Unreal Tournament III

...oops, I mean Game Design Module 3. Download brief here.

Optimizing for games

Read this a while back, and it was incredibly useful for describing a bit about how a game engine might render your models, and what you as a game artist can do to ensure your assets perform well. The Polycount Wiki in general is a gold mine.

Basic terminology
Do polygon counts really matter?
Beautiful, Yet Friendly (Part 1)
Beautiful, Yet Friendly (Part 2)

The last two get pretty technical, but can be useful if you get through them.

Kill Face Robot

Paste this script into your script editor, create a custom button by dragging the script into the custom toolbar and run it whenever you find a scene with the unwanted "Face Robot" activated within it.

Script: 
DisableFaceRobot
SelectObj "ActiveFaceRobot"
DeleteObj "ActiveFaceRobot"
SelectObj "Face", "BRANCH"
DeleteObj "B:Face"
SaveScene

Game Design Deadline

The deadline for uploading your characters into the shared folder on Dropbox is Saturday, before end of class - see previous posts for details.

Class starts at 15:00.

No progress marks will be given to those who fail to submit on time. Don't rely on the TOW internet connection either... you know how it goes. 

Please remember your area layouts, texture libraries and asset lists you had for homework. 

Skaapstad Project

Dear animation folks, please have a look at the Skaapstad strips (download)... they're quite short and work really well in this sort of planar perspective, so try not to add unnecessary camera angles. 

I think they might actually be better as 30" animations, so please select 2 that you like and start preparing the elements for the animatic. You only need to separate the elements that you need for animation in Photoshop, remove the speech bubbles (we won't use those) and add drawings for additional shots (if any). 

Comment on this blog if you have any questions. :)

Game Design Models Update

Please upload your latest Game character (emdl) & textures (jpeg) to the communal Dropbox folder.
You'll need to create a Dropbox account in order to collaborate. Also make sure that your e-mail details are up to date on the Open Window DB - you should be getting an e-mail from me shortly.

Please compress everything into a zip archive (with your initials & surname i.e. "PJ_Koekemoer.zip") , for bandwidth sake. 


You'll also find an updated version of the Level model with scale reference, as well as a Walk-through breakdown of the level in the shared folder. Thank you.

- No class this Saturday, see you on Tuesday.