Final presentations for our Round 4 projects have ended. This round we had to make a game that “told a story,” and my team decided to use Kinect as the platform.
You can see the game that my team produced in my portfolio under “Games: Building Virtual Worlds.”
My team decided to address a more serious topic with our game this round I think the result turned out well.
The brainstorm process was a bit slow again, but this time because we had too much to work with. Daniel Aum had a great idea for a complex and very cinematic story but we didn’t have the resources to execute the whole thing. Many thanks to Chris Klug who helped us streamline the story down to what it is now. We ended up capturing the essence of the story we wanted to tell, and Daniel did a great job too in choosing a subject that was well-known enough that we didn’t have to waste time in-game setting up any of the back-story.
I really pushed myself this round, and I really enjoyed it. This was the first time that I had modeled and rigged humans, and they turned out really well. I even had a go at putting bones in the faces and animating the mouths and eyelids. The buildings were really ambitious, too. I didn’t have CityEngine or any other procedural city-generating software so I just made 3 different types of floors, 3 different types of roofs, and a generic door, and mixed and matched building heights, orientations and texture colors. The amount of scene work I had to do gave me a lot more exposure to Unity3D than any previous round as well.
I have to thank and apologize to my texture artist, Dan-Ah. I made so many models that she became back-logged I had to UVW unwrap most of them for her especially since she had to spend so much time texturing our two human characters. This was an enlightening experience though and I found that certain ways of modeling are not as UVW unwrap friendly. I think 3D modelers and texture artist should coordinate to understand the difficulty of each other’s roles and pipeline better between themselves. Something that I know some other teams in the class have had difficulty with.
Albert C Gea 