Posts by Mr. Happy

Why didn't you tell me you were releasing this!

The whole Potato thing has been way to complicated and time consuming for me to participate on any real level.

And then this shows up! I love both these games. Looks like a great crossover

Quote from Evert

Philip doesn't look like that at all tbh.I always find it weird to have those strange shapes, makes for a pretty...useless crate?

IRL those weird shapes would be used there for structural integrity and stackability.

I was at the Doom post mortem and it was really cool, I would recommend watching.

It was cool to see the room that forced them to use BSP, and the old demos, and whatnot.

Personnally I think the gameplay looks fun. I'm not a fan of slow tension action, i prefer fast action, like this game seems to have. I hope the jets let you jump alot higher.

I wonder if the wip animations impacted some peoples impression of the gameplay. They look stilted and gives a slower feel to what seems to be a faster game.

At least I hope its fast, with big jumps. Seems that way.

I don't know what you changed, if anything, but those screens look more consistent with each other than with your earlier batch.

Here's more detail in response to your PM:

Your textures, even the ones that are far from the ground, have alot of repetitive detail. Also, each tile of the wall has some very obvious markers. As a result everything looks really repetitive. Also, they are, well, noisy. I don't know any better word for that, it basically just means there is a lot of small but even variation accross the entire texture, and since that texture is far away and repetitive that makes it stand out more than it should. It makes the viewers eye spend too much time on each area picking out and recognizing the details. Since you used the same base texture on each of the 'floors' of the building, and each tile of it is repetitive, it forces you to look at each tile rather than as a whole, and you want the back and upper areas to give an impression.

Also, you use too many "base" colors, in my opinion. There are large patches of several different major color regions (like, pink, orange, blue, green, etc.) Theres nothing wrong with a colorful scene but you should try and use fewer main colors. They are overwhelmingly bright and saturated, and clash, like this guy:

By contrast I meant that the scene is too evenly bright. Try to have the brighter elements against a darker background, and try to use darker colors on less important areas.

I like your stuff, though you might consider using a bit less text.

One nitpick is that, at least when describing the black mesa, is you use the term 'orange box.' Which is right, but more source specific cause the dev textures are orange. The terms 'block-mesh (<---best)," "white-box" and "gray grid" are alot more common and I think you should try to be as general as possibly when describing techniques and abilities on a portfolio. I didn't read all the text or look at all the pictures because there is a lot of clicking, scrolling, and too much text. If you could reduce the clicking and scrolling a bit that would be nice. Ideally your main page with banner links to each project should not require scrolling, perhaps two columns?

The download link for the TF2 level is small and easily missed.

The levels page is a little overwhelming, try to break it up a bit more between projects (I know I said reduce scrolling and that's contradictory, but still!)

I think your work is really good though! Actually I remember playing quarry alot when it first came out

Thanks for doing that seir

I'm gonna restructure my site soon to include videos and drawings for maps

Wow shadow that looks like a colored pencil drawing!!! (good thing)

BUT, the tighter screens focusing in on specific smaller areas do not imo have the same feel as the whole level. which isn't in itself a bad thing but, and this may be the worst explanation ever, i feel like the rate of change in texel density and lighting mood from large scale to small scale is just wrong. i guess theres something wrong a little bit off in the contrast in assets between the larger and smaller art

Ok, so I think your assets are fairly decent but overall it kind of hurts my eyes to look at. I think:

*textures are a bit noisy for the distance at which they are viewed

*needs more contrast

*fewer wide splashes of highly varying colors

*could use better defined focal points. Try to figure out how you want the viewers eye to move across the scene and add focal points/lines

I would say that some grating to create layers/parallax might be nice?

The lighting looks so much better than what I'm used to from Unreal, but maybe that's just the difference between what is done for a demo and what is done for a game in terms of artist effort and scene optimization.

A designer at insomniac (forgot his name) gave a talk about combat that was really really awesome, better than the entire 'level design in a day' imo.

And those tech demos are AMAZING!

Thanks for posting this, I wanted to go to the session the article references but missed it.

The only battlefield game I ever played was the 2142 MP demo, which I absolutely hated due to the 1 person per 1000 acre gameplay. Someone please tell me the more recent games contained a game.

EDIT: Re-read OP so here's so more tips specific to asset creation:

Add writing to your sketches write exactly what you need to know when modeling such as what material is on what part

Get the model in game NOW. so you've got a primitive roughly the size of whatever you are making and youve extruded a few polys and it's VERY early. put it in game, that way the name of the asset and the windows you need to use are ready to go for your next iteration. also helps spot problems and avoids fatigue (as in, "I just spent eight hours on this model and I don't want to do the tedious stuff"

U/V'ing woes? Learn pelt mapping pelt map all but the simplest models then work on the u/v from there. u/v is like anything else, you should do it in stages starting rough and getting progressivley finer

U/V NOW U/V parts as you make them. don't worry about layout, size, or projection warping, just get a rough u/v on there that is recognizable and generally light on warping

(don't/do)Texture the high poly if you have a model that is 1. complex, 2. has a hi-poly version, and 3. is being a pain in the ass forcing you to be constantly redoing the u/v after you've already textured it, then you can texture the hi-poly with a hi-res badly-optimized u/v and then bake that onto the constantly changing low-poly, better optimized u/v. some people always work like this, personnally i avoid u/v'ing the hi poly except in special cases like this. know when to do which

but I am also not happy with the speed of my workflow

----

keyboard shortcuts and WINDOWS My Computer favorites, the ultimate time saver. I don't work with udk but getting my shortcuts down and windows favorites and softimage favorites and everything setup nice meant that my time for importing a model iteration into source went from a painful couple of minutes to effortless seconds of keyboard slapping

the same is very true for the actual asset creation. create photoshop actions for pasting in and setting the blending mode on your u/v shell stamp, adjustment layer presets can be used to ensure consistency accross assets in a given 'pack', i dont use maya but little things in softimage exist like middle mouse button click on menus and im sure maya has tons of that kind of stuff to

but ya, keyboard shortcuts, customizing your tool layout, presets, maybe thats the obvious stuff but when you figure out the quicker way of doing something specifically check if its worth changing your workspace or habits to fit that new technique better.

organization! organize your actual windows folders better. what you say they are organized? thats why I said better. windows itself has simple but life changing features like i said the my computer favorites pane on the left side (which you can add to), or in windows 7 pinning specific program functions to the taskbar or start menu.

maybe this is all the obvious stuff. it all comes down to modularizing your workflow. so you've got the modeling step, many programs let you do the same thing from many different menus or shortcuts, which is the closest one? what about your viewports? I know I rarely use two of the orthoganol views so whenever I start a new file the first thing I do is get rid of them. then the export step, that should only be keyboard slapping after the first export of a given model. (remember ctrl+tab, alt+tab, and start+tab) then the check in game step is simply alt+tab + reload map/model cache/whatever shortcut.

many programs have multiple save dialogs. so you are in photoshop and want to export your art to a different format. do you go through each one and click save as in the menu? boring! perhaps you use ctrl+shift+s? faster...like a turtle? these things can be automated heck even the save for web dialog (ctrl+alt+shift+s) can save alot of time if you are sharing wip's

get a second monitor. oh you have one? get a third. oh you have one? get a fourth. oh you have one? where do you keep the key to your house?

tl;dr : find and learn shortcuts, set up automated actions, rearrange your workspace, get a second monitor

Thanks!

*shrank by 108 pixels width

*cleaned it up

*(mostly?) updated to conform to strict html compliant

*updated to conform to insta-psy compliant

Quote from Pampers

http://www.findstudiomakingmw3.com

Sledgehammer Games has a job listing on Gamasutra saying they are working on the next Call of Duty game. I dunno if that's this. Personnally I don't even know if call of duty is modern warfare anymore or what....If infinity ward owned modern warfare but not cod after the first legal showdown and they now own neither after the second showdown (is this right?) then what does that mean?

WHAT IS GOING ON?

I will fix up and shorten all the text asap, unfortunately everything I write turns out verbose. Thanks for pointing out the header font I overlooked that. I will find a better way to do the download links. They have the tab effect to maintain consistency with the plaintext resume and contact card download buttons since I need to signify those two are downloads but don't want to use the word download...

As for the width, yes it's wide but is that a bad thing? Accepted webdesign practices say yes... BUT it's a portfolio and not intended for daily browsing, or to be occasionally glanced at while doing other things, it's only purpose is to display images for critical examination. I built everything around the images. Maybe I could make them smaller but since no one browsing a portfolio clicks on more than a couple images I feel it's important to have all images for a project on the screen at one time at a "readable" resolution. Also you can clearly see everything in every image of every level (or scene) without ever clicking, loading, or navigating back and forth.

But then again I'm very new to webdesign and maybe just wrong so I am opening dreamweaver and photoshop right now to make it a bit smaller (and probably a bit more after that and so on....)