Digital Mercs

So we’re back from the Game Developers Conference, and there’s really more great news and stories than can possibly be contained in a single post.

Aside from the success we were met with at the show, I believe our greatest triumph was the vast and measurable growth each of us experienced as artists. At the show, I personally had several art directors who’ve been following my work (or perhaps upon whom I’ve foisted myself to the point of recognition) comment on the positive changes in my personal portfolio. (As an aside, this was the first year that new projects completely displaced all student work from my portfolio.)

I overheard one of my personal Art-Heroes, Jeremy Bennett, comment on how much improvement he saw in Johnny Perkins work. That alone is amazing in two regards, first that he remembers us from our brief meeting a year ago, and obviously speaks volumes for the effort and improvement itself.

If you haven’t had the opportunity, I urge you to drop by each of our personal sites and browse the galleries. The fact alone that we’ve crunched to update our sites and share our recent work may be out greatest achievement over the past year.

Bradd McBrearty
Jon Rick
Johnny Perkins

Also, we had far more interest in Digital-Mercs, and its sister project, RPM-Games than I could have ever imagined. I invite you to follow both as things are just ramping up now. We’ve built a solid platform, and now progress is inevitable.

I thought I was going to be able to get away with just low poly weapons, but as I began texturing it became evident that they were bringing down the quality of the project as a whole.

I decided to man up and knock out quality High poly models. Most of the hard work was already done. And by hard, I mean tedious, EG Unwrapping and optimizing the model. High poly modeling is really a lot of fun. You’re free just to make it look awesome.

Here’s a quick progress shot of the M61 Vulcan:

I put these turn-around videos together largely for myself so that I can see how a project is progressing. Having the model in motion makes judging the quality of the normal maps, and the correctness of the specular maps much easier.

The easier answer is to dump the model into your game engine du jour, which is my next step, as I make another pass on the textures and make shaders for the glass and lights. I also have to tackle the weapons. They’re all unwrapped and ready to go, but the jury was out on whether I needed to make high-poly models of them or not.

I’m going to relegate that to the ‘After GDC’ column on my to-do list, and just put a nice texture on each one right now. Throw a little crazy bump at ‘em.

I’m glad for friends who lend some perspective to my life.

Over the last ten days or so I’ve spent as much time fighting with hardware, software, drivers, and firmware as I have working. I seriously considered breaking up with the digital world. I made a comment to Johnny along the lines of, “This just won’t fly in a production environment.” He was quick to point out that in a studio environment they have tech guys to solve these problems, and the artists just get to make art. Now I remember why I want to stop freelancing and join a studio.

I put together a playblast of the Low-poly version of the Truck, with Normal and Ambient Occlusion maps. I was curious to see what kind of rendering power 8 cores running at 4.17ghz, a SSD Raid0, and 12gb of ram would deliver.

Click the pic to be taken to the video.

Here’s a second update, after a few hours of texturing…

I spent a few more hours finishing up most of the modeling on the Ram. A lot of that time was spent modeling the weapons on the truck. The Ram is armed with two M61 Vulcan Gatling style machine guns, five Browning M1919 machine guns, and near the end of the movie they add six RPG-7′s. Since these are all real world weapons, reference images were plentiful. I wasn’t worried about modeling super-high poly versions of the weapons, I just wanted to use enough geometry to make the guns believable from a distance.

Unwrapping is going to be a beast, as the truck is made up of some 85 individual parts. All along I was planning out in my head now I was going to UV and Texture everything, which is why the truck isn’t one solid chunk. This will also allow me do add some really great secondary motion to the animations, time permitting. Also, while modeling I kept in mind that the player is going to be seeing the truck mostly from behind, and so I tried to play up the visual interest at the rear of the vehicle.

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.

So I was thinking to myself how I’d really like some extra time to work on our project. The universe, as if in reply granted my request by laying me low with bronchitis. It’s an interesting illness, because unlike a cold, or the flu, you don’t really feel that bad. In fact, aside form the constant coughing, and labored breathing, everything seems fine. This makes sitting at the computer for hours and hours basically the optimal activity, next to sleeping, when recovering from this particular malady.

Also, my internal clock is all out of whack from sleeping long hours, and then modeling long hours. Hence this early morning post.

I finished a couple smaller assets earlier this week as a sort of personal practice before I tackle unwrapping/mudboxing/texturing the Ram. The model is deceptively complex. The individual armor plates demand to be each modeled separately, as extruding them all off the base mesh results in it looking really low poly, rather than covered in unique angle metal pieces.

At this point I just need to clean up the armor a little, and model the weapons. Here’s a couple WIP shots:

There’s been a lot of progress in different areas recently. My next focus is getting this truck finished. I put another couple hours into it, a lot of which was spent scratching my head figuring out the best plan of attack. Now things are moving right along and the end (of modeling) is in sight.
Last night I put some work into the warehouse and its textures. Turns out it’s a pretty major part of the game. Deserves some serious TLC.

I’m probably my own worst critic. At least I know that I’m not suffering from any illusions of grandeur. After taking a good hard look at the cars made by Johnny and Jon, and then perusing a few forums, and eventually ending up at looking at a vehicle wireframe on Tyler Wanlass’s website, I realized that I was working much too low poly. I was going to end up with a PS2 model that no amount of normal mapping could fix.

Rather than slice up the boxy model and pull a ton of verts, I made a clean start. I’m a lot happier with the way the base mesh is coming out this time around. The car has more structure to it, which is going to make extracting sections of the body to create armor plates much easier. Also, there is a lot more resolution to work with in the mesh , so creating damage states later is going to turn out better.

I swear. There’s other people working on some great stuff. And if you’re lucky, someday they’ll share it with you. I hear Johnny’s car has turned awesome since the last time I saw it.
I just started blocking out the base mesh for Machine Gun Joe’s Truck. Since every square inch of the truck is covered with armor, I was only worried about getting the basic proportions and silhouette correct.