Hello!

Be thankful, this week’s post won’t contain the wall of text you were abused with last week. No, since that hurdle, the work progression is rather basic: work, dammit, and work hard on creating assets. Once these are established, the groundwork for the actual game may begin. Regardless of the heavy amount of work that’s required here, we’re very much on track, with many models nearing, at the very least, the halfway point. Additionally, everyone is digging into their past assets (and freetime) to help create a full looking library environment for everything to take place in. But, for the time being:

Ben- Work continues on the two characters of Tin Woodsman and Billy Pilgrim. Minus a few modeling touch ups (and a consideration of cloth/alternative methods– see the concept art for the little cape he wears), Tin Man has been more or less completed and is ready to move onto the next step of being textured and rigged. Billy Pilgrim, as he is a bit more sophisticated (and almost two characters in one, given the Tralfamadoran), is taking a bit longer but is developing nonetheless. Shave will be utilized for the hair, and modeling for the body has begun. The head is ready to be textured.

Additionally, work continues on in-game art assets, specifically the logo and card back.

Mike – The Library, based on the Library of Congress, is coming together. All assets for the Library are being developed with a futuristic motif. King Artur continues to grow into a full fledged character as he moves into the body and costume portion of our program. He will have very minimal hair if any. If the decision is made to use hair on the model I would like to use shave to keep consistent with Ben. I have also done some digging into our Gantt Chart issues, they have been since sorted out, more on that in my post.

Hessam- Robin’s head is nearing completion, and so is the web’s design aspects as well as usability, database and Drupal updates.

Lauren- Completing up the lovely Tiny Tim model and preparing its topology for the “real world” (aka, non-Zbrush environments), and contributing toward the completion of the library environment.

Jason- Working with the flartools glyph tracking code in actionscript to both get it working with custom glyphs and for our purpose of only tracking what cards will be in play without tracking their real time positions. Modeling on the tripod continues with the legs finished being modeled. The body is all that is left.

Tracy-Working on particle effects in Maya for the “Deus Ex Machina” animation.  The particles are working, and have instanced geometry, just need to work on the actual path they’ll take and finalizing the shape.  Researched customizable glyphs for the cards instead of using the basic checkerboard patterns most augmented reality applications use and started to get into FLARTools.  Found a great application online that will convert our glyphs into the proper .pat file.