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Seaward, WIP screenshot 1
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Date completed:
September 2008
Media/tools:
Blender, Photoshop
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A work in progress screenshot for a video game I'm developing.
Since I have a mild to moderate obsession with modern ruins, I decided to start off by modeling a couple rooms in a dilapidated institutional building and see how that goes. It's also a good subject to start with because it's far more difficult to model things that are dirty and deteriorating than things that are sparkling clean, so I figure that if I can pull this off to my own satisfaction, I can probably create any of the other environments I have in mind, too. I have a lot more work to do on this room, mainly in terms of adding rubble and improving the lighting, but it's getting better.
I love it when one of my projects benefits from the experience of having worked on an unrelated and seemingly pointless project in the past, and this is a great example. It turns out that the time and effort I put into my Silent NPL photo manipulation experiment really paid off, because that helped me figure out how to get the textures to look right in this scene. Now I no longer regret spending so much time on that image.
Warning: Geek-talk below!
I am using Blender for all the 3D modeling and level design, and Blender's game engine for prototyping, but I will probably have to move over to something like Irrlicht if I ever want to release the game. I'd love to be able to do everything in Blender, but the game engine has a few glaring feature omissions that would make this nearly impossible. (No support for decal textures? Even the original PlayStation could handle that, for crying out loud!) On the other hand, this is a very long-term project, and it's entirely possible that by the time I'm ready to start working on gameplay mechanics, these deficiencies will have been fixed. Or maybe I'll take a crack at fixing them myself.
Having just complained about Blender's limitations, I should point out that I'm trying to avoid using any fancy modern techniques to get the graphics to look good (e.g. bump mapping, dynamic lighting, dynamic reflections, particle effects, light bloom, etc.) If I can avoid using a single shader, so much the better. Not only do I lack the time to fiddle with that kind of crap, but I also reject the notion that fancy computational techniques are more critical to the quality of a game's graphics than artistic talent. I am still in awe of how jaw-droppingly gorgeous Silent Hill 3 is, despite the many weaknesses of the PS2 compared to modern hardware, and if I can make something that looks even half that good I'll be ecstatic. |
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