Stage 1 is almost done!

Well it is time for an update.

I almost finished with stage one, there are a few things here and there to add (a phone and a wooden outside toilet which are ready as objects) but the rest are final.
I did had a great trouble with the surrounding ecosystem, the first try was that:

and as you can see while the forest is almost ok (there are not trees close) the grass is terible, small and not close to each instance of it, not to mention the grass in front of us, there is no grass in front of us!
This happened because I added a hidden object to stop trees from spawning in front of the camera, but I over did it.
I tried to make it better but I did it worst:

so I decided to remove the automatic ecosystem and to do it by hand, which is really painful with my low power system. After all the automatic ecosystem as material it was a pain in rendering and it was adding about an hour to calculate and more, if we consider that it was filling the memory and the swap file by up to 16GBs.

I also found some tutorials about optimizing the renders and they saved me a lot of time and they will save even more once I do the finals at 1280x800p.

So there is the final scene, I added about 20 trees by hand and after the second line of trees I used a paint ecosystem brush to add random forest. I used the same brush for the grass and made it much more realistic.

Enjoy:

This is final but I have to render it again in 1280x800 sometime later. I will do some small renders to start composing in flash and I will change them with the higher resolution ones afterwards.

And I made a low resolution video to show how the door will open:





I also made the intro for stage 2, where we land after our teleportation journey and the strange life form who will explain to us what happened. This is a loop:





It is a little dark, movie maker did it...

That's all for now!

Some early shots of the inside.

I have finished the laboratory building, and I'm making the surroundings now. Before that I took some "photos" from the inside. Somethings have changed and the shots are outdated, but I want to give a first impression on what we will see inside the building.

(Above)This is the entrance from the outside to the reception.

This is the door of the main laboratory, as seen from the reception room.

The door is open now, I'm planing on creating a preview animation to show how the door opens. It is made of 3 parts, the bigger at the front will slide down and then the other 2 behind it (which are half door size each) will slide left and right, like the automatic doors in elevators. So this is the laboratory.

And this is a closer view, the texture in the chair need some adjustment.

So this is the living room, a place to relax and spend some free time.


I also did some experimental renderings of the building to see if the ultra settings for rendering are really giving me anything back, or it is just adding extremely more time to render.

As you can see below, yes these settings make the whole scene much better and they worth the extra time.

Final render settings

and

Ultra render settings

The difference is clear.

Anyway I'm populating the forest around the building now. I will soon post an update.

The Laboratory, step 1

Hello everyone, I have decided to do less frequently updates. So far every time I made an object I was posting here. From now on I will only post about progress in whole scenes.

So here is the step 1 in laboratory's creation.

I got some help from my girlfriend (she is studying architecture in the NTUA university) to design the building, she made me a top view (actually she made for me the whole building but Vue doesn't import ArchiCAD files, neither ArchiCAD export in some format Vue can read) and I transfered the building in 3D into Vue.

Then I made a full automatic door to add in front and the lab's entrance, you can not see it here but is complicated and not easy to breach through, I will made an animation later to show that. I also made a device to add next to those major doors, with finger print recognition and an extra monitor.
Also I made a reception desk with a typically computer.

Then I added the teleportation device and a desk and few computer monitors in the main laboratory room. You can see it in detail here:

So the hard part is almost over, for the rest furniture in the building I will use ready items.
The next step is to make the natural surroundings of the building, I'm afraid that the ecosystem tool will eat up all my ram for that task, but it have to be done.

Anyway I will post back again once I finish this scene!

Welcome home!

Since the Adventure game project got a name, I moved everything in this new blog, to separate it from the other one which is for all my on going projects in general.

The new blog need a little tweaking here and there (some pictures for example are too big for the new layout), so be a little patient and I will fix everything soon.

Keep in mind that there will be no new posts for this game in the old blog, all the news and updates will be posted here from now on!

Have a nice Autumn!

The laboratory

Hi again, here I am once more with another update.

The whole project is on the go but the progress is short of slow. This is mostly because officially I'm on vacations and I swim, I get out and things like this and on my "free" time I work on the project and also trying to get familiar with open source programs, like gimp and inkskape. You see I really want to work exclusively on open source programs, for many reasons.

Anyway this is not the place to say why to use open source, so I return on topic.

I'm working on the laboratory, actually the first level of the game which will also be the "intro" of the whole story. I did had an accident with the first file I made with the laboratory, I made the "teleportation device" and then the saved file didn't want to open again, vue 8 was just keep on crashing, I also tried to open it in my desktop and no difference, crash on load. It was short of push back because I designed a mechanism to hydraulic open and close the device's door, and also linked the objects in a way to be used for easier animation. It took me about 4 hours and all are lost. At least I designed the mechanism in hand first and it will be easier to remade it.
After that I decided to design each part of an object separately and then join them in a new file, this seems like safer way to do things.

The results are this:

 

The main body of the device.

And this:

This is the window of the device and I made an aged alternative of it to use elsewhere:

Also I used the lamb from the preview post and joined all the objects together to make the "teleportation device":

All I need to finish the device now is to make the door and the mechanism to open and close it.

Also I made some handmade artwork with a BIC pen... I don't have any other mediums available here so that was the best I could do, another problem was that I don't have a scanner available so I shotted it with my macbook's web cam, the image is terrible but you can get an idea before I will scan it.

So this is the artwork for the teleportation device and the door mechanism:

and a plan from top view I draw to know what will go where inside the laboratory, because of the terrible quality you can't read what is what, sorry for that I will scan a better image soon.

Also I did a high resolution render to the device to see more details:

You can get it from here:

http://fav.me/d2ut7ub

That's all for now!

A little update

Hello! I finished with my college for this year so I'm enjoying a few days of vocations. However I still work on the adventure project.

I though of a name, since the game will take place in parallel universes, I though it might be cool to call it "Multiverse".

I was also working on the first scene of the game. The laboratory where the whole adventure will begin...
A disaster! I worked overnight to make the "teleportation" device, with some short of real looking mechanism to open and close the door, I saved the file and once I tried to open it up again... BOOM! Vue 8 crashes!

I was hoping that this is some short of problem in my macbook so I tried, full of hope to open it in my windows desktop, still crash...

It seems I have to remade it from scratch, at least I draw the mechanism in hand before go on with the 3D modeling, so it will be easier this time.

I also remade a scene which is not part of the current project, but it can be used for it.


It is some short of water well, the original is this:

and the remake is this:

Also I made a lamb :

and an attempt to add it on a wall:

The Island animation

I know it is stupid to keep working on the island without even a project plan yet, but I can't stop!
So I made the animation and did a small render to check things.

Scenario

Hello everyone I hope you are all fine, the latest events in Greece does not make me feel fine myself but well...
Anyway I fall behind a little with the project, I was busy with my studies and yesterday it was a bad day, and my morale was really really down, because of all that shits that happens in my country.
As I said a part of the scenario is already done, and all it was needed was to translate it. So here it is:

Our hero is typical scientist who works day and night in his laboratory and he tries to make a teleportation device.
The research in theory is moving smooth but the experiments does not, since so far he is not able to move an object from the place A to place B, or maybe he did, but he does not know where the hell this place B it is.
Another routine day in the lab and our hero is doing some changes in the device (think a box with a door, for the device), and one of the cats he got for experiments in the lab went free from her cage and pressed the activation button of the device. As a result our scientist (he does not have a name yet, maybe Gordon Freeman? :P) he disappears!
After a really crazy and surrealistic journey he lands in a strange place. The place looks like a desert but there is no sand, just an infinite plane. All of a sudden, in front of him appears that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU8iXPbC-oI and starts to talk to him.
The strange life form, explains to him that Einstein's theory for the parallels dimensions was right, except the part of how many they are, because there are an infinite number of them.
Each dimension is been over watched by it's guardian, like that life form who talk to us. The guardian have to make sure that there is balance in his dimension and in rare cases like now, to help any "intruder" return to his dimension without disturbing the balance and order in the other ones. The problem is that the connection between the dimensions are one way, what means we can not return back that easy. We must found a way through the other dimensions with the help of their guardians.
The guardian inform us that our life form will change in each dimension, like it did now (here it pop ups a mirror like thing and show us that we look like the guardian), and we must find the guardian of each dimension to move us to the next one (till we made it to ours).

After that we are been teleported at the next dimension. There we see that it is an artificial world where the only living beings are robots and computers. A small robot show up and says that the guardian sends him and he will help us to find our way to the guardian. This will be a dummy entry level to make the user familiar with the controls and in most of our way to the guardian we will do thinks that the little robot instruct us to do.
Next it is the island level which I gave shots a few days ago. From that on we are at our own and we have to use logic and tips around the world to made it to the next guardian.
When I say logic I mean for example that : "there is a boat, it seems clickable but nothing happens once you click. The reason is that it is useless without the paddle which is somewhere close but with smaller clickable area, so it will be harder to found it with a simple mouseover". In that scene with the boar if you can't find the paddle and move on the next area there will be a dead end, but if you look careful enough, you will see a tip, which says that you will need the paddle to take the boat, and go to the island next to that one you are!

This is it so far, I have a couple of ideas about other areas and I will make some artwork for each one of them soon.

Later.

The Island Wallpaper

OK here is a wallpaper from the island.
You can use it or distribute it for free as long as my watermark remains.
If you want to give it trough your site please link back here.

Enjoy:

The Island Vue 8 step 2

So with the newest version of Vue on my hands I decided to sacrifice my sleep to move this scene a little closer to completion.
Day by day I'm getting more and more exited about this project! Especially now with that powerful tool on my hand... aaaaah sweet like wine, yes this is how it tastes to create new worlds!
Enjoy!

Also the story behind the game is gaining form day by day. But I have it in Greek right now and I'm working on the translation of it. It is not something which take a lot of time, but I work on my studies as well and I'm very, very short in time right now.