3D Animation

Wizard House Conclusion

November 11, 2008 November 11, 2008 I spent some time last week finishing up the Wizard House project I wrote about previously – another pass through on UV’s and textures, and then onto damage modeling, which went faster than I thought. The house goes through three damage stages: there’s one model for hit from the right, another for hit from the left (both for the first stage); a model of all the walls missing for the second stage; and a very minimal model of just the foundation of the house for the third stage. I also made many debris parts – shingles and beams and wooden planks – which will go flying away from the blast as the damage models are instantiated. The actual movement for the debris is left up to the game engine’s physics simulator, so I don’t have to worry about animating that. So, I pumped out the damage models and debris, working down to the wire getting this stuff to the developer by the deadline. I walked in there and happily handed my files over on a flash drive. But of course that would be just too easy. Much to my dismay, the models showed up in the engine, and – oops! The models were about the size of my pinky toe compared to the characters, had no textures, and the normals were facing the wrong way, making the models invisible at certain angles. Of course this was all a problem in how I was exporting my files. It wasn’t a huge deal to fix, but just a slightly annoying little reminder that you should always check export settings and the engine’s import expectations to make sure everything lines up. The house series can be seen on my site. But the big news of my week now is I’ve been in touch with a startup game company in LA, and they want me on board, working remotely as a primary environment and props modeler. Too early to say anything for sure, but this could be pretty exciting, and of course I can dream that this will take off, and here I am with my foot in the door…