At Long Last

Hope from last week is here to be delivered this week as I stumbled across my idea for the setting and scenario for my cinematic to display to represent a sequence in my game concept Outer Eden.

Further promoting this concept I would like to say that its places the main character Zak in the desert like outlands of Mars where he survives evading the governments military order that patrol Mars. So in this scene you will first see Zak looking out towards the vast land mass of Mars until his devices alerts him of incoming enemies; urging him to flee. With that in mind Zak hides behind a rock in order to wait for the patrol to pass but one of the soldiers hears movements from the rock in which Zak is hidden, which ignites an action sequence.

I choice this idea because it gets across how the game feels as a whole and it doesn't require me to construct a great deal of assets for the environment and that's not down to laziness its just simply in place to ensure I'm hitting milestones.

Taking in that I now have an idea to work with I felt as if I could move on towards researching environment and rigging characters as character animation protocols are something I have never before encounter, so it's going to be interesting.

For now I can leave you with an image of my main character with all the bones of the biped in 3D Studio Max in place ready for skinning.

Next Week

• Fully Skinned Character
• Motion Capture Animations 

Slow and Steady

Unfortunately  unlike the past few weeks I cannot bring cheer through work completion as I haven't really developed much this week due to the frustration of not coming up with an idea for my cinematic.

This has had a negative effect with the project as a whole because creating the two characters were definitive elements however the world that surrounds them is yet to be drawn and with not having a world I don't actually have any actions to take place.

Bringing me onto the factor that I have had the opportunity for the first time to witness motion capture in full flight.....but when it came to Outer Eden I didn't have anything to record because of the previous issues.


Anyway I'm going to have to leave it there for now but I really hope next week has more in store.


Next Week

• The drawing board with cinematic plan

Back to Work

Another steady week for me as I deliver on last weeks aims and a bit extra on the side and what I mean by that is I managed to completely finished my enemy characters. However I will not claim that it was difficult as for my enemies I recycled the armour which was originally going to be solely allocated to the main character by 3D modelling a helmet to sit on it's shoulders instead of my head which has been generated using a piece of software called FaceGen.

This was done in order to save time as I felt at this stage a lot had to be done and some aspects were elements that I'd never looked at ever such as rigging these characters to be animated. So, all in all I wielded my head to the armour mesh, created the enemy helmet to be used with the armour set and in result of this I had to put together two separate texture maps for both characters. All of which are displayed below.

Next week

• First look at motion capture
• Starting to build environment for cinematic

Happy New Year

Happy new year everyone who is reading my blog I hope you've all had a great Christmas and received everything you've asked for

Anyhow, been as my last post was last year due to me taking time off over the Christmas holidays I would like to highlight what's in store over the next few weeks leading up towards my second milestone which is the press pack and cinematic segment of Outer Eden. These are in fact two separate milestones but they do fall very close together so subconsciously I consider them to be as one.


Expectations over the weeks leading towards cinematic and press pack

• Enemy Character Model
• Rigging Characters
• Animating Characters
• Environment
• Other assets for scene
• Press Pack

I must point out that at this stage in development I haven't actually got a fully fledged idea for my cinematic piece as I'm trying to consider all logistics such as time constraint and whether or not my abilities will maintain a specific idea.

Next Weeks plans

• Enemy Character