Art Work

So I’ve decided to take a break from the thousands of lines of code and start working on the games graphics. Over the weekend we purchased the Jason character pack from Eivaa Games for a mere $25.00 to give us a head start with the games main character and NPC’s. I prefer to avoid the painstaking task of modeling and rigging a character from scratch, so if I can purchase one which falls within my so called budget and tweak it to fit my needs, I’m all for that. So I give you, until we change his name,  Jason.


 

Initially I wondered why this character was priced less then most other character resources for the Torque game engine. Well after a few emails with the good folks at Eivaa I found out that they apparently had some issues with the biped rigging of the character so the final version was released rigged with bones instead of a biped. Not a major issue I thought since the standard animations were of course included, run, walk, jump, etc. I soon realized a problem, you cannot use any of the standard or extended animations that are packaged with and produced for the game engine. Those packaged animations are produced for a biped therefore the nodes (bone names) that control what bone to animate and by how much do not exist. Additionally since they are bones and not a biped I can not utilize my motion capture library which I was depending on to make the game play a bit more realistic.

Now I must admit, the folks at Eivaa were great, give them a 10 for their customer service. They sent me the original Jason character rigged with a biped and all I had to do is ask why they used bones instead of biped. So now I’m feeling warm and fuzzy again with thoughts of utilizing this newly rigged character with “out of the box” engine animations and hit the ground running. Well running in place is more like it and that warm and fuzzy feeling I had seems to be the makings of an ulcer. The issues with exporting this new character to Torque are too lengthy to list here, I apparently didn’t pay attention when the folks at Eivaa said they had multiple issues with the biped model. Well it seems I have now inherited those issues if I plan to utilize the stock animations and my motion capture files. Tired and frustrated I decided to use the character rigged with bones and start on the graphics for our environment. I enjoy working on the artwork so this should be a good change of pace for me. Enjoy the first pass out our city ruins map.

Map Test 01

Map Test 02

Map Test 03