Week 11 Senior Project

This week I chose to do one location of clothing. I picked the head. The reason I chose the head is because like in real life when you wear something in your head it is a accessory and since the dress up part is all about accessories I thought this was going to be easy to pound out. One of the more harder problems about this was that the shape of the head made it difficult to have thing such as cowboy hats and baseball caps. So I ended up improvising.

In most games the head piece is used as a sign of stature such as RuneScape. With it's Party Hats, Santa Hat's etc. Same goes for real life. How many times have you seen a chef wear a hat that is different than other workers hat, or a Foreman in a construction site. When I make a clothing item I keep in mind two things cuteness and will someone choose this item.

With that being said these are the hats we have in game.

Week 10 Senior Project

This week I had to do clothes for our cat. In most games sold in stores when the designers create things such as alternate clothes what there doing is creating a completely different model. The reason were not doing this is because we want to customize the character and also have it on a IOS Device meaning we have little memory to work with. Having many models in our game isn't a big deal but at minimum we need to have five of each clothing item so you have five different combinations for the head but then you need to multiply it by all the other different combinations you can have on the other body parts that is about 625 different combinations. That might not be that impressive of a number but when you factor in that we are now using 1024x1024 textures we are going to need a whole lot of textures. In just a couple games that allow you to make small customization such as Team Fortress 2 they use what we are going to be using which is attaching an extra model to the body of the character. In the pictures below you can see that the model is the same but he's wearing a different "hat" in each of them.

There are two ways to make clothes for a 3D model using the attach to the model way. One is to make a piece of "cloth" and wrap it around the model like a table cloth. This isn't our best choice we don't want to create something a wrap it around our model and stitch it together they always look very fake we want it to look like a different model but with taking the memory. What I decided to do is to load our current model and select where we want our clothes to go and "extend" it from the model. So when you are going to make a new model that uses the method I talked about in the beginning you do what I'm talking about. You take your original model and make thing "stick out" so thing about it like this. If you want to make a T-shirt you get the bare model and select where you want to shirt to go and then you make those selections bigger to give the illusion of a shirt. After a while you want to go back and make it more realistic as in adding a hole for the neck so that it doesn't look like the shirt is painted on. Here are the clothes we have for our demo.

Week 9 Senior Project

This week we all really wanted to work on the feedback we got from our demo, and our client. One of the big things was the colors and how everything looked. So I'm going to bump up the quality of the textures on all the models. Instead of using memory saving 256x256 pictures I'm going to be using very pretty 1024x1024. If your not clear what do these numbers mean just think that the new ones will look four times as sharp as the old ones.

As you can see from the example I put together the photo to the left is the photo that is sharp and 1024 and the one on the right is the memory saving one. The first thing you can tell is that they both look alike when viewing from a distance but if you see the one on the right you can tell that it is missing some detail. For example the photo on the right is missing the grid the Google logo has. Also if you make the photo on the right bigger or stretch it to fit a big object you will definitely see all the little details that it's missing from the photo on the left. Think of it as taking a high-res photo from a modern camera phone to a photo you would get from a old flip cellphone from 2000.

(High-Res - Low-Res)

Another thing that the client didn't like was the model for the cat. Hopefully this will be the last time I would have to redesign the cat, because I really need to get started on the clothes for it. I was also told to do a model for a dog. Keeping with the theme of "cute" I thought what type of dog would make for a cute dog. Then I though well why not a puppy with huge dumbo ears. That is what I was able to get once both of these models get placed in the game then I will finally get the green light to make the clothes for the Cat.

If your asking yourself why don't I make the clothes the just adjust it for the cat think of making a tailored suit for a client. You can't just make any suit you need to get the person in the take measurements and know what size do you have to work with. Even the previous clothes I made for the other cat I will have to redo to fit this cat. Yes I have something to work with but chances are that I'm going to have to scrap it and start over. This is the cat that hopefully we are going to be working with for the rest of the time we have left.