What! Me UI?

Over the past year or so my Team Adorkable, a mixed team of DigiPen junior and senior artists, has been working on our game Bear Pile. Since our artists have graduated most of them haven't had much time to work on the game. However, the graphic user interface was still in desperate need of an update.

I had previously finished the art assets to make the vault door (viewable in my modeling portfolio) destructable in game. Now I moved on to the HUD, Paws Menu and Main Menu. Here's the current look of the Main Menu and the HUD with an open Paws Menu. In game the game world will be showing behind these icons. The Bear and Johnny's head are 2d art assets created by Talon Jennings that I wanted to keep in the UI.

If you are interested playing Bear Pile please come try it out. It will be at PAX at free play and an updated version will be available to play at the DigiPen booth. Of course our game is also available for free from DigiPen's website. We will continue to work on making this game better and preparing for competitions such as IGF and IGC.

Seminar Follow Up

Just a quick update. I've continued to work on the head from the zbrush seminar. After several attempts I finally figured out how to do hair in a way I like. I use a brush like Clay Tubes (with smoothing) or more recently Trim Dynamic to try to establish the shapes and volume and then use Slash 2 to make hard cuts and smooth them back as necessary. I'm really liking the Trim Dynamic brush.

I have often run into a problem when I brush geometry with sides too close together. The brush can collapse your two-sided geometry into itself. To fix this problem you can go to down to a low subdivision and then use the move tool to pull the object's sides apart again, then continue to go up in subdivisions pulling the sides apart. Alternatively I find the Inflate brush makes solving this problem quite easy.

At this point I'm mostly finished with the hair sculpt. I threw on some quick base colors for show. Next up: poly-painting.

ZBrush Seminar

I just finished a ZBrush Seminar taught by Will Patrick, a DigiPen graduate now working at Monolith. It was very enjoyable and Will was very helpful. Luckily, it was a fairly small group of people and he could work with people individually.

I started by coming up with a quick head concept. When I finished I liked the overall design but didn't feel it was realistic enough to make good use of ZBrush, so I redid the facial anatomy, using facial reference, until I got something I really liked.

I scanned in my work to Photoshop and then used it as reference in 3ds Max. I used the Joan of Arc tutorial with a few modifications to build the head and laid down hair planes that I later converted into solid geometry in most places. The front locks over the forehead and the curls on the side will be cutout planes. Here's the low poly head.

I'm currently working on this in ZBrush: high poly sculpting and experimenting with poly paint for the first time.

I also made this fellow (MONSTRO!) while messing with zspheres and this painting while messing with quick sketch.