Progress

It's about time I wrote another blog. Everything is chugging along nicely, I've come to the conclusion that the blender game engine won't be sufficient so I've decided to make the switch to CrystalSpace. CrystalSpace is an open source game engine with efficient hardware acceleration and a nice heavy physics set. I'll be using the Crystal Entity Layer, (CEL) which comes with all the code I need to make a game. Despite that it's going to take me a while to settle into the change, but it's well worth it. The actual modeling, texturing and animation will be done with blender and is easily exportable to CrystalSpace. Without the almighty dollar to fight over, open source software developers tend to work together to make everything super compatible, which makes my job that much easier. I've also found a nice collection of textures (open source of course) which will save me a bucket-load of time. I watched a quick tutorial today on concept mapping software, doesn't seem that great. If I need to make a concept map I think I'll just scribble it on a piece of paper, The example that roger used to demonstrate it was helpful though, it re-enforced exactly what I'm being assessed on. I'm making a few models right now including Geoffrey the tinkerer and electronics enthusiast. Final project submission is also due soon. Here's some screenies,

Demo!

Here is the demo I promised, all the notes and instructions are in the readme file, all you need to do is extract and play. Feed-back is super welcome. Enjoy!
http://www.4shared.com/file/43616565/af19281/HumanElementDemo.html

Graphic insanity

I've spent most of my lesson looking at the blender gallery archives and I'm blown away! Some of these graphics are insane. I didn't even know this sort of thing was possible, check it out at http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/archive/ it's pretty humbling to see this stuff, most of these renders are of a calibur way above my level. This is the kind of stuff I want to be producing in the future, hopefully I will be there within a couple of years but it's hard to say. I've been using blender for 2 years and have had no formal training, I'd like to think I'm blending at a pretty high level but after seeing the archives it's hard to be cocky. Anyway, the tech-demo is well on the way and I'm hoping to complete and post it by thursday

Who am I?

It's only recently occured to me that anyone reading this blog probably won't know who I am. It's about time I cleared that up, my name is dustin and I am this guy:





I can't believe this is the best photo I could find

Update

Well this is my first post in a while due to the easter break and my painfully slow home internet. I've made some good progress since, I've tweaked the walkcycle which looks great, and I'm still working on textures. I'm planning on bringing out a short technical demo within the next week to demonstrate the animations, the models and also to gauge performance on a range of computers. After this I am going to start modelling other characters and levels. It probably seems like I've taken a long time making one character, not to fear though! Most of the last few weeks I've spent on the skeleton, which I can re-use, so making the others will be much quicker. I'm settling into GIMP, which is new software to me, it still confuses me sometimes. expect the .exe demo file sometime next week.

Progress good, but slow

I'm slowly chugging through the mountain of work. Between blogging, recording my progress, researching and doing my project submission, there's little time to work on my actual project. I've managed to find a few hours a week to work on it at home and I feel it's progressing nicely. The project certainly has a lot more direction than it did. I've downloaded GIMP and am learning the ropes now, I'll need this to make textures for my models. I've already made the body texture for my main character, once I apply it I'll post screen-shots.I've also made a walk cycle, I can substitute this into any upright character and make them walk backwards and forwards. Doesn't sound like much, but the process I used to do this underpins the whole game engine. I'm feeling a lot more confident about the technical side of things.

Screenies and progress

Starting on a positive note today, my home computer is working again. I'm still not sure what was wrong in the first place, but the important thing is that it's fixed. I have also deciphered enough python and BGE (blender game engine) tools to start working on levels and physics. progress with modeling is painfully slow with just one person, so far only the main character has been partially modeled, but I have a few screen-shots ready so...


If you are observant you will have noticed that the character is still un-textured and un-armed. Not to worry, they are both on the way. While I'm posting pictures I figured I would post this as an example of blender's power when poly-count is not an issue...

This was a little project I did last year, made solely with blender,