Milestone 2

[RonHiler]

Alright guys, a brand new forum. For the moment, I'm going to use the working title of the game for the forum cataogory, but once we get an actual real name, I'll change it. Nothing has come to me yet, and I've found that's not the sort of thing you can force. It'll come, at some point. Most likely when I'm not even thinking about it.

Alright, so first news about Milestone 1 (M1). It's going to be taking a step backward, I'm afraid (jeez, first post in a new forum and already I'm giving out bad news). If you note another thread on this forum, I've been unable to find a reliable workflow that let's me export skinned meshes and the animations for them from trueSpace into C4. So instead of constantly fighting with the tool for the next year or two, I'm changing modeling software, to Maya 2009.

What this means is that the current player avatar will be scrapped (even though she's actually not too bad) and I'm going to start over on her. Even worse, it's going to take me some time to get past the learning curve. There will be a period of time when I'm going to be fighting with the tools rather than fighting with my own artistic ability (which is what I have been doing with trueSpace). I hope to minimize that time as much as possible (I have two good books on order, and I'll be going through a few ebooks as well). Even so, it'll take me a while to get up to speed with Maya.

So what'll happen with the Milestone list is that the entries on Modeling workflow from the modeler to C4 will be reset to 0%, because I don't yet have such a workflow figured out fro Maya. Hopefully they will return to 100% pretty quickly though. I know that C4 will readily accept Collada files generated from Maya, so I don't expect the same sort of problems I had with trueSpace.

Although you may think it was a waste of time doing all that character modelling in trueSpace, I actually don't regret that time. I became a better modeler (not difficult since I wasn't that good to begin with) for the effort, and the next model will be even better for my experience with the other one.

Modelling is like any other artistic ability, you get better at it the more you practice, and that's especially true for novice modellers (like me). I doubt I will ever be a professional level modeller, but the stuff I can do now is at least passable, and it'll work until I can get a real modeller in here, heh.

This whole business with the C4 engine has forced me to develop a whole set of skills that are totally different than the skills I've spent years honing up to this point. It's been an interesting transition, heh.

[RonHiler]

You guys are probably wondering what is going on.

If you've been around this site for a while, you probably get a bit nervous when I don't say anything for a bit. It usually means something horrible has happened, and that there is bad news on the way :)

Not this time though, everything is going just fine. I'm still learning Maya as fast as I can. I could probably stop and just use it now with what I know and be fine for producing game assets, though certainly not an expert. But actually, I'd like to continue on the path I'm on. The more I learn, the better off I'll be later on.

The training course I'm going through is about 82 hours worth of pretty intensive video, and I'm going just as fast as I can. You can really only absorb so much information at a time, so I'm not sure I could go any faster and retain what I'm learning (as it is, sometimes I end up going "how did I do that again?"). So there is a limit on how many hours I can get through in one day.

And of course, if you are following along (like you should be, you aren't going to retain this much information without hands-on-experience), you can't run through the vids in real time. Naturally the instructors are much better than I am at knowing where to go and what they want to do, so there is a lot of pausing the video to "catch up". At this point I'm a bit over halfway through the training (near the end of "project 2" out of 3), and I've learned *tons*.

On the good side, Maya is all about Nodes (both in the hypergraph and hypershader), so other node based programs will be that much easier to deal with. I have a much better understanding of shaders than I've ever had before (this was admittedly a weak spot in my understanding of 3D texturing. Well, not anymore!).

Anyway, the training I'm going through is kind of an overview of Maya as a whole, it touches on a lot of areas, but doesn't delve real deep into some of them. And some of the things I'm learning is not so relevent to games (well, I guess you could use them to produce cut scenes I suppose). But it's good stuff to know, even on a "scratch the surface" kind of level. When I finish this one I'm going to go through another one that *just* deals with modelling, and that one is even longer (116 hours!). But that will be directly relevent to producing models for games. And that's an "in-depth" look at every button, dial, and switch in Maya that would apply to modelling, so that will be good info to have.

So yeah, I've got a long way to go yet. But at the end of it I should be in really good shape for asset production with Maya. Which, given how much I paid for it, would be a good thing :) I may start back up with model production for the game before totally completing the second video set, as I am anxious to get the game moving forward again.

If you are interested, here are the VTMs I'm using. These are paid VTMs, though they have sample videos you can stream for free (hours worth, in fact. The fundamentals samples go through the entire first project).

The one I'm currently going through:
http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=32&cat=9&page=1

The next one I will be doing:
http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=35&cat=9&page=1

[RonHiler]

Whew, a long time since this thread has been posted in!

A couple of reasons for that.

One, as I said above, I took a while off the game development side to learn Maya, which took me a pretty good amount of time. But totally worth it.

By the time I was ready to start actively working on the game (which was October), a few things had changed, and I decided to insert a Milestone in front of this one (so this milestone, which was originally Milestone 1, became Milestone 2). That new M1 was very complex, and it took a few months to finish.

But that's done! And now I'm back to where it all started, heh. The difference is that I'm much better now with my tools, and we have a pretty awesome front end and back end to the game.

It is now time to start putting some gameplay into that game. There will be much less coding to this one and a lot more art and design work. These are not really my strong points, I'm more of a programmer, so it's going to be a tricky Milestone for me. But it should be very educational :)