New class. New Project.

Its that time again, and I am in a new class, Senior Project and it is exactly how it sounds. I've got ten weeks to make a portolio piece that shows off my abilities. I'm a level designer and a modeler so my first instinct is to make a fun level. I spent about a day thinking about what would make a cool level that has not been over done by other students at the school.

I kept thinking...do something with a church or a cathedral. If I made a cathedral, the project would be completely focused on modeling and texturing rather than the level itself. A smaller church would be a bit easier to model but the level wouldn't be good enough for a good stage. I was searching churches and cathedrals in Europe and I came across the catacombs in France and that was it. Catacombs have been in a few games in the past but has not been done at the school before and also gives me complete freedom to do what I wish with the level itself. I'm not making a copy of the catacombs, but what I'd be making would be my idea of some catacombs underneath a small church.

This idea gives me the freedom to do some modeling, level design, and kismet coding which are important to level designers. Below is an interesting picture of the catacombs feel that I'll be aiming for.

a new idea!

It was brought to my attention that I need to model something really cool. It is a sword called "Stormbringer" from the Elric series of books. Elric of Melniboné is the last emporer of Melniboné. His sword is said to steal the souls of the things it kills. Here are some concepts I've found on the web of the sword. All pictures came from www.stormbringer.net.

Character Complete

Well, these 10 weeks have flown by. The character is 100% complete. This whole process was fun. I cant wait to get started on the next character. Next time around I'm going to get the model much more complete before progressing on everything else. The unwrap process was somewhat easy but I'd love to get into zbrush for some detail work next time. Texturing was fun but I need to perfect the painting shadows and lights of different materials. Overall, this was a great learning experience and I cannot wait to create something new.

Some Character Renders

Here are some renders of the character. I've got a few more small tweaks to do but a final composite picture will be up here next week and maybe some movies of the character.

Character Texture - Complete!

Eye Texture

Specular Map

Normal Map

Diffuse Map


After a ton of time spent on the texturing part...my character is textured. I used a few different methods to get everything the way I wanted. I tried crazy bumping but it didn't come out as I had pictured, so I decided to mess with the settings and paint on my normal map. Painting on the normal map came out with pretty decent results but if I had my choice, I would have used zbrush to create a higher poly model for the normal map. Overall, the whole texturing process has been a bit harder than I expected. Modeling is just so much easier for me then unwrapping and texture painting.

Character Unwrap and Texturing

The next part of the process is completed. For those that don't know, this part of the process is where we get ready to paint the texture of the skin, clothes, hair, etc. So we have to "unwrap" the character to pretty much flatten it out so its easier to paint on. The character unwrap was not as bad as I expected. Getting the verts together and welding them was a bit tedius but overall it was a fairly painless process. I'm now currently working on the texturing process. Texturing is not my forte but the better it turns out the better the character will look. More pictures will be up soon.

Final Model

It appears that my model is almost complete. I have one small things to do before I can begin the unwrapping process. I have to make some better cuts for the armpits for them to animate better. I threw a biped into the model and tested the rotation of the arm/shoulder and its not there yet. After that is done, I've gotta start next part of the project, which is unwrapping then texturing (maybe normal mapping) then skinning/rigging the character, then finally animating the character. The last three weeks are going to be pretty difficult but the finished product should be worth it.