Liam Richardson
Artist, Programmer, Hobby-starter
Mansion Grounds
Layout for the mansion grounds, with some labels. ‘Bout ready to build this sucker.
Mansioned
Pretty satisfied with this mansion design. I probably won’t be making the interior, given that I’m only one person. If I were making more than one area, the majority of the game would be set inside the mansion and the sub-levels underneath. I’ll probably at least make some sketches of what they might look like, at some point.
Another Haunted Mansion Sketch
I think I’m damn near close to happy with the mansion setting, I can start laying out specifics, design what the mansion itself will look like, and actually start building it pretty soon.
Point and Click
I’ve been poking at this for a while, but I finally got dynamic loading sorted out so it actually sort of looks like something and I can show that something to people and they will understand what they are seeing! I started with the intention of splitting all the assets into their own files for manageability and I wasn’t about to compromise that for the sake of pushing out a video sooner.
Made almost entirely in Blender I sculpted the character in Sculptris but then modeled, skinned, textured, and animated the game-res version inside Blender. The game itself runs in the Blender Game Engine, yadda yadda yadda.
Still working on smoothing out animations (right now there’s no turning animation at all, it just jumps right to walking forward) Definitely got a ways to go (the bulk of the work will be making assets), but so far what’s there is pretty solid. The player can click where they want to walk (if they can’t walk there the cursor changes), the character paths to that location. If there is something that can be examined, the cursor changes to an eye and the player can click on that and text will show. I’m in the process of adding actual interactions with objects. What more could a person possibly want in a game?
Accidental Hiatus over? Possibly.
I’ve been horribly neglecting this blog! What art I have been posting online has gone to my Tumblr instead. Whoops! Here’s the models I’m currently working on/retouching. They’re all made for in-game purposes, so we’re talking low poly with normals and whatnot. I’ve been messing around with using softbodies for the tunic of the warrior woman in the middle, but game engine the softbody support in Blender is marginal at best so I may try a different engine or just hand-animate. The bomber jacket girl and bat guy haven’t changed much, the zombie boy and ghost girl have textures (for the most part) and the jester guy is new.
It’s an offline render just to get around Blender’s awful real-time alpha handling; I disabled ray tracing and AO and such so other than the better antialiasing it may as well be a real-time render.
In other news, I haven’t drawn it yet but I had an idea to make the sky islands project less generic! I’ve been frustrated with that one for a while. I like the idea of sky islands but there’s just so many fantasy worlds with floating islands and whatnot that I just couldn’t bring myself to make another one. I’ll be doing sketching for that while I make the environment for the zombie ghost project, I guess.
Dynamic Hair and Cloth!
I’m mostly finished with my dynamic cloth and hair solver for Blender. Pretty solid (the collision isn’t as stable as it could be, though), simple script, simple-ish setup (I had been hoping to make it all contained within one armature, and that’s still probably possible but I’m still struggling my way through vector math and converting to local space in relation to a chain of parents is a tad beyond me at the moment… the game engine does that part for me at the object level but if I were controlling specific bones I would have to set up the math myself), I’m pretty happy with it.
Whoops, forgot to post
Well I went ahead and sculpted up the ghost girl, I’m nearly done retopo-ing her too but I’m going to bed so I’m just going to post the sculpt.
I’ve spent a fair bit more time scripting up the basis for the game but it’s not quite at a point where it looks like anything. I’m still relearning a lot of things about the game engine and my next step is to figure out dynamic loading of assets, so I can have actual models and not just a bunch of cubes for characters. I also have to finish the game-res ghost girl, and then texture her and the zombie boy, and make them some actual scenery. I don’t think I’ll be done with this by Halloween but that won’t stop me from trying.
Zombie Shaders and Shapekeys
Well, I haven’t actually painted into the textures yet, but I blocked in the colors and assembled the shader and spend a heckuva lotta time getting shapekeys set up for the face (When I realized I’d forgotten to give him teeth or a tongue or the inside of his mouth I added it, and it wreaked havoc with the shapes I had made), now I can animate his expressions and whatnot. Also I slapped together some random orange light balls and ran it in the game engine to make sure everything rendered right during runtime. It does!
Also, the geometry is finalized now, at 5610 triangles. Now he’s got a 1024 square normal map, a 1024 square diffuse map, and two 512 square maps for SSS (one is grayscale tho so it’s a lot smaller) I’ll top it off with a 1024 square spec map when I’ve made some progress on the diffuse. Might be able to get away with 512 plus a detail texture, I’m going for a fairly simple and cartoony look.
Zombie Progress
For the past week or so I’ve been spending most of my time in the good ol’ Blender Game Engine making the framework for a game that will take me, by way of the current halloweeny mini-project, back to the sky islands project. In the meantime, I’ve modeled, rigged, and unwrapped the in-game zombie boy (5270 triangles), and baked across the normals (1024px square normal map). The next step is to give him some asymmetry in the model (such as the poof of hair on his right) and then paint up some textures.
I may knock in an extra faceloop or two on the shoulders, too, they’re looking a little rough.
Zombie Boy Sculpt
Behold, an update! Here’s a sculpt of the zombie boy. Hard to tell he’s a zombie just now, what with no armature or textures.
It appears that the combination of Sculptris and my computer are unable to handle sculpting this model, as soon as I turned off symmetry it slowed to a crawl. Thus, he doesn’t have a number of details such as shoelaces and the like- and the clothing wrinkles are all totally symmetrical which bugs the heck out of me. I’ll see what I can do about adding them to the normal map manually, I suppose. Definitely looking forward to the day when I can afford a more capable sculpting program.
Liam Richardson 