Week 03 - Michael

Hey everyone! My name is Michael Peterson. I am one of the artists on the team for One More Game. I’m super excited to share what I have been up to this week with you, and I hope to shed some light on the artistic aspect of creating a game.

Let’s get started on Monday! Monday we all meet in class to get clear directions on what we’re all doing that week. It allows us to fully get into a team and figure out our objectives. So, as you may know, our game is two games in one. One of them is Rex Hunt, and the other is Rogue Asphalt. RexHunt as you can assume is our dinosaur game. Rogue Asphalt is our racing game. For this week I was tasked with working on Rogue Asphalt.

We originally wanted Rogue Asphalt to be a demolition derby with cars and guns, you’d chase other AI cars and destroy them, but it was such a far stretch from RexHunt. We went back and forth with it and after careful consideration and the help of our instructor, we figured that just making a standard racing game fits well with our game and allows us to have a clear artistic direction on how we want to go about making the game. So, we landed on a theme for the racetrack, and it ties into our RexHunt game. The racetrack will be set on a deserted island where dinosaurs roam freely. We’ll be adding abandoned buildings around the racetrack giving off the vibe that it once was a lively area inhabited by creatures and humans.

A lot of my artistic fuel comes from just being inspired, cliché, I know. But hearing that it was going to be an abandoned racetrack fueled my inspiration, and I immediately got to work in class.

So, without further ado, this is what I came up with.

Modeled, UV’d, Textured all by me. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been the best with texturing models. I’ve always just thrown a black mask with a dirt generator on everything, and it just looks better to me. And yes, I did that on this one as well. But there was a clear direction on my texturing job, and I absolutely love how it came out. Since the racetrack was set in a Sc-fi futuristic place, I used the Chinese mars base as my inspiration. And the cherry on top was seeing that substance had its own vine paint brush, so I went all in on the abandoned vibe. If I didn’t have that brush these buildings wouldn’t look abandoned at all. Really happy with my first day of work with this new direction.

Now those buildings took up most of my time this week, but I had a couple of hours throughout the week to continue working on other odds and ends. The racetrack wasn’t done yet so I couldn’t start playing around with the buildings yet, so I drew my attention back to RexHunt. I watched a couple of other dinosaur games to see if there was anything I was missing and I realized a lot of them have idle dinosaurs in the background.

So naturally, it was time to make more dinosaurs!

I’m going to say it. I love Z-brush. It is such a strange realm compared to my safety net of Maya, but my god does it do its job well. The moment I realized that Maya could retopology live models from other programs I immediately understood how powerful a tool Zbrush is under my belt. If you were to ask me to make you any organic thing before learning Zbrush I’d spend a whole week on it. But now I can easily pump out a character or creature within a day. I know I shouldn’t boast about my speed because speed isn’t what makes something great, but hey, we’re on a time crunch here.

The first dinosaur I decided to go with was a brachiosaurus. I can’t believe it took me 3 weeks to realize there wasn’t anything in the horizon drinking water! Every dinosaur game needs a long-necked guy drinking water from afar.

But obviously he can’t just be stuck in the water drinking as a static mesh, we’re professionals here. So, after I made him, I rigged him and made a quick repeating drink idle animations so he can always be drinking, and the player won’t spend much time watching him drink. I really liked how he came out. He’s so cute.

The next dinosaur I made was a pterodactyl. I’ll be honest, he could be much better but since he’s going to be in the sky the entire time, I doubt his model needs to be that great. And technically he’s not bad or ugly, I just rushed the wings aspect. Maya does a great job with retopology, but when the wings are super thin, it gets hard to line your camera up with the thin features of his wings. But I was happy with him, nonetheless. I worked up a quick script to have him idle in the air around the landscape as well. 

All in all, I am very pleased with my work this week. I pushed hard in the beginning of the week, and my work shows.

Thanks for reading!