After putting this personal project on hold for a couple of months, I decided to come back and start doing some textures. For now, I'm just doing basic diffuse textures just to get the feel the direction of my textures if it's tolerable or needs improvement. I initially picked the bomber since it's one of the simplest one in terms of geometry.
Volt Machine 2 (Bomber) first pass geometry done in 3DS MAX
Volt Machine 2 (Bomber) armament developments
Volt Machine 2 (Bomber) landing gears.
Basically, I just let loose and see how the textures turned out. I banked on the old school colors but I also threw in some excessive dirt, stains, and scars like most aircraft that's seen service in war/battle. It turned out pretty much alright but not enough to make an impression. It's not the best texture job, but at least it gives me a general idea of what needs to be addressed and what needs to be improved. The renderer used on the following images below is 3DS MAX's Default Scanline with Area Filter, enabled Global Supersampler using Adaptive Halton.
Volt Machine 2 (Bomber) view of starboard side and bow cockpit
Volt Machine 2 (Bomber) view of port side and stern
Underbelly view of Volt Machine 2 (Bomber)
Volt Machine 2 (Bomber) with landing gears lowered
It doesn't have much to show at the moment. But I am heading towards a good direction of learning from my own mistakes and re-learning how to make better diffuse textures. I think I'll start all over again. The work wasn't really a waste. It was a good experience and now I know what flaws to correct.
So the word was that Treyarchwill be doing the third sequel to the Spider-man movie. Sweet! I get to do another "spin".
Not to mention that this will be ported to Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft XBox 360. As soon as my duties for Ultimate Spider-man was done (and after a 2 week compensatory time), I was drawn back to familiar grounds. As an Environment Artist, my understanding was that I was basically assigned to contribute in building the city. But not in this case. This time 'round, I was assigned to be modeling "special case buildings", or Manhattan's landmarks. Architecture stuff. But the geometry as well as the textures going on will be more detailed than the ones that were made for Spider-man 2. But as always, there will be legal limitations on what can be modeled and what can't be modeled.
Everything starts with a map. Spider-man 3 pretty much uses the same map that was used on Spider-man 2. Building procedure is just as the same as Spider-man 2.
Similar base map from Spider-man 2 for the use of building Manhattan Island for Spider-man 3
Just as what was done is Spider-man 2, the same "LEGO" system was also used for building what represents New York City. Anywhere from a representation of a simple brick building to a modern glass skyscraper.
"LEGO" System assembly similar to Spider-man 2
To get an idea of what the assembled city looked like, here's a bird's eye view of the city based from the game's UI.
View above Spider-man 3's swinging turf.
To get a better look of the city assembled, here's a video where Spider-man starts from the rooftop of the Daily Bugle (The Flatiron Building) and goes swinging towards Manhattan Island's Financial District.
The amount of landmark buildings that I modeled in this game is pretty much the same as it's predecessor. With the exception that landmarks which are privately owned are modified to look different from the original. Pretty much like taking the Chrysler Building, make it look like the Chrysler Building but not in it's exact appearance and in color. Meanwhile, government buildings were modeled to look as close as the real thing. But due to memory constraints, it too suffered from limitations (in terms of amount of geometry, number of textures, and the number of landmarks I have on my plate) in terms of architectural detail, but the general shape and appearance pretty much exist in the game.
Appearance of city's basic street level with pedestrian and vehicular traffic
Buildings were not the only ones on my task list. I also had a fair share of building bridges that surrounds Manhattan Island such as The Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, George Washington Bridge. But due to the game's constraints, the player is pretty much limited to the Borough of Manhattan. The bridges were made just to convince the player that the venue is a close representation of New York City.
Player's area of gaming in Spider-man 3
What makes this game different? One thing's certain: this is where most Spider-man cult fans get to use the Black Suit.
Spider-man in the black suit as he hangs around what appears to be Times Square
Spider-man does what he does best: Swinging through the city of Manhattan
Spider-man dukes it out with Sandman/Flint Marko
Reception? Spider-Man 3 had mixed or average reviews on the Xbox 360 and PS3 according to Metacritic. On Game Rankings, these versions average between 53% and 67%. The key criticism for these versions is the game's similarity to its predecessor. The game was also criticized for not being the same version on each system. Some criticism has surfaced due to having New Goblin only fully playable in the PS3 and Xbox 360. It was also criticized for having a lot of glitches. However, Gameinformer liked the game, giving it a 8.0/10 or "Great" rating. Gameinformer praised the number of moves, Toby Maguire's voice acting, and the variety of missions, but criticized the soundtrack.
Playstation 3 Collector's Edition of the game Spider-man 3
And here's the trailer for the game.
And a few more screenshots of the game.
Spider-man scales one of the buildings in New York City
Spider-man whips a costumed thug with his webbing.
Best way to beat the traffic in New York City is to stay above it.
Peter Parker (aka. Spider-man) takes the fight above the streets with New Goblin/Harry Osborn
Spider-man deals with a thug
With my involvement in creating this game, this concludes my ties to the Spider-man movie games. I'd like to try something different this time. Maybe a shooter.
We had just finished working on Spider-man 2, and a handful of us were assigned to work on different new projects. The project I was assigned to work on was so different that I was looking forward to work on – it wasn't a Spidey title. The game's entitled Dead Rush. To get a complete description of the game, I found the Dead Rush E3 2004 First Look article at Gamespot. And here's a preview.
Unfortunately, the game was cut short. I was supposed to start work on a ship level (far different from the ship level that I made in Max Steel) where the player starts from the deck and goes down into compartments below (pretty creepy since most corridors in ships are confined spaces).
But soon enough, I was drawn into another Spidey project. But instead of a movie based game, this one's based on a new Spider-man released comic book series entitled Ultimate Spider-man published by Marvel Comics which was originally created by veteran Spider-man artist Mark Bagley and writer Brian Michael Bendis.
Ultimate Spider-man #1 comic book cover.
In terms of appearance, this was pretty much different from it's predecessor, Spider-man 2. The art was pretty much similar to comic-book art (as well as presentation). A form of cel-shading or toon-shading (to be later dubbed as "Comic Inking Animation technology"). Here are screenshot samples from actual game plays in comic book approach.
Emphasis on the effects in text commonly used in comic books as cue for an action scene.
Another example of emphasis to cue introduction.
And another emphasis on effects using text as means to defeating an opponent.
Outlines around characters as well as projecting details are commonly used on comic books.
A dynamic approach showing Mary Jane's confidence.
However, similarly to Spider-man 2 was how the terrain was built. The entire environment was built using Autodesk 3DS MAX with textures painted with Adobe Photoshop. The only difference was the layout of Manhattan (or NYC). Here's a sample of Ultimate Spider-man map (with Comic-book tokens, Landmark tokens, and Secret tokens).
Token Map of Ultimate Spider-man based from the same master city layout.
The layout is somewhat similar to Spider-man 2's master layout, but this one is slightly smaller on the Manhattan side but it's also opened up to the area of Queens. However, there was hardly any use of known NYC landmarks. Only a couple of places such as Times Square was included in the game but doesn't necessarily look like Times Square.
Putting NYC together (or a NYC of the Ultimate Spider-man universe) is no different from the "LEGO system" that was implemented in the production of Spider-man 2 as well as partitioning the city into regions. The only thing that's different is that the "bricks" on each LEGO piece is much more detailed in terms of geometry such as a door jamb or window frames.
Isolated region from city master plan to be filled with LEGO building system similar to Spider-man 2.
A collection of simplified version of "LEGO" brick building system used in Spider-man 2.
Instead, characters known in the Marvel universe in it such as Human Torch, Wolverine, Silver Sable, S.H.I.E.L.D. and it's leader, Nick Fury were present in the game; as well as other characters such as Mary Jane Parker, Beetle, Green Goblin, Rhino, Shocker, Electro, Venom, and Carnage. Here are a few snapshots of the characters included in the game.
Spidey tries to catch up with a mercenary who calls himself the Beetle.
Venom takes the fight to Electro in the middle of New York's Times Square.
Herman Shultz aka. The Shocker powers up his "vibro-smasher" gauntlets.
But since my role was completely environment stuff, I basically dealt with building exteriors and interiors, bridges, parks, tunnels, and waterways.
City view at street level from the game Ultimate Spider-man.
Just to to show a wee bit of the stuff I made, here are a couple of missions where I built the environments. The first video shows a couple of indoor environments. It starts with a bar and later progresses to a karate dojo (complete with racks of swords and Japanese paintings) . The second one is basically an exterior environment with all sorts of debris scattered, property damage, civilians in distress, small crimes... ...well, best that you check it out.
So the production procedure at my end isn't any different from Spider-man 2. Eventually, the game finally hit the shelf at stores. Reception? Ultimate Spider-Man received generally positive reviews, with its lowest score being a 6 out of 10, given by Eurogamer. Its highest score was a 9 out of 10, from Nintendo Power. And here's what the final product looks like.
Copy of Ultimate Spider-man for Playstation 2
This game was basically my last game developed for Microsoft X-Box, Sony Playstation2, and Nintendo Gamecube. On my next project, I will be dealing with Microsoft X-Box 360, and Sony Playstation3.
After the release of Spider-man: The Movie Game, I was pretty much fired up to do the sequel. And things won't be the same as it was. Methods and procedures to building the environment. Understanding the tools. Knowing the shader at hand. These and a lot more constantly change on every project cycle. Not to mention that the environment will be far different from the previous project. It gets bigger.
In this project, work required that we build Spider-man's turf: New York City. Well, not in it's entirety but close enough to what represents New York. We spent weeks just getting to know NYC (without going to NYC). It's landmarks (in it's general area), the architecture, neighborhoods, the legalities of what can we use as well as can't be used (we learned this from the first SM release). Basically, I started reading anything and everything I can find online with regards to New York as well as it's current city conditions. But with such a massive environment to deal with, it was decided to cut down the size of the city that would be feasible to production schedules.
New York City master layout.
Purpose of the master layout was to organize the city production itself. After all, one person can't handle this much load. Hence it was divided into several cells (or as we used to call it "regions") in a honeycomb pattern where one terrain artist's work can be easily recognized by the next terrain artist (when it comes to bug fixing, eventually).
Divided regions of master layout.
If you'd notice a yellow box on the image above, that's pretty much what a single region is composed of. That said, the whole city was divided into more than 50 regions made up of city elements. As an example, here's a region from the master layout where a small part of Manhattan represents.
Sample of a region's WIP (Work-in-Progress) matched with Master Layout
And for a closer look, this is what a single basic region block would be like composed of buildings of various shapes, size, and design, as well as sidewalks, roads, and alleyways.
Sample of a basic region's WIP (Work-in-Progress)
The concept was pretty much similar to Lego bricks. Stacking one piece on top of another to form a building. Appearance, shape, design of a building, as well as adding a superstructure or two is pretty much the decision of the level builder and/or designer. Textures, on the other hand, were pretty much generated randomly in uniform design or mix-and-match of building materials (be it made of stone, wood, brick, glass, or any other building material). Not to mention that they also cycle to time difference (day and night).
Collection of "building bricks" used to assemble buildings.
Later on, details of sorts were added. On ground level, objects were thrown in such as lamp posts, pedestrian lanes, fire hydrants, newspaper stands, benches, bus stops, fences and sorts of barriers, trees, traffic signs, etc. On and alongside buildings from the ground floor to the rooftops, were decorated with a plethora of objects such as signs of various shapes and sizes that are either plain, simple, bright, and those with blinking with lights (similar to decorated billboards of NYC's Times Square), various store fronts with various commercial themes (ie. bookstores, drugstores, general merchandise, bakery), fire escapes, A/C units, water towers, billboards, flagpoles, etc. Other amenities are also thrown in everywhere such as window washer platforms, docks, coastline breakwater, fountains and treelines for parks (ie. Central Park), etc. All these details are pretty much seen on the game. Here are a few trailers showing the city from actual gameplay.
Overall, the project's scope was pretty much huge (well, at that time) compared to the previous Spider-man movie based game. Instead of hard loaded level per level, this was a huge chunk of city built from section per section just to come up to a close representation of New York City (minus the actual details of NYC). We also had to deal with legal issues of what NYC landmarks (mostly buildings) can be used and what can't be used. Thank goodness we were allowed to use the Statue of Liberty.
"Mesh footprint" of Empire State Building used during production.
Reception? As mentioned from Wikipedia, the home console game was released to generally positive reviews, citing the realistic, life-sized Manhattan, large variety of crimes and emergencies to stop and vivid use of Spider-Man's abilities making the player really feel like Spider-Man. The most popular aspect of the game was the web-swinging mechanic, where Spider-Man had to shoot webbing at an actual building, unlike previous games where he shot webbing up into the sky. However, parts of the game were criticized, such as the complaints of some of dullness of the side missions and the linearity of the story objectives (which many saw to be contrary to the developer's idea of creating a free-form game).
Spider-man 2 (video game) cover for Playstation 2. Also available for XBox and GameCube.
However, IGN gave the game a review of 8.8 out of 10 for the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft XBox version, and a 9/10 for the Nintendo GameCube version.The Official PlayStation 2 Magazine ranked the game #50 of the "Top 100 PS2 Games of All Time." In the Screwattack top ten 'Top 10 Movie-Based Games', Spider-man 2 came in eighth. In 2010, the game was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.
Here are a few screen shots of the game.
Spider-man on top of a building over looking the city.
Spider-man scales a spire of a skyscraper (supposedly, the spire of Empire State Building)
The city's look from above. Actually, this is the view when Spider-man jumps off most skyscrapers.
The city at night while Spider-man does his swings, leaps, and bounds.
Spider-man webs up a thug.
Spider-man captures a thug with a websling and yanks him.
Spider-man deals with a thug any which way he can.
During this stage of the project, I've started adding a few details on each Volt Machine such as landing gears, hydraulics, struts, weapons (ie. missiles), and a few other stuff like weapons. Here are the developments of each Volt Machine.
Volt Machine 5: Lander. Somewhat started detailing the right side (or everything that's gray) of the Lander with the exception of the front part (that pretty much looks like stairs). Anyway, specifically paid attention to wheels, struts, and dampers (or hydraulics) - although they won't be seen as much 'til the underside's exposed. Treating the left side is pretty much the same (or I can just mirror the whole thing when I'm convinced that geometry is done), with the exception of the cockpit where Jamie (or Megumi) sits.
Work-In-Progress of Volt Machine 5: Lander
On the two top frames (on the below), shows the work being done on the wheels' struts and dampers (for the pilot side of the Lander). You'd notice that one set are already angled and the others aren't. This is where I was still working on the Pivot and Link constraints on the angled suspensions (still need to apply to the ones that aren't angled yet). Plus I also made heavy use of dummy objects so as not to tamper geometry's location in space, scale, and rotation (even if I forget to apply the right pivot as well as X-Form). As for the "stair" pattern on the front, reference dictates that there are only four (4) whereas I have five (5), but who's counting anyway?
Work-In_Progress of the Lander's suspensions as well as the "Stair" pattern.
Volt Machine 5: Lander's base model.
This is pretty much how the animation will go. Added a few hatches to cover the inner sides and top of both feet. Antennas fold and are tucked in.
Lander's animation sequence.
Volt Machine 1: Crewzer. Or is it supposed to be Cruiser?
On the image below, the top left shows the base model. Top right is the appearance after transformation (also slightly showing the face of the mecha). Bottom left is the exposed launch bay of the Crew Arrow (or Sky Rocket) tucked in fuselage, and one of the Crew Cutters at the tip of the wing. Bottom right are Crew Boomerang with the Claw Cutter exposed, and an appearance of a Crewser Missile after launch.
Work-In-Progress of Volt Machine 1: Crewzer's transformation sequence and weapons.
After the weaponry, it took me a while to figure out which landing gear configuration serves best. Initially, I was aiming for an assembly similar to an F-18's main landing gear assembly. But with too many moving parts, targets, and rigging to work at, I decided to switch to an F-15 and/or F-16 configuration which is a lot simpler. It's not exactly as heavily detailed, but I think I have the principle mechanics down from the hydraulic dampers, folding brackets, retraction devices, and even the basic lights.
Work-In-Progress of Crewzer's landing gears.
Volt Machine 2: Bomber. The image below shows:V2 Bomber basic on the upper left; Bomber bomb and bay; Bomber Missiles, and Bomber Hook (before and after spikes comes out).
Work-In-Progress of Volt Machine 2: Bomber
But then I had a slight trouble on the design of the landing gears. Military fighters doesn't basically fit on the Bomber. So I decided to look at actual Bombers. As it turned out, Northrop Grumman's B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber came as an answer. Just as I did on the Cruiser, I basically took only the principles (diving into too much details will just ruin the whole illusion) and yanked out the details ('cause that's a lot of polygons to deal with). Hence I came with quad tires on each main gear and dual tires on the front landing gear.
Updated V2 Bomber's Main Landing Gear as well as the Front Landing Gear.
Volt Machine 3: Panzer. At this stage, I didn't bother creating the treads. Too much polygons. I'll just use textures instead. On the top left, detailed view of the Panzer's bottom and rear. On the top right, one of two Panzer Arms in action. On the bottom left, stage one and two of Panzer missiles. On bottom right, Panzer Knuckle.
Work-In-Progress of Volt Machine 3: Panzer which includes missiles, arms (and claws), and the Panzer knuckle.
Volt Machine 4: Frigate. V-4 Frigate's mesh is pretty much done with front landing gear, main landing gears (which were pretty much the same landing gears that are used on the V2 Bomber), and Frigate missile. I could throw in Neptune Missile but it's pretty much the same as Panzer Knuckle.
Work-In-Progress of Volt Machine 4: Frigate
So now I move up to drawing the textures of sorts for all the Volt Machines. I might even edit a few of the meshes, but that's pretty much expected.
