The brain's greatest asset... Whether creating a game engine as Josh has done, programming or creating a game plus artwork in general, imagination is the most basic nature of a human being..
This 3D WIP humanoid concept started out as a 3D sphere and evolved into what it is now at it's present stage... Artistic direction is what we need in a game or piece of art to keep us on track but it is always first from our imagination...
As Dave is texturing, I started to build our first basic character rig from scratch. Soon we can give some animations to Rick to start testing and working on. This rig still has a few problems but all in all works well. The rig can be adjusted to meet varied human type of characters.
I am working on creating this production pipeline, from creating rigs, exporting out of blender and importing the animations (working correctly) into Leadwerks.
The rig in the picture is shown with all the armatures showing ,relationship lines and axis showing. I still need to add the bone shapes for the controllers. Of course all the bones will not be exposed when animating but only the bone controller shapes.
This time using Blender's animation tools and the rig I created to make a walk cycle.
We needed to start testing some animations in Leadwerks. Rick will test soon and according to his information we can find tune and figure out any problems.
The rig has only the control bones now showing. Next is to create the control shapes and those will hide the control bones.
I am glad the old days of just having paper manuals is history. Manuals are good but Youtube with tons of Blender tutorials really helps. Yes you have to hunt and peck through a lot tutorials but you find some real nuggets. I also have an CG Cookie account...
I was thinking about how much it cost to make a game from just the artistic software and game engine software.
Leadwerks $200 or $99
Blender-- Free Wings3D--Free
XNormal Free
Gimp or Krita Free
3DCoat professional version $360
DDO Indie version $250
Total $810. add another $190 for loose ends and you get a total of $1000.
Now of course I can be missing stuff, like for coding so pipe in and give a price for coding software.
Also you could spend tons more on software as there is ZBrush, Maria, Substance Painter, 3DMAX and a slew of others.
Software cost money but a great team is priceless!
I will write various articles as we progress through the making of Phobia.
Our team Dave, Rick, Rose and myself are like the Leadwerks promo states "turning players into game makers". In the end hopefully some things we learn you can use as well.
As Josh said marketing is considered before one line of code is written so it is with modelling, UV set creation and texture \ normal map workflows.
My first job as I saw it when I joined the Phobia team was to establish a modelling and texturing workflow that could be used through the entire process of the game. This took some testing and then a final workflow settled on. Regardless of software used a repeatable and consistent workflow is vital for production. This helps the different modellers and texture artists keep consistent as they work on the overall scheme of the game. If the team increases then any new artist can be brought up to speed quickly.
