Messages

1

Artwork / Re: Alternative Plasma Weapon Appearances?

« on: July 04, 2012, 04:38:58 pm »

All some good points to be made. Actually, I was thinking that I'd get rid of the "teeth" on the guns for the final models in any event, since I figured the poly limits would be pretty tight. A maximum of 500 polys (or is that 500 triangles?) should be good to work with...not sure how well I'd be able to do the texturing, but the low poly could should make it a little bit easier to do UVW mapping, should it either be me or someone else who does it.

I'll also see about doing a redesigned Blaster - the design I came up with is rather neat, but yeah, need to fit it more within the existing animations. Still, glad you guys are open to a plasma weapon redesign!

2

Artwork / Alternative Plasma Weapon Appearances?

« on: July 04, 2012, 01:23:29 am »

Hello there, folks - wanted to see about maybe making a little contribution to this fun little game. Starting small for now - was thinking about the plasma weapons in the game, specifically the Pistol, Rifle and Blaster.

See, they are fairly neat designs, but I did sort of wonder if they really matched the sort of design aesthetic you get from the aliens' ships, among other things. These plasma weapons seemed to be designed to be quite smooth and contoured, rather elegant looking weapons really, whereas the alien ships tend to be rather angular and spiky affairs, particularly the Scout and the Fighter. Also, some have pointed out that the plasma guns look quite similar to the weapons the Covenant use in the Halo series - in fact, I was rather struck by the similarities between UFO: AI's plasma pistol and the Covenant plasma rifle. Even with the project being free, it does worry me that there could be legal repercussions involved...

Now, I don't know how welcome or unwelcome this contribution is, but I decided to try and do some alternative designs for the plasma guns, see if I couldn't get them to seem a bit closer to the general alien design aesthetic - or at least, avoid possible copyright infringement. For this set of plasma weapons I wanted to give them an angular, aggressive appearance - in some ways I based some of the parts of the weapons on the "fins" on the Scout and Fighter UFOs. I hope they appear good enough to fit in alright with some of the existing weaponry and armor - I won't know for certain until they get constructed in 3d and textured and all that.

Now, these are just my second pass on this idea (the first pass tried to retain the more curved shaped of the original plasma guns, with somewhat mixed results), so this is all very much open to change. In fact, looking at these now, I can think of a couple of possible changes already - for the rifle, I'd probably want to reposition the fore grip and/or the rear grip so that they form a more comfortable holding position for firing. For the blaster, I was intending it to be a sort of underslung weapon design (a bit akin to the Heavy's Minigun in Team Fortress 2), but for that I think the trigger grip may need to be angled a bit forward so it's a bit more natural to handle. Alternatively, one could shift some of the elements around so that it works more like how one holds a Light Machine Gun or grenade launcher or what have you.

I'd welcome your comments on these designs - whether it's constructive critique, approval, or saying these weren't necessary and the current plasma gun designs will do just fine. I look forward to hearing from you all! Now I just need to reinstall 3ds max so I can actually make 3d mockups of these...

3

Discussion / Re: UFO:AI needs you. Yes, you.

« on: June 29, 2012, 01:57:10 pm »

Whew, looks like quite a few contributors for this project already! Hard to find something that hasn't already been done in some fashion...but I imagine we'll be able to work it out.

When I saw this project on Desura, I was rather intrigued - a free XCOM-like game with high reviews? That sounded like something to take a look at! Dozens of hours later in just one game, and I was hooked. Quite a lot of neat things going on, a very nice XCOM vibe with a lot of tension - it's always tense when you find a UFO Fighter invading one of your ill-prepared bases, leaving you eight badly-equipped, hardly-trained rookies to face Ortnoks with Plasma Blasters...even on the easiest difficulty there's definitely some real challenge going on.

When I checked the website and found out folks can contribute, I thought, hey, maybe I could do something! But what?

Just glancing over the TODO stuff and proposals, it looked like a lot of what's still needed is either code-related, out of my experience, or already being taken care of! I'd originally thought of seeing what I could do on the modeling front, but I have to admit I'm sorta rusty with the ol' 3ds max, and it looked like a lot of the stuff to be modeled was already being taken care of. I never could figure out texturing very well either, so that seemed out. Then my eye got caught by the talk of cutscenes...

Now, a little background. My primary experience creatively is as an artist and animator - most recently focusing on experimental-style animation, but I've also done hand-drawn traditional stuff and some 3d-based work. I've actually made a couple of animated short subjects on my own, and assisted a friend with another, so as you can imagine when I saw the call for cutscene stuff - storyboards, designs, etc. - it definitely caught my eye. "Might be an interesting thing to try," I thought. A storyboard can be useful for whatever kind of cutscene style is used, whether it's the full 3d CGI treatment or the more "motion comic" style you see in Neverwinter Nights and Homeworld. What worries me is that I've no real idea if my work would be of a good enough quality to work for the project - seeing the amazing stuff the 3d guys have been coming up with is certainly rather humbling, particularly the updated armor models I saw floating around. (Best I ever managed on the 3d front as far as a game went was making models for use in a Spacebuild enhancement pack for a Spacebuild mod in Garry's Mod...)

So to help any of you in charge decide whether I'd actually work on this project or not, I can offer a few samples of what I've done to give you an idea of what my talent level (real or imagined) is. To the Dropbox links! (And YouTube too!)

Experimental Animation: http://youtu.be/JcnsMrHbrts (pastels/charcoals on mylar sheets) - this may give you some idea of what I've done with animation, particularly with regards to story/pacing. Obviously, the style shown here isn't going to be used for this project!

Digital Painting (sorta): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/GD-Blood%20Star%20Rising%20v3.png - A little digital painting thing I did one time - not really great, but has some potential, may give others ideas too.

3D Props for Garry's Mod:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/Armed%20Combat%20Corvette%20Front%20View.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/MilCock2%20and%20MilCock7%20Fighters.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/MilCock8%20Exterior%20Shot.jpg

^My one real experience in actually making 3d content for a game, albeit for a mod of a mod (confusing huh?). The modeling itself was actually the easy part, the tricky part was getting textures on (I had to do a sort of brute-force method because I had almost no experience with UV mapping/texturing whatsoever) and doing the collision models for the props based on sliced-n-diced models...to some degree anyway. I'm ashamed to admit that it's also been some years since I've actually done any significant 3d work, so I'd probably suggest exercising caution on this front.

So yeah, there's what I have (at least some of it). If anyone who happens to be in charge on this project feels I could make a contribution - and, of course, has a suggestion on where I could start and what needs to be done - then please, by all means let me know!