What I've Been Up To, Part 3: 3D Composition for Interactive Media
I think this might've been the most useful class I've taken at Columbia that didn't directly result in a game for my portfolio. It was a fast-paced crash course in 3D modeling, texturing, and animating. The only downside is that it was all in Maya. Great for understanding the tools of the industry! Not so much for making stuff I can actually use in-game, because the educational license doesn't allow for commercial use and the commercial license is something to the tune of $3,000. While I try to figure out Blender, here's what I made in the class:
Assignment 1 was to make a crate. I tried to make something like the cargo-crates from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne's puzzle-stages. This one has Top Hats in it. Because Tuttle.
Assignment 2 was pretty vague. It was to create an "Architectural Asset" I ended up making some stairs with railing like you might see on a fancy college campus (that isn't in Chicago) or in a Tony Hawk game. There's some chalk drawings on the side, but they didn't come out very well in the renders. :C
Assignment 3 was to re-create a still-life using 3D assets. The one I used can be found here: http://digital-art-gallery.com/oid/81/640x535_14313_Gear_2d_fantasy_illustration_still_life_picture_image_digital_art.jpg
We only had to recreate 5 items in the image. I was never really happy with the coin bag, and glass was a heck of a lot harder to make than it should've been, but I really like how the sword came out.
Assignment 4 was to create a model that we'd later animate. I thought really hard about what to try modeling. I didn't think I was good enough to make anything that organic yet (the coin bag was hard enough), but I didn't want something too easy. In the end, I made this nutcracker soldier guy with hinge joints. I'm pretty dang proud of how he turned out!
Assignment 5 was to animate him, of course. I had to give him a walk cycle and an idle animation. You can check those out in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SFzVJet5CE
Assignment 6 was to make a level in UDK that'd be used as the basis of our final project. The level would need to showcase our walker model, one of our other models, and a bunch of UDK stuff like Post-Processing Volumes. I wanted to make a toy shop or carpenter's bench for my toy soldier, but the default UDK assets didn't have much in the way of that sorta thing, so cartoony castle village it was!
Part of Assignment 7 (the final project) was to make a 30 second fly-through camera movie of the level with all the stuff it needed in it. I made this fly through movie, but couldn't figure out how to export it out of UDK. And since neither could anyone else in the class, I think that just having it in our UDK map file was enough for the teacher. Maybe I'll figure out how to export the movie later and post it here. For now, though, I'm content to leave UDK alone. Either it's a lot less user friendly than Unity3D, or I'm too used to Unity to use it properly. Either way, I think I'll stick with Unity for now.
That's about it for 3D comp. Next post, I'll talk about what I'll be focusing on in the days ahead.