Chat with Jared...

Basicly... summing up what he said was -
Look at wacky racers - how cars and characters relate to one another.
Possibly put in a different car. Mechanic - pick up truck?
A Character can have hints of the surrounding environment.
Remove Rockstar info.
Sam needs to do more concept work, more development and ideas (2D)
Dan needs to characterise the car and character - choose either realistic or Sams style (probably Sams style) and stick with it.

Ugly Ray

Sam mate I think I might need your help to model the head as the drawings just apparently aren't enough.  Either way I'm guna keep working on him... and the car.  But I'll keep you informed.  See my mechanic Madness for more images and details. Cheers mate.

Hope your good.

Model Sheet.

Model sheet so Dan can start modelling the characters body size. The front and profile views will provide a better idea of a 3d version.

Car Bounce Test

Just a quick test into the bouncing of the car as you change a feature such as a body part.
I did this to demonstrate the file size's to Sam my team mate. I think he'll be happy its all to scale. May have to alter the size of the character/car a little but not by to much. At least we are working within the same parameters as one another.

Deadlines

On Going through the entire project so no deadline for this. If we see something we like we put it up... This will be research and sound effects.

Monday 26th January:
We Start Modelling on this date all things that need to be modelled.

Monday 2nd Febuary:
Final week of modelling now. Car should be nearly done and the character should be pretty much modelled.

Friday 6th Febuary:
Modelling should have been done by now and we should be collecting Textures over the weekend if we can.

Monday 9th Febuary:
Texturing begins of all, character, car, models in scene etc. One week ONLY Square textures etc.

Monday 16th Febuary:
Finish textures ... Slap them on if needs be at this stage or leave it and come back to it (slot it in) Animate the character is priority this week.

Monday 23rd Febuary:
Light and Camera moves should be started now along with simple animation of props...

Monday 2nd March:
Edit shots and send to render. Keep thinking about sound.

Wednesday 4th March:
Compile Renders we have recieved back and start sound and compositing. Begin interactivity.

Monday 9th March:
This week is the FINAL week now. If its not interactive yet FINISH THIS! After effects final touches need to be added also.

Wednesday 11th March:
We should be nearly done now. Final touches for two days.

Friday 13th March:
We've forgotten about the project as we handed it in the other day. (Lets Hope)

Just Thought I'd Post A lil More

Sam and I spoke about coming in tomorrow.  Tomorrow we plan to begin an outside SET which we can reference correctly using Maya's referencing.  This will allow us to make sure we don't get any duplicated Geometry unlike last terms work in pretty much all the groups.  I believe we plan to set up a File within the Public Folders and then update these - we will have to set the project to the public folders I think but we'll figure it out tomorrow and then we'll be able to begin modeling an environment!!!

Interior Concept

This is the concept for the interior, where upgrades and parts are added to cars throughout the game to progress. Tried to make the space feel dark in places, with strip lighting and spotlights to highlight areas of interest. The drawing board is one of the main features in the room, and provides players with the freedom to select what they want to create within the game.

Spoken to J-Dogg

Jared liked the idea and I think his words were... 'Really Interesting'.  He was a little off put initially as he didn't understand that it was set WITHIN a game but was a small part of it.  Jared also gave us the idea of creating a showreel sort of idea where you could view the making of a game and we could even be pitching a game TO people.  What a cool idea however we currently don't have any ambitions (well I'm not sure about Sam but I know I don't) to actually create a game from TOTAL scratch - no idea or anything... So presonally I think we'll probably just stick with our main idea to start with and if we have time we could make an options page to show off some of Sams concept work and sketches etc.  Just a thought.

All in all a good chat with Jared which aided us in our development.

Discussions Continue

Sam and I discussed a few different Ideas yesterday between Gareths lectures and before I left.
We discussed the outside environment and settled on the idea of it being dark and at night. Lit by moonlight and large lights (that flicker when a train goes by) Ramblers Auto Repairs is situated on the outskirts of a city underneath an overpass (railway). The building itself is fairly well mantained however there is graffiti on the side of the building. We'd like a fence around the perimiter of the garage and to give it a small courtyard perhaps but we will have to see. The sign spins above the shelter where all the work takes place. The shot entering the garage will be a pan in towards the door and then the garage will simply open slightly upwards (see Fallout 3 - I think)

[Character Concept]

Thought I'd have a go at designing a character if we use one. Might be taking on too much work with the environment to create also. Anyway it's early stages and this gives us something to fall back on if needed. Thinking about it, the design may have to be simplified.

Concept Exterior

I've been working on this exterior concept over the last few days, added colour and lighting to give an idea of it's location and mood. Looks very urban at the moment, with a city skyline backdrop. I was also thinking about what sort of texture would be present on a garage. Depending on if its old or new. Adding graffiti indicates what sort of area its in, also adding to the feeling that people inhabit it.

2 Fast 2 Furious...

Images from the 2 Fast 2 Furious film - Animated scene at the end.  Good for a bit of concept work.  Not sure if Sam and I are doing a night shot - would be nice but we'll see a little later into the project.

Unreal 3 Engine

One of the best Engines around - used for creating games for the PS3, XBox 360 and PCs is the Unreal Engine. The third of its kind now and it only gets better and better. Every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with the ease of content creation and programming in mind. The team have attempted to give as much Power as possible to the hands of the artists and designers to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance. The Engine is intergrated with numerous leading middleware technologies.

Heres a list typical content Specifications taken off of the Unreal Engine Website.
"Different Genres of games will have widely varying expectations of player counts, scene size, and performance, so these specifications should be regarded as one data point for one project rather than hard requirements for all.Characters:Renderable Mesh: Build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on teh expection of 5-20 visable characters in a game scene.Detail Mesh: Build 1-8 million triangles detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048 x 2048 per character.

Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.Normal Maps and Texture Maps:Character, Normal and World Texture Maps authored at 2048 x 2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next Generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2 times, and low-end PC's up to 4 times, depending on texture count and scene complexity.

Environments:Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.

Lights:There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lightes affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radus lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene."

Yesterday was quite productive.

Sam and I had a little brain storm session where we came up with a few different ideas of how our piece will look. We still need to research Game Engines and how many Poly Counts on average game companies use. As this is an old brief I imagine that it is very limited and looking back at the GTA games the Garage's, Pay and Sprays and all such buildings which you can drive into are very empty in terms of models but very alive in textures. Hopefully our project will be alive with both.

Character?
Sam and I also discussed on whether or not to have a character in our piece. I think it would be a great touch to have a mechanic in there however as its not on the brief and it may add to Poly Count (it may or may not be considered within the limit yet - need to confirm) it may not be needed.

Ramblers Auto Repairs

So here we are. Sam Saunders and I Daniel Shufflebotham have teamed up and are going to be working on Brief A:

Source: Nik Taylor
Lead Artist -- Rockstar North
http://www.rockstarnorth.com/
“I want your students to design, build, and texture a “chop-shop” for us. In case any of the students are wondering, a chop-shop is a garage where stolen cars are taken to be either re-sprayed and given new number plates, or broken up for spare parts. If they want to come up with a name for the chop-shop and appropriate signage then that would also help us out.”
“They should use a 3D modelling package that is preferably Max or Maya. The submitted work should consist of both an exterior and an interior.”

“When they model the interior then they should use a 20,000 polygon limit as the game engine won’t be displaying anything other than the interior and characters at a fixed LOD (Level Of Detail).”

“When they model the exterior then they will have to build three different LODs, high (5000 polys), medium (2,500 polys), and low (500 polys), for viewing at three different distances within the game engine.”

“The texturing of their models is as important as the geometry; their models should be textured using TGA format image files of 256 x 256, 512 x 512, or 1024 x 1024 resolutions.”
Which of the four possible areas do I concentrate on?

a) 2D conceptualization
b) character animation
c) visualisation (and modelling)
d) visualisation (texturing and rendering)