Watch out for the Zombies.

Minus the zombies...cause there are no zombies.

It's been awhile, I know.  You probably thought, "Why does this guy never update his blog anymore.  He probably stopped working on the game."


WRONG!

Quite the opposite.  I haven't updated cause I wanted some progress to show for it.

You may remember, back in april, a post mentioning THIS about trying to make abandoned looking buildings....well...here is a little side by side comparison for you:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

And here is a slightly closer look:

Lots of detail went into these guys and there is still a whole street to finish.  Here's a closer look so you can see the detail a bit better:

There is even a hidden walkway in one of these buildings that has some graffiti in it that looks like this:

In the story, this city was made with decaying manufactured materials so when it rains, the buildings are slowly falling apart.  There will be other little hints and secret things to find in the level as I plan to have a bunch of hidden places to explore and see during side quests.

Well, that's it for now, I have about 11 more of these buildings to finish off before the street is done, and that's a lot of photoshop work.  Hope you've enjoyed this little piece and look for me again hopefully before the end of the month!

Street of dispair

Finally finished modeling half the street and the main park area for the run down side of town.  This was a pain cause of the fine detail's I had to incorporate into the modeling.  Take a look:

Once textured, this should start looking pretty sweet.  Hope you enjoy.

Buildings Are Boring

I've been working my butt off trying to finish these buildings, however my progress is going at snails pace even though I've been putting a lot of long days into the process.  Here is a sneak peek:

I have 6 buildings finished and 19 more to go.  The one above took me all day to texture.  It only has roughly 23 different textures on the single building but the process is grueling.


1.  I search for a texture I like either in my texture library or online.
2.  I then bring it into photoshop and resize it, color correct it and if need be blend the edges and save it.
3.  I then have to re-tweak the image for again for highlights and save that as a separate file.
4.  Then I apply it in 3DS Max and work on the way it fits onto the building by pushing and pulling it around, (Giggity)
5.  And then I repeat that over and over 23 times and then I have one building done...........this is going to take me longer than I expected.  I'm exhausted after just explaining it.

I'm gonna go take a break.  Later crazies.

Halfway to Insanity

Lately, I've tried to complete 3 separate objectives on CryEngine 3 and all 3 objects were left halfway finished due to, well, insufficient information.

Objective 1:  Create fireflies.

The closest I could come up with was either a singular light floating around or a bunch of bugs that I tried to make into movable lights crawling on the ground.  Needless to say I was disgruntled (I messed around on them for about a week)


Objective 2:  Create a bridge.

This one was going well until I had to import the bridge from 3DS Max into CryEngine.  For some reason, the CryEngine exporter claimed I had something called "Degenerative faces" and wouldn't allow the bridge to be exported to CryEngine.  After searching online and reading up, I've come to the conclusion I have no idea (even from the definition) what a degenerative face is. (Although I was trying to understand this at 2am a few nights ago.)  I need to give another re-try here in a bit.

**UPDATE**:   I found out what a Degenerative face is and have successfully fixed the issue after only three hours of looking around. 

As you can see above, I have imported my custom bridge into CryEngine and even have a man standing in the middle of it.  Next to build the house that the bridge leads to that sits on stilts above the water.

Objective 3: Create cobble stone.

This one is my most current upset and as of 30 mins ago, my most current success.  Last night I thought, "Screw 3DS Max for right now, I'll just work within CryEngine for the moment while I ponder on my other obstacles.  In doing so I watched a 45min demo (twice) while I followed along and mimicked making the cobble stone from Photoshop (which I am pretty pro at) and moving it to CryEngine.

Inside CryEngine there is a function that turns the cobble stone from a flat layer like this:

And transforms it to a 3D layer called "P.O.M." like this:

However, even after following the instructions step by step I could not get it to apply the P.O.M.  I even went as far as deleting the CryEngine software and re-installing it (a friend on the CryEngine Forums told me when making the fireflies that I might need to do that).

After the re-install it still didn't work.  I was furious.  After messing with more settings, I finally got it to work.  VICTORY IS MINE!

All in all, I will continue working on the project but wasn't expecting so many hiccups.