April Week 4: “Vacation time”

Monday I was not feeling so well but I still attended the MMO Workshop after class.  I actually got permission to leave class early so I could sit in on the Q&A section.  Unfortunately both of my contacts had already left before I arrived so there was not much I could do.  I networked the best I could and got my name out there but without connections or representation of bigger fish I did not do so well.

  I did not accomplish anyother work this week because I was hospitalized that night and remained so for a few days.  I will spare you the details but I was in no condition to work on any of my schoolwork or internship work.  I intend full well to make up for it all in the coming week when I will be working more on the moon buggy, and polishing up all of my work to be presented in my new portfolio. 

April Week 3: MMO Jitters

NASA MMO Workshop is on Monday.  Jay and Travis are both going to look out for me, I’ve got all my materials together and I am as prepared as I’m ever going to be.  All week long I’ve been working up a power point presentation on game concepts and execution, polishing my proposal (which spills over to 12 pages now), researching current and past NASA missions, and throwing myself into this 100%. There are a lot of really neat NASA missions going on when you look through it though.  GRACE is my favorite.  It consists of twin satellites measuring gravitational fields of the earth.  But I’m a sucker for anything involving the distortion of linear space/time.

Meanwhile on the home-front I am also working on composting a robot database to bring strategy, balance, and innovation to the current mining system.  It will require the introduction of a few new variables and models but in the long run it’ll be worth it.

April Week 2: Moon Buggy

The moon buggy in the game lacks a certain degree of detail and realism.  So the task at hand this week was to see if I can’t refine the design a bit.  Unfortunately the computers at AGI do not have 3D editing capabilities, so the actual buggy could not be worked on.  However they did finally get photoshop in.  So this week I designed a proof of concept sketch in illustrator and went to work on making textures for it.  I spent a lot of time on these.  The solar panel was a free transform distortion of an actual solar panel, so that one was not difficult.  It just took some tweaking to really shine.  The metal was a bit more difficult.  See what makes a metal look like metal instead of stone is the way the light shines off it.  However a seamless texture does not have any obvious hot spots that give away the texture is being repeated.  So this texture required quite a bit of flipping back and forth and very tiny changes to make it look just right.  All the experimentation led to 2 additional bonus textures as well, stone, and minerals.  In the end though I made 2 variations, one that is made of plates with obvious welds, and another that can be used as a solid metal if absolutely necessary.

The leather texture was kind of fun.  IT took some ingenuity but I took a smaler image, cut in half to create a triangle and created a tiling pattern to make a base image.  It looks roughly like this
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  Then using some photoshop magic I blended it smoothly together and created areas of higher and lower contrast to pull attention throughout the texture without focusing on it.  This in combination with the repeated elements in different rotations creates a seamless texture that can fool a viewer staring right at

The tire texture is the only texture that took double digit hours to complete but it doesn’t take a paternity test to know that this one is my baby.  This is the strongest portfolio piece I’ve made to date.  It includes a front and a side texture both of which are the absolute best I can do.  I worked on both of these textures switching between 2 computers to make sure the details look perfect regardless of monitor settings.  Describing all of the steps to the tire would take more time then all of the posts up to this post combined but needless to say, it looks beautiful.  The lighting is realistic but also allows for rotation without looking like the shadows are out of place.  The the center piece looks like worn bronze, but still gleams like beautiful metal.  The hubcap design is a creation of my own design modified from an antique Volkswagen hubcap.  The tire looks worn and generic but the wearing itself gives it a unique character.  The treads are visible regardless of angle because of the great amount of effort put into lighting.  I even created the side view texture of the tire which has the most beautiful tread work I have ever seen.  All of it made from actual images radically modified to fit into one seamless piece of art. I will defiantly be formatting it to be put into my gallery and portfolio/resume`.

April Begins: Space Suit editing

This week has been all about the space suit design.  Which means hour upon hour upon hour of photoshop, not that that’s a bad thing.  Photoshop is amongst my favorite programs to use.  To start this project we have a very unorthodox suit to fix up.  It is re and yellow and personally it seems a little creepy to me.  So the first step was desaturating it without losing too much detail.  This however made it look kinda terrible.  I must have literallygone through a dozen variations to get this suit looking just right.  I also finally figured out what the dissolve blending option is used for.  You can render clouds then set it to dissolve to make very grainy looking dust.  For a bit of realism I recommend merging the layer down to a layer set to “normal” blending method then adding just a little bit of Gaussian blur.  I used this method to refine a lot of my textures and I’ve got to say it really shines on this suit.  Instead of listing filters and brush strokes and all blending modes for several pages I’ll just link you to the finished suit.  I put it in it’s own nifty showcase image.  http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dggkg2pd_31cpr69mfw

March Week 4:Terrain editing and MMO Proposal

I know I’ve been talking a lot about this style guide recently but it really has become somewhat of a masterpiece.  As well it should be given the time allotted to it.  I’m glad it’s finished, it’ll make an excellent portfolio piece.

This week I also started working on the terrain in Moon Base One.  Not many people have played the game… well based on the scoreboards no one outside of us game makers have even looked at it.  So its probably safe to assume none of you remember what the moon looked like before.  Well the moon was red and orange all over but did not look to bad.  I took some ambition this week and reworked the terrain essentially from scratch.  It looks a lot different, not only in color and texture but also in its topography.  It was really a pretty fun process. 

The first step was to change the textures used in the game.  Nothing to dramatic just reduce the saturation a bit, and play with the contrast, maybe a little dodging and burning.  I even made a square or 2 of my own textures to throw in there.  Next I opened up the terrain editor.  The Torque terrain editor is by far and away my favorite “map maker”.  not only do you fly around as a camera zooming in ad out all over, but you can also go into the FPS.  That’s right you can go into the game as your character and edit the terrain around you.  I think that’s a pretty nifty game all on it’s own.  You have to be careful not  to edit what you’re standing on too much though or you might fall through the world.  If that happens though all you have to do is go to camera mode then drop your player someplace safe.

We also started work on proposals for a NASA MMO.  Don’t get too excited though, they are just 2 page long documents but I’ve been lengthening mine steadily.  It’s about 4 pages now but I still have a ton of notes I need to formalize.  Then it’s finished though it’ll be something to behold.

This week was actually pretty fun considering the late nights put into it and the learning how to use a new program.  I hope we work on something like this again next week.

March Week 3: Return of The Style Guide

I showed Jay the style guide Monday. He says it’s a good start but I’ll need pictures… lots of them.

This week I met up with Andrew, he’s another intern from our class who is also working with FOGE, and we started looking through some game screen shots and talked about the direction we want the art to go. I made this pretty sweet before and after picture. Andrew has a good eye for detail and helped me polish it up a bit. Once we had a shared vision for the game we went back to our separate tasks.

I played the FOGE game, Moon Base One, and started taking my own screen shots for some good examples.  I also whipped up some custom brushes in photoshop that can be used on later textures.  Some craters, an abraisian, and a slice… they look really good for what they are.  see a photoshop brush is essentially saving just an alpha channel of an image but in reverse.  black is opaque, white is transparent.  You draw your brush out in grayscale and save it and you can paint that image as a brush.  So they are good base designs but just a little bit of variation in them on the actaul image goes a long way.

Anyways a lot of typing and about a dozen images later the style guide made the required 10 page length. It is Glorious.

March Week 2: what is FOGE?

Sitel decided to go with someone with more experience, a person who had interned there before.  I guess I can’t blame them for going with what works.  This does however put me in a bit of a predicament as to how to accomplish my internship.  I contacted Jay back at FOGE and I was accepted so I guess I’ll be working there.  What is FOGE you may ask?  It is The Federation Of Galaxy Explorers, you can check out thier website here: http://www.foge.org/launch.php .  It’s a pretty cool organization, all about teaching kids about space.  They’re tied into space camps and NASA people and all that bigger stuff.  We talked a few more times throughout the week, a really long phone conversation where we discussed the magnitude of the project and where to focus our efforts and an E-mail about the previous conversation, honing in and clarifying goals.   I’m working on the style guide.  Got it up to 2 pages long solid type with really sweet formating.  But you can take a look at it yourself

Moon Base One

Official Style Guide

By: Brian White

Locations and Scenery

Moon Base One takes place in the unique location of an aged moon base in the future. The conditions of the moon, including the magnetic charge given to moon dust during a solar rotation, the absence of atmosphere and its mineral make up, require careful attention to create an accurate and immersive environment. This section of the style guide lays out a few guidelines for keeping different areas of Moon Base one accurate and consistent, however it is by no means an absolute. The environment will need the creativity of our game artists to make instances of similar locations unique and interesting for the player.

That being said lets move onto the task at hand, guidelines for game art.

Indoor Locations

Moon dust becomes magnetized due to the sunlight passing over the moon. This will make it stick to space suits, vehicles, and tools, and cause it to be tracked into base structures. A noticeable amount of dust would be brought in over 30 years therefore moon dust should be present in the hallways and airlocks of indoor environments. Many base structures would be pressurized to allow the habitants to move freely without use of suits. The presence of an oxygen environment would mean oxidation would be possible. Only metal kept within pressurized areas could rust, all other would only be scratched and dented. Other materials should also show signs of wear and tear such as roughed up fabric on bar stools, lackluster and aged plastics, and small abrasions on most surfaces.

Custom Photoshop brushes will be made available for adding consistent looking scratches and abrasions to materials, but every object has its own story and should be treated to its own distinguishing age marks, not just processed with pre made brushes.

Outdoor Locations

The surface of the moon is most akin to a desert, however without an atmosphere, the environment has a few distinguishing qualities. The lack of winds mean footprints and tire tracks on the surface would stay in tact. With a 30 year old base on the premises foot prints and tire tracks are everywhere but all of them would lead to a base structure. This also allows us to prevent players from getting lost, and help them to find quest locations more easily. The texture of the untouched parts of the moon would be very rough. Without wind to erode and round down the rocks, the moon is essentially covered in broken glass and rough stones. The surface is also frequently bombarded with micrometeorites. The meteorites would leave tiny craters on the moon’s surface and on the exterior of all base structure. Several custom Photoshop brushes will be made available for outdoor environments including footprints, tire tracks and several variations of micro meteorite craters. It is important to paint each object with unique characteristics to prevent players from getting lost, and to enrich the experience of game play.

Robots and Vehicles

Moon Base One is set in a world wherein small robots are easily purchasable by players, and with time and effort, vehicles can be unlocked as well. This section of the style guide is dedicated to the appearances and behaviors of machines that the player will directly interact with.
Robots

Robots cost very little, and are quite plentiful in the moon base. Thus it is logical to assume that they are mass produced. In which case, the most prevalent qualities in drones would be functionality without frills, and survivability. The design aspects of the robots would have to be easy to manufacture. This means clean easy to machine wields that can be done with minimal necessary moving parts. It would also be necessary for them to have plating to prevent circuits to be punctured or damaged by micrometeorites. This would result in drones that have a boxy appearance.

First week of March: Interviews

Well I got everything together quite professionally too.  Made little packets with report covers that show all of my work and their vital stats, stuff like polygon counts and file size.  It really looks nice with that standardized format I created.  Went to Sitel and my interview was scheduled during a meeting, but I still got to meet with a lot of people there.  The place is a little intimidating though, security tags, and a giant building…. I mean HUGE, the kind of big that has fountains on the inside.  But all in all I think it went pretty well.

First Serious Interview Prelude

After some technical difficulties I’ve finally scheduled an interview with SiTEL  I’ve been working hard to update my portfolio with more relevant works and with any luck they will take notice.   Over the course of this weekend I’m going to be doing all sorts of madness to get prepared: Kinkos run to get everything allocated, bust out the tie, and even shave.  It’s all or nothing time.

The journey begins

Hello all, today is the beginning of the journey from mediocre college student to an intern well on the way into the field and beyond.  Weekly posts will inform you of the uninteresting rise to nominal power.  I am currently awaiting a phone interview from The Federation of Galaxy Explorers, a nonprofit gaming group centered around educational space themed games for kids.  I am also awaiting the final scheduling of an interview with the SiTEL devision of George Washington Hospital.  Both opportunities would be a dream come true.