Branching out

There was a statement made by both Feargus Urquhart and Jim Rivers of Obsidian Entertainment from presentations I've attended saying "You should know at least a little of all aspects of game development." The reason being you'll have a better idea of what you're asking/being asked to do and the work needed to do it. There's also a better appreciation for what people do.

While I was working on porting Blood Dragon armor to Skyrim, I was thinking about what it would take to make my own armor. That, and how unfamiliar I was with the 3ds Max UI. I'm not very comfortable with XSI Mod Tool 7.5 (Even after following the Colt-1911 tutorial on the VDC), but seeing as how I have more of a workflow setup with Max, it made more sense to stick with it. After using Hammer for 7 years, I have a decent grasp on primitive 3d modelling (and level design), but Hammer can only do so much.

I made a window based on this using only brushes in Hammer for the Amber Library (Screw brush counts!).

The tutorial I followed did not cover UV unwrapping, so I've been winging it with Unique UVs that I'm not ready to show.

After some searching, I found this tutorial. As it states on the page, the tutorial was written in French and translated to English. As with most translations, certain words are misinterpreted and/or sentences come out broken. The tutorial itself isn't that easy for me to follow either.

I spent an hour trying to get the first tutorial done, but lack of explanation on some bits threw me off and I scrapped what I had. I'm better with video tutorials. I like seeing the steps performed in "real time" instead of an image followed by another from a different angle or on another section, it's rather jarring. So, I searched YouTube for character modelling tutorials and came across this series.

With a video tutorial in hand, I opted not to create a dummy account for the-blueprints.com to get the video's reference images. Instead, I reused the scene for Joan of Arc and am now following through as best I can. I prefer it this way because I'm watching a method performed and am simultaneously adapting it to what I want to do.

Symmetry mode is such a timesaver.

In other news, Firefox had another major version number change, 11.0 (probably be 4.8 or 5.0 at this point on the old system). This has subsequently broken the addon Tab Utilities, again. Only instead of the address bar being broken, I can't right click on a hyperlinked image or else it'll open whatever the link a new tab. There was another bug, but I can't remember it at the moment. I've disabled the addon for now, but that means I no longer have the old 3.5 style tab context menu or the Clear Tab History option I've grown accustomed to. I suppose I'd better embrace the new UI.

If there's one thing I should work on for this blog, it is getting my verb tenses straight. I'm talking about the past then jumping to the present, back to the past, present, etc. Stream of consciousness indeed. Back to flow.