Learning to the Max!

If I want to fulfill my ambition of becoming a game designer, at some point I'll need to buckle down and learn 3ds Max. Today, I made the most of Digital Tutors by spending most of my afternoon powering through a tutorial on the basics of the software.

The process begun with the creation of a spline, which was then turned into a piece of 3D geometry. The fillet tool was used on some of the sharper corners to make them desirably rounder. These elements were then duplicated and attached with the bridge tool.

Separate polygon shapes were created, modified and positioned to represent the buttons and joystick. The screen face was duplicated and hidden, before a more shapely screen was put in place. 

The duplicated object was unhidden and positioned to act as a piece of glass - which would later be altered with mental ray materials. 

At this stage, the UV unwrapping could begin. All of the processes so far have been fairly similar to that of Autodesk Maya, so it hasn't been too difficult to follow through. I had so far followed the tutorial very closely, so I decided to use the texturing stage as a chance to make the model my own. As 'Spyro the Dragon' is my childhood favourite, I chose an array of images to use in my Photoshop file.

Using the material editor, I created several different plastics for the buttons, joysticks and rims which were individually altered to be either matte or glossy with varying colours. The backplate was input into the settings for the initial render:

I was pretty happy with the progress at this stage, but there were still changes that needed to be made. To begin with, the output ratio for the render was set to 1280x720 and use of the safeframes allowed me to reposition the object to fill the frame.

A skylight was created with a HDR spherical map input to gain better control of the scene's lighting. However, this was still very dark, so the lighting was ramped. A polygon plane was inserted to act as the ground, allowing a shadow to be placed.

I'm feeling pretty happy about my progress so far, so I am aiming to work towards building my knowledge every day through the use of Digital Tutors and YouTube tutorials until I feel comfortable enough to try my own projects.

Remy in Full Colour

The textured UV snapshot.

Texturing the model proved to be very time consuming but completing the task left me with a feeling of accomplishment. I had many errors with rendering the textures with mental ray - many of which quickly resulted in a navy blue screen. I overcome this by exporting the texture file as multiple different image formats and found that bitmap solved the problem.

The bloggin' begins...

My journey began in childhood, where I first discovered my love for video games. Not only do I enjoy playing games, but I consider them to be an art form - a gateway almost, allowing a person to visually explore another's imagination. I was fascinated by the designs that went into the creation of both characters and environments. 

Games I particularly enjoyed include 'Spyro the Dragon', 'Hotel Dusk' and 'Heavy Rain'. Heavy Rain was created by Quantic Dream - a French video game developing company who create realistic graphics using actors and techniques involving motion capture. The final results of the creating process are impeccable, as the character models are borderline identical to their real-life actor. 

In 2012 I began my studies of Animation for Film and Games at St. Austell College. I excelled in many areas of the course, working vigorously in software such as Autodesk Maya, Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop. The course taught me many important skills, such as how to create storyboards to a good standard, how to analyse existing video and photographic advertisements and how to visually present ideas. 

During my college course, I had much experience in working as a team - which was especially effective when designing TV idents. The assignment required me to work in a group of 2-3 people to create a 30-second ident for the fictional game-reviewing channel 'Game Hedz'. Within the project, my colleague was responsible for the environment design, whilst I created the character - which was modelled, rigged, textured and animated in Autodesk Maya.

A render from the final TV ident production.

I am currently studying Animation and Visual Effects at Falmouth University, where I am hoping to develop my skills further in order to achieve the career I hope for.