Back at the helm..

So, for the past month or so I've been a little busy. My wedding is on the 4th of November, and I've been up to my ears in prep. I'm actually already married so the whole event feels a little pointless, yet this is how they do it in Japan- marriage at the local registry first, wedding later on in the year.

I took a coding hiatus from The Damned for a while in order to work on my isometric engine, but I'm back now. I've basically spent the last month teaching myself how to use 3DSMAX, and I've been learning rather than creating. FINALLY, I'm getting the hang of working with a mesh in Max, though for almost a week it's been an awful wrestle trying to get to grips with texture mapping enough to produce an end result I can be proud of. I suppose I've got more of an advantage over your average noob though, having mastered other programs such as TrueSpace and Lightwave in the past, and know my specular from my ambient mapping. The change was inevitable really, as Poser is well...shit.

Presenting my first mesh success 'CrowMan';



Picture this little squawking freak coming at you from out of the fog, because that's what will happen in the game.

He isn't the boss, just the standard enemy for the 3rd (and final) level of the game.
I have yet to rig him up and attach wings, but the mesh and texture maps are finalised. He's not perfect- yes, the mesh seams are visible close-up; yes, some of the textures don't blend nicely- but from a distance he does the job. I figure later on down the line I'll probably come back to this game and improve on all the graphics/code one day anyway.

It's a high-mesh model of Poser's James, exported to Max and altered quite a bit. As mentioned, texture mapping was the hardest to do. Only until I came across an easy method using a combination of UVW MAP and UNWRAP UVW,to keep all the textures in one jpg file. At anyones requests, I will write a mini-tutorial on how to do this.


All for now.


Progress on the game should be faster now that MAX and me are starting to like each-other.