A little known fact about our website here at Digital-Mercs.com is that thanks to a tool written by our very own Jon Rick, we are notified by email anytime someone visits our site. This causes two things to happen. One, we get a lot of emails. And two, we know who is checking us out and how often.
Interestingly, we have been getting visits from internet watchdog services on a regular basis. We are assuming that this is due to the title of our current project, “Project: Death Race”. We here at Digital-Mercs want to take a moment to publicly state that “Project: Death Race” is simply a fan created UDK project, whose sole purpose is to highlight our talents as digital artists & game designers. P:DR will never be sold, or used to make money.
However, with that being said, the artists here at Digital-Mercs.com are all currently looking for work. So if you like what you see, don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team that you may be interested in. Or even better, hire the entire team. Instant art department. And we work cheap!
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.
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.
Just a quick post before bed. With a little less than four days till GDC, we have begun the looong process of populating the track with assets. Here’s an in-engine screen cap of an alleyway I have been building.
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.
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.
I’ve been working on the mustang pretty intensively. With the model complete, I’m deep within Mudbox sculpting away. The reference from the movie shows the car as pretty beat up. With lots of rust and crumbly metal that’s been wielded together. This screen capture is from an earlier stage of my process. I’m hammering my way through mudbox, excited to take everything over to Photoshop and finish up with an awesome looking car in UDK.
