Learning Art
The day job is killing me right now. So game-dev time has been at a premium. Two-and-a-half weeks into development on a new game, and I don’t have much to show for it yet. I’ve managed to create a very small, tight, from-scratch set of scripts for the game (with help from Ken Finney’s book), and bring in the absolutely MAHVALOUS Synapse Lighting Pack.

I re-wrote some code dealing with fxLight’s AttachToObject so that attached lights will properly revolve around their objects. This isn’t applying to volume lights yet, so their cast angle is still the same as the original. I haven’t had a huge need of it yet, so I haven’t mucked with it. By adding an additional point-light source near the point where the volume lights intersect the ground, I’ve been able to simulate headlights on a moving car. It’s not as good as having truly dynamic spotlights, but the results have been kinda cool:

Besides playing around with moody lighting, this project is forcing me to diversify my game development abilities. My modeling skills could only be considered “beginner” if you are feeling charitable. My ability to skin, bone, and create animation for a model is even worse. The last time I did anything approaching serious level design was for homebrewed Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption mods. I thought the results were pretty cool for a tyro, but a lot of the work was done by the excellent pre-lighting and professional textures. But it gave me some confidence (okay, you experienced level designers can laugh now).

So as a modeler, animator, artist, or level designer I figure I’m a pretty good programmer. But the thing about being an indie is that you really can’t afford to be too much of a specialist. Besides this, it’s a lot of fun to develop new skills. So while I don’t harbor any illusions about being able to produce any of the major final content myself, I figure I can generate some halfway decent stand-in content with a bit of practice, as well as some of the less important final elements.

Right now I'm doing a little bit of dinking around with the latest release of Blender, and getting a little more advanced with MilkShape and doing actual character models (I got pretty good at modeling cubes and cylinders and spheres, so this seemed like the next logical step... *grin*). Besides this, last night I started working on boning and animating MilkShape models in CharacterFX (because Milkshape's bone / animation capabilities - well, they suck. But at least they are there). I'm hoping to be able to export the animation data back to MilkShape from CharacterFX, and then use the MilkShape to export the whole thing into Torque. Someone suggested in the GarageGames forums that this was possible, but I don't know if anyone is actually doing it.

I also don't know enough about Blender's animation capabilities to know if I should bypass that stuff altogether and just start doing everything in Blender.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:39 PM (Permalink)