First off, my contract with NetherRealm ended in late February. I was just a week short of hitting my maximum nine months, so that was pretty fortunate considering that there are many that don't even make it halfway. I enjoyed my time there a lot, and I hope to make it back at some time in the future. Injustice: Gods Among Us is looking like it's gonna be insanely good. I'm pretty stoked for it to come out.
Fortunately though, I just signed a contract with the fine folks at Phosphor Games! I'll be on until the end of April, working on an unannounced title. I start Friday. Their site: www.phosphorgames.com
And oh yeah, the new website is up! You'll see some of the fun stuff I made for Injustice in there, thanks to my awesome web designer girlfriend, Jen Vacanti. By far the best stuff I've done. Her site is: www.jennifervacanti.com.
So as for my personal work, I've literally had no time at all for anything except for the NR contract. Lots of long hours worked, to get Injustice out the door. But now, I finally have time to get back into that arena. And so, my next project:
I'm doing a re-imagination of the Winters area from Earthbound, a.k.a. Mother 2. I played through it for the 4th or 5th time recently. It's definitely one of my top 5 favorite games of all time. If you haven't played it, grab an emulator and dig in. It's one of, if not the best SNES titles out there. I'm also playing through Mothers 1 and 3 right now. 1 definitely has not aged well, but 3 has been excellent so far. As you can tell, big fan of the series. Anyway, this is the original map of Winters:
EDIT: Here's a link to a version of the image that will let you get zoomed in nice and good. images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080803013402/earthbound/images/0/04/Winters.png
I chose it because it's not ridiculously involved with the amount of stuff it has, but I'm confident that if I give it enough love, it'll look great. I've already modeled about 1/8 of it, so there's quite a bit left.
As always, I'm going to try to dabble with some new features that UDK has picked up since I left it last.
1)Advanced Environment Color- Basically, it's a way for UDK to not only give only one env. color that mimics the sky, but it also allows another color to influence the ambient lighting given to the environment. Specifically, the color of the sun.
2)Unreal Landscape- This is the big one. If any of you remember the Desert Straggler project, it used the old terrain system. Which was garbage. It looked nice, but I couldn't get a decent framerate out of it. It was SO bad in fact, that Epic scrapped it and remade it into this current version. I still don't know how it exactly works, which it will affect how I go about making the terrain.
3)Simplygon- A new tool that allows you to combine static meshes and automatically create LOD models for better optimization, right inside the engine. Should be handy.
4)There's a new suggested modeling workflow that should make mesh normals look better when they're rendered. I'm curious to see how much of an improvement it is.
5)Effects- Another big one. I'll need to learn how to dabble in effects work to get give certain elements that "WOW!" factor. I'll need steam coming from the lake, rain drops above Rainy Circle (lonely-looking puddle north of Stonehenge), and perhaps some snow and floating leaves added in. The trees might move slightly, but that's more of a material editor sort of thing.
I will also be trying out NDO, a spiffy new program made by the folks at Quixel. It makes normal map creation a lot faster, with more control. They also have a new one called DDO, which handles faster texture map creation. Still don't know how I feel about it. Almost makes texture creation seem redundant. At any rate, I don't think it fits this project anyway.
It's all going to be done in a more cartoon-y style rather than realism. I want to treat it like it's how Nintendo might do it, if there was a remake. Good points of reference would be Team Fortress 2 and Pixar films.
As always, expect to see progress posts. I won't be hitting any crunch for awhile it seems, so progress on this should be fairly smooth. On top of this though is a project I'm working on with my Concept Artist friend, Max Hudetz. He's doing a tasty fantasy themed concept painting, which is coming along nicely. You can see it on his blog: maxhudetz.blogspot.com
Laters!
