Here’s a quick concept painting to exorcise it from my brain. Rendered in the same style I’ve been exploring recently, it’s yet another napkin doodle while having dinner at the Vintage. …stay away from my steak zombie, it’s mine!

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The recent release of my Enchanted Forest Environment Pack was well received and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback on it so far. Granted it’s only been live for two and a half days, so I may be celebrating a little prematurely.

It’s been a very busy month for me and looks to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

I put in a very long four weeks on a seriously kick @$$ project for Bad Habit Software, game environment, avatars, load screens, GUI’s, and particles effects. That’s wrapping up and now I find myself immersed in two new environments development projects. But it’s too soon to show them off, so I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Obligatory post image: this is a screen cap of a MudBox sculpt I  started on last night.  One of about a dozen I’ve done this week. Still a long way to go on this one.

The reality of most game development is that high-end asset generation (normal maps, specular, ambient occlusion, etc) via Sub-D modeling or high poly sculpts, often simply isn’t justified by the time involved.

Unless you are talking about character generation and a few other exceptions, the bulk of content is best (bang for your buck) created via tools like Crazy Bump, or Shader Map Pro.

However, knowing when to make that call requires you to know the in’s and out’s of both. It takes a master to make a complicated task seem simple. And there are no short cuts getting there.

But there are principles and practices that will help you along the way. Sort of like “Don’t take candy from strangers …unless they’re distracted”, and  “Never pee uphill”, or that there is no right answer to “do these pants make me look fat”, which inevitably leads to your evening being F.U.B.A.R’d.

Einstein’s said “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”. Or as Da Vinci  put it “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

At the end of the day, time really is money. The sooner a developer learns to reconcile that with the passion for their craft as an artist, coder, or otherwise, the happier and more effective they will be. That’s no easy juggleing act.

I was going to write more about this from a project planning perspective, but the sun is shining, so I’m going for a run.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

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I didn’t end up where I was headed when I started on this content pack, but I arrived more or less where I needed to be.

In fact, I didn’t even start this as a content pack. The Enchanted Forest began as a contract gig to design and create an environment for an online MMO being developed on the Torque Game Engine.  I retained the rights to the art in return for a reduced hourly rate on the contract.  A good deal for all concerned.

After the contract was wrapped up, the pixels and polys collected virtual dust while I moved on to other things.  But eventually I came back around to it and started updating the art with normal maps and reworking a good portion of the content with the intention of releasing it for the Unity Engine and Torque game Engine Advanced.

By the time it began to resemble current gen art content, Garage Games had their shiny new Torque3D engine going strong.  Derek Bronson and Brett Seyler of GG eventually persuaded me to steer development toward Torque 3D, which would also give me an opportunity to learn the in’s and out’s of the next generation of torque tech.  And I have to admit Torque 3D is pretty damn cool and come along ways since I first started using the Torque engine back around TGE version 1.2 or something like that.

Hopefully the community will enjoy the pack and put it to good use.  There’s a dark side to the Enchanted Forest waiting to be packed up and ship along side it, but life is keeping me pretty busy right now, so that will have to wait a while.

It should launch any day now and I will post a link as soon as one is available.

-Todd

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Theo Jansen is a “Kinetic sculptor”. His creations live or die by their simultaneously complex and elegantly simple design.

This guy is like DaVinci reincarnated and locked in a room with an Erector set ..that’s a really old toy for generationally challenged out there.

On another front, I just wrapped up 5 weeks on a contract job. ..now just a few days to revise and polish.

This was a great reminder of why contractors should keep in mind that Murphy’s law always applies, and no matter how certain you are about a schedule and the work involved, something will always happen that you can’t predict.

That’s why I include a 15% margin for error in delivery times.

I estimated the job at 5 weeks, that’s 25 work days. A 15% margin for error could mean as much as 3 and 1/4 days, give or take.

Well, the Murphy effect that I didn’t predict this time was that I forgot to include my 15% rule in the estimate…