Games Design - Prop Design

For the next project in Games Design we were asked to design a prop for Unreal, a P.C 3rd person shooter. The requirements were as follows :

• Your model must contain no more than 2500 polygons (triangles).
• Your model must have normalised texture UV's.
• A single 'shader'; containing a bare minimum of two 1024x1024.tga format texture channels (Diffuse colour and Specular).

I decided to make a weapon, but decided not to make a gun because you can readily find guns in the game and i wanted to try adding something different. That's when i decided to make an axe.

Above is the first design i made for my axe, using Maya. I wasn't that happy with this because it wasn't how i wanted it to look, but this design opened to way to me thinking about the design that i wanted to see. I think the bad thing about this design was that i looked too small, i envisioned an axe that someone would have to wield two-handed.










The two images above are the axe as it looked in its early stages, the one on the left shows the shape it took and the right one shows the detail I added using some techniques that Brad (lecturer) showed me. I was starting to like the look by now and i was quite happy with it to say that I had never used Maya before I think I did quite well.

This image shows the axe with the diffuse texture map on it, in other words this is the colour information that will be shown in Unreal. I think this turned out well, I wanted my axe to have a kind of magical feel so it made it so that the indented bit had clouds in it, i would have liked to have this animated but I didn't get that far in the time I had.

Above is the finished and textured axe, I added the runes to make it more magical, and also it was a kinda interesting way to sign it because the runes stand for the letters of my name. In all I made 4 textures, 2 more than i needed to :

• Diffuse texture map (Colour information)
• Specular map (light reflection)
• Bump map (height information)
• Luminosity map (Glow)

I really like how it all turned out, it looked much better than I had planned to tell the truth. There was one thing that I had designed to go with it but I had to scrap it because it went wrong, and that was a skull that I had wanted to decorate the axe with.

This is the skull that I made in Maya, I would have liked to use it but the mesh had become faulty and stupidly I hadn't saved any copies of it before it went wrong because it had started as an experiment and I never really meant to use it. I did get to see how it would look on the axe though, shown in the screenshot below :

Web Design - Myspace Redesign

For the third Webdesign project we were asked to redesign the social networking site "Myspace".

• Inspiration/References (for example screenshots of existing sites and URLs)
• Mood board/Visual Language benchmark (explained during lecture, week 28)
• One proposed graphical layout (for user profile page)
• Outline statements and contextual notes to explain design decisions

Above is my myspace redesign, I chose a yellow colour scheme because it is warmer than the usual blue Myspace look, and i also chose a more subdued yellow so that it woulding be too bright and overpowering. I left important tabs in like blog, comments, pictures, music and interests beasue i think thats what most people use myspace for at the moment. In all i think the design went well, it is simple but thats what i designed it to be and i got rid of some of the clutter on the myspace page.

Games Design - Card Based System

For the first project in Games Design we were given we were asked to design a card based game with rules and flow of play. The limits were :

• A maximum of 60 cards
• Playable by a minimum of 2 players
• Games should last no more than 20 minutes and no less than 5 minutes
• No boards or figures are to be used, except for pen and paper for scoring
• Game must be original

I decided to make my game based on superheroes because it was something I found myself interested in. I was watching the American T.V show "Heroes" and also playing an MMORPG P.C game called "City of Heroes".

Above is a sheet of the character cards I designed, I wanted them to be jokey ad not serious at all, and thats where the obvious sounding names come from.

“City Symphony”

For design we were asked to take photographs of patterns, shapes, colour, texture etcetera to make a piece of work that shows “City Symphony”. I joined a group with Patrick and Stefan, and we decided to take pictures of the city and nature, and then alter and combine them using Photoshop.

This one is of the contruction near the Victoria Centre in Nottingham. I made it so that that cranes transform into trees at the top, because cranes are like urban trees, tall and sturdy.

This picture is another one of mine, much the same idea as the crane one but using a lamp post, this is much more believable for the size that it is.

The first project we were given in web design was to design a banner for a website, be it static, interactive or animated, it was our choice. There were restrictions such as a 3mb size limit and recognised banner sizes, found on http://www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp

www.freewebs.com/oldephase/dan.swf