Strategery
Last night the PDR team got together with Jim Rivers to formulate our plans for GDC… Jim is about as close to a professional ‘convention goer’ as you can get, and so his words carry serious weight. Also, he knows how to have a good time. I actually met Jim at last year’s GDC, and this past year has been strictly better for it. Either directly through him, or the events he organizes, I’ve made a ton of quality friends.
Lately I’ve been so stressed out about getting quality art together that I’ve literally been making myself sick. Anyways, after our little get together, my path from here to GDC seems manageable. It’s going to require sacrificing just about all my free time to art, but it’s doable.
I was reading the postmortem on Borderlands in this months Game Developer magazine and they mentioned that one of the things that really worked well for them was ‘Kit Bashing.’ The basic premise is to use a small set of ‘parts’ to build an environment by scaling and rotating those parts. It’s a bit like building with Lego’s. I have tons and tons of props sitting on a big hard drive labeled ‘Projects.’ They’re mostly minor stuff, so I’ve never really felt like showing them off. Using this ‘Kit Bash’ approach and the skills I’ve picked up in Unreal over the last few years, I think I could make good use of a lot of them to assemble compelling environment shots. After all, I keep applying for environment jobs, and i don’t have a whole lot of complete environments to show… Model a star asset or two, and then flesh out the background with old models I’ve created. Bam. Completed environment.
I put a few more hours into the Truck last night, mostly cleaning it up, and reducing the poly count by about half. I also added a few more details like the rear-view mirrors, and the Ram Skull on the grill. I thought the skull was going to take a lot of time, but I knocked out the low-poly model in about 45 minutes. A little Mudbox and she’ll be looking pretty.
