to have some odd effects with the faces I've divided with the interactive split tool.

HotW on GitHub and new CryEngine

I have created HotW public repository on GitHub which you can access here:

https://github.com/jholownia/HotW

This makes it easier for me to work from multiple machines and also if I screw up (which has happened) I can go back to an earlier working version. If you ever wonder all my changes in the code are preceded by // (jh) comments so they are easy to find. If you open Visual Studio solution there is also hotw filter were I place all additional classes. I should probably make a separate folder for that.

Also github offers free hosting of project pages so unless there is a better option we can use that for our website.

Finally the new version of CryEngine has just been released and I've almost painlessly migrated our level and code to it.

CryEngine 3.4.5 Download

Website Design

Jayden says he's better at the development than the design, and I've always enjoyed the design more than the development... so I thought I'd have a go at designing the website. Jayden's already emailed around the first prototype, and it's looking good. I feel like I'm betraying my design training by wanting gimmicky features (what with one of the first rules of design being - simple is better).

Crude design made in Paint:

I've also created a more complex design template in HTML, although it is difficult to take a printscreen on account of the relative dimensions. If anyone knows of a quick way to take a panaramic screen shot of a webpage - I'm all ears.

26/02/13 group meeting

We are piecing together all of our components together this session. Thus far we have a white boxed map, a basic UI into the engine and a custom camera in development, the character is yet to be animated but the basic model is made.

My (Greg's) first model of the Brunel labs seems to have corrupted, but progress shouldn't be a problem from here on. The plan is to make a base frame for each building to a reasonable quality, then to look at texturing the core pieces of the map as portfolio pieces and to bring to life the tutorial area of the map. Destroying the buildings will come after completing the map, as having a playable map that is less destroyed is better than partial rubble.

Links:
http://www.creativecrash.com
searching for fracture scripts: a way to decompose my constructed buildings into ruins without manually doing each.

progress update

-Quick reminder: group meeting starts at 3 this week-

So after last week there was a positive vibe in the group, with things coming together and each of us being able to focus on our own roles more individually.Sound too good to be true? yeah.. so I've had a week of technical difficulties ranging from having no internet since Wednesday, to my computer completely locking up at times for no apparent reason. Despite this I have managed to create something... not as impressive as I would like, but a start.

I took some reference photos of the Brunel labs, and started to model from them. I started with this building as is quite central to our map, and has some unique quirks that seemed interesting to build.


From these I have made a start on the model, with many surfaces flat but with textures in mind (i.e. the windows)

There have been for few issues I've been having with Maya, but having the internet to solve those would probably have been enough... but I feel I will be able to pick up the pace a bit (thankfully) over the next week.

And I thought getting used to Maya's controls would be hard...

Let's just say without a formal introduction, me and Zbrush will NOT get along. I had to use Google just to figure out how to zoom in and out - that's just counter-intuitive!

When are those workshops again?

I think I'm going to try and animate ZBrush's default skeleton, and make this my "whitebox" for the zombies... then I can just add "clothes" in the form of  decomposed arms and sagging flesh. I think it'll look awesome.

No concept artwork, I'm afriad. My plans for last week were ruined changed when my mum reminded me I was going home for the weekend (for my birthday).