nDo, modular level design, PhilipK

Updated: 15 October 2010 - Bottom of post

So if you're at all interested in quick texturing and easily generating normal maps, cavity maps and friends from your photos or paintings, you've probably installed CrazyBump (available at the school, educational license) and xNormal (which, although it's mainly used for 3D geometry bakes, also comes with Photoshop plugins and is freeware).

nDo has been released. It's a set of Photoshop actions that allow you to generate normal maps from your images, as well as creating a sculpt layer for you to "sculpt" your normals in Photoshop. There's no realtime preview (a la CrazyBump), but other than that, it's really powerful, and means you can create your maps without leaving Photoshop.

Also, it's free.

Game Industry Mentor

"My name is Aaron Canaday and I work as an environment artist for BioWare Austin, and as you can guess, a large majority of my guests for the show are pulled from the amazingly talented friends I have at that studio."

Take a look on the Game Industry Mentor site.

There's a folder on the student share with some of the ones I've downloaded. Recommended listening if you're keen to get into the game industry. (And while you're at it, join polycount and/or GameArtisans and interact with the multitude of industry professionals who frequent those boards.

Reminder: AV Workshop @ 13:00

AV workshops will take place on Fridays from 13:00.

The series of workshops will deal with creating and managing audio for animation projects.

See you there.

All the rAge

Meeting at TOW each morning:

Friday 1st@ 8:00 - Stephan, Dries, Duncan, Jon, Werner
Saturday 2nd@ 7:30 - Stephan, Ben, Chantelle, Jon, Mareli, Stefan
Sunday 3rd@ 8:30 - Hendre, Jon, Louwrens, William, Stephan will arrive later.

If its easier for you to meet us at the Coca-Cola Dome please leave a comment on the blog, or sms if you need to cancel so that we don't have to wait for you.

Game Lecture for rAge

Aaargh, mateys!

There be a game lecture on Tuesday from 1:30 until... whenever we finish getting our stuff together! See you there.

(Also, I've got the top-down view working and all that - even though it means you can no longer shoot - so we'll be able to use UDK to preview all of our level stuff, including baking lightmaps and collision. For collision to work without my having to fiddle around with it a lot, please make a collision mesh for each object in your level that requires collision. So, for example, if you have a bench, and it's called "SuperBench", then you would create a box that surrounds the bench, and call it "UCX_SuperBench". UDK automatically detects the naming upon import and creates the collision stuff.

Note that your collision mesh needs to be made up of convex objects. If you don't know what that means, just build the mesh out of boxes. Otherwise, I can walk you through it all on Tuesday too.)

Visualization Techniques 2 (AV)

I've heard via Stephan that Dalene is allowing the AV students to pick whatever medium they wish.

Thank you to those who've been involved in organising this. :)

Happy Friday!

CrazyBump is widely known as being the software to use for creating 2D maps. It allows you to generate a bunch of believable height/display/normal/etc. maps, and drag sliders while seeing what effect they'll give you in an awesome preview window. (It's kind of similar to the nVidia plugin for PS... but much, much more.) Awesome for turning simple photos into full 3D materials. The full price is in the region of 300USD...

(For making maps from 3D meshes, i.e. baking a high poly down to a low poly mesh, xNormal's pretty much the standard. It's accurate, customisable, fast. And it's free. The interface is just rather ugly.)

Also, Softimage 2011.5 has been announced, and includes, among other things, Lagoa physics, "ICE for Artists" (lol?), MatchMover (previously bundled with Maya), Composite (bundled with Max) and stereo cameras. And a ViewCube, if you're into that sort of thing. :P Click here to see a more comprehensive (although not exhaustive) list that also includes some videos showing Lagoa in action.