Not much done

As I believe I had previously mentioned two weeks ago, I spent that week reading up for my upcoming exam.  I even spent most of the weekend also to study.  Then last week, I worked more overtime then I ever had.  I was lucky to get sleep let alone study.  That means that most of the modeling was put on the back burner for this weekend.

I was going to try to get one or two original tanks blocked out.  However, every time I began to get somewhere, I really did not like where it was going.  So then I was going to write the background story, explain the technology and such.  However, I also did not like how that was turning out.So by the end of the night, I was just fooling around trying to make a material library, when I made a camo pattern.  These are likely to be the matte base in the game, and I made one for each team (yellow, green, red, grey).  The desert and jungle camo are staples while the red desert and arctic camo I though cam out nice.  This means, I think, that the blue team I had initially said when laying out team will be replaced by desert camo (yellow).

Hopefully, I will have something more substantial in the coming week.  Until next time,
~gunnah

Friday Posts Delayed

I am not sure if I mentioned it in passing, but I was studying fore and passed a test back in November.  That was the easy one since it was the one for my major.  Unfortunately, I need to take another test which is more of an overview including a subject I have not taken in a decade and a subject I have never taken.  This means I will be devoting quite a bit of time until the test in early March to studying those holes in my knowledge.  But with all of this time newly devoted to studying and still needing to work, I am going to have nearly no time left to do any modeling work during the week.  Because of this, I am going to stop posting Friday nights/Saturday mornings.  It is not like I have been making Friday posts regularly for some time and the ones I do are mostly excuses about overtime or something came up, et c.  I am hoping to get some modeling done over the coming weekends while taking a break from studying, but as fate would dictate, most of my overtime is now over the weekends.  I am going to continue chugging along slowly but surely and hope that things come together real soon.

Hopefully with a focused post one night a week, I can get this project back on tracks.  I am going to add a list of projects for the game as well as side projects I am doing to the page eventually, just to keep track of what I am doing for everyone else.  Until next post,

~gunnah

Getting Better, More Slowly than Surely

The last week has been rough.  I have been pretty sick, so bad in fact I had to take off one day from work.  I am starting to recover, but I have been spending most of my free time sleeping.  This has meant I have not gotten a lot done on the game models.  I am hoping to finish a few tutorials, just to bump up my art display, while working on the game models.  I am hoping to alternate post eventually with one being a completed tutorial and the next being something related to the game.  It will probably take me until the beginning of next month to get on that schedule, culminating with the finished Abandoned Building Scene.  I tried to work on it with a new technique, but it kept crashing before I could make any progress.  Hopefully I can figure out how to fix that without too much extra work so I can get it back on track.

Until next post, hopefully I will be feeling better,
~gunnah

Happy 2013

I was hoping to have a lot done for this post, but not much happened.  I have been feeling a little off for a few days, and now I think it is in full blown cold mode.  Hopefully, I will be able to work through this, but I am not sure how much extra I am going to get done on these projects.  Most of my time has been devoted to seeing how real world examples handle details, so playing video games, and learning more about post=processing of images, also known as watching tutorials.  I was going to do a few, but with whatever I have, I just cannot get everything straight in my head.  This is also why I have not worked on that one nearly finished project.  I do not want to put a bunch of work into it, then look at it later and decide I do not like the direction I took it.

Hopefully this bug clears up and I can get back to normal, with perhaps a surprise or two in the future.  Until next time,
~gunnah

Hard Lesson in Animation

So I nearly finished up my first animation and decided that it was time to render it.  I had rendered bits and pieces as I went and did not really notice anything since they were single frames.  When you switch from frame to complete animation, you gain an appreciation for just how fast the brain works.  In order to fool the brain, the computer needs to display 24 frames each seconds.My animation is just under 10 seconds, so its length is just over 200 frames.  My first couple of tries went quick since I toned down the render requirements, but I would continually get errors with the particle system render, which made them fairly useless as something to display.  However, knowing the settings were high during the creation and animation layout stages and those images came out nice looking, I was left with only one choice.  Unfortunately, each frame on those setting takes between 12 and 15 minutes to render - as opposed ot the first time which was under one minute and the second which was three to four.

So, I have been rendering this animation since Saturday and it will take a decent bit of Monday to finish it.  Because of this long length of time, I have been afraid to work on the other project, which has a tendency to cause the modeling program to crash.  While I could restart the render from the last finished frame, as I am rendering each frame as an image, I would hate to loose anything I changed after saving last.  I have been fooling around with other items, but I am not sure if I will post any of those, especially since nothing is anywhere near any stage of completion.  Until next time,
~gunnah

Slowly Progressing through the Holidays

So I have been making progress, but it has been extremely slow.  So slow that I really do not have any images to post.  As I have said, currently I am trying to knock off two projects before the new year, or shortly into it, then return the the modeling for the game.  The one project which I am not really disclosing much on until its release is moving along at a decent pace, but nothing Earth shattering.  Since I am trying to keep it a surprise, I am going to leave it at that, it probably needs about four or five hours, before I am happy with it, then it will need to render and hopefully it will be done.

The other big project is the abandoned building I started back in October and which has not had much new on it since mid-November.  I have fixed some of the aspects I did not like so far.  I have a little to add still in terms of what has already been modeled.  After that, I need to get the flood lights up and textured to finish off that part of the project.  At that point I will do a final, before post-processing render.  Then I will move on to post-processing, which will take a little time I am sure, but I hope when compared with the before image, the difference is noticeable.  Estimating what that is going to entail, and assuming a minimum number of crashes and data loss, that is probably about ten hours - mostly because I need to learn about post-processing while I am doing it on this project.

Not really sure how much I am going to get done since I am trying to enjoy some of the gifts I have received over the holidays, but I really do want to finish these projects and get back to the game.  Once back on my project, I will probably start blocking out a level or two, just to get a feel for how large I want the map to be and how much I need to make.  From there I will make a list and start doing one piece at a time, slowly building the level in something playable.  Once the level is done, I will worry about the tanks, weapons, turrets, satellites, and other non-static objects.  Well, hopefully I have something next time, until then,
~gunnah

The Holiday Season

So it is that time of year when everything is down to the wire and nothing gets done, so why should I have expected any of these projects to be any different?  I did work on modeling, but it was mostly just fooling around learning little things.  I worked on making an arch and then modeled a leg, but nothing really with which to do anything constructive.  Hopefully, with my altered shift for the week, I can get to something a little more productive.  I would really like to get those two projects I have been working on finished for the end of the year so I can start the year off fresh.

I think I will keep my ramblings short this time.  So until next time,
~gunnah