Level 03 Tree House WIP Continued

In continuing with yesterdays post I thought I would keep you up to date on how the Tree House is coming along. I've been busy all day mostly just adding the foliage to the tree. Because it's going into Unity 3D in my game environment I figure I might as well use the "Big Tree Leaves & branches" from the standard terrain assets pack. Because Max does the transparencies a little differently than in Unity I had to make a new reversed transparency map from the alpha channel in the unity "Big Tree Leaves & Branches" PSD files and use that in order the get the same effect you see here in my Max render using "Mental Ray." As you can see I've added some more branches to the tree and started to texture a few of the simple things like the tin roof that only needed a simple box texture mapping. I'll see if I have time to do the UVW texture mapping for things like the tree house parts and the tree trunk but that will depend on how much longer it will take me to add some more foliage to the tree, I still want to fill it out a little more in a few areas, but overall it's coming along nicely I think.

I was trying to think of things one might see in a tree house although I could not think of much outside of a few things like wooden boxes to sit on, an old cable cart for a table, a crude wooden bench, and maybe some comic books. Maybe some toy blocks on the floor and the occasional cola can. I'll have to see if I can search the Internet and see if I get some ideas from there.

Cartoon Potato Beetle

Just finished the texture mapping for the Cartoon Potato Beetle which is Bud's new enemy to deal with in level 02. Just like all of the other characters I've given him a decidedly hand painted texture map. I'm just now in the process of giving him Bones in Max 8 and rigging him for animation. I thought I could use a Biped, I was pretty sure there was a horse or dog biped option but buggered if I could find it, character rigging and animation is not really my strong spot. lol

I ended up just creating individual bones so I'm hoping that will work. Once I get him rigged I'm going to scope out YouTube for some insect footage and see if I can determine how six legged insects walk so I can better mimic his motion in Max 8. It does not have to be exact, in fact if he's a little more original and animated when I'm done that will be perfect as it will give him a more characteristic walk I figure.

Next will be his attack animations and killed animation which will no doubt precede the "Splat" when "Bud the Spud" jumps on him for a nice meaty "Squish!" Then will come the scripting in Unity 3D and character controller so he'll be able to perform his animations and interact with his environment.

Bud's House Model

Bud's House model renders

i've been busy all day rendering the interior of Bud's house to upload to Turbosquid. The renders took a long time in 3DS Max using Mental ray, one omni light for the candle beside his bed and settings for soft shadows. I'm very pleased with how the samples turned out but they sure took a while to render.

This morning in Unity 3D I was working on a particle effects for the little candle beside Bud's bed. Lots of tweaking and a while later I was starting to get something "Candle Flame like." I still want to tweak it a bit as I feel it could be better but I think it's getting there.

I feel the 000Webhost that I have my game currently on is not very reliable of friendly with Unity 3D's Web Player as I keep getting a "Bad File Length" error message. Seems sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't and I still can't tell if my load bar is quite behaving the way it should. It seems to move very slowly and then does not completely finish and then suddenly the game level loads which does not seem right to me, but unless I can find another more reliable web host I can't really tell what the problem is.