17Jan

Video composing workflow (1 of 2): from 3D Studio to Composite

Welcome!

We have finished our promo video at least! That was a very hard work, specially because we did’t knew how the workflow was, and it has a “medium” poly count and some effects that took our computers busy for hours (too many, sure). It relates the story of how our Zombie found the minigolf ball alone in a meadow, fell in love with it, thus annoying Sprunch, who decided to recover his now “stolen” beloved ball. Well, it’s not the best script in the world, but helps introducing the characters and adds some background for the game.

But that’s another story you can find there. Today’s story focuses on the video composite workflow, using two compositing tools and one for the subtitles. We will divide this entry on two posts, as it’s too long. You can use any tools you want, although we’ve used these:

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9Jan

A Mad Journey Minigolf: The beginnings

Hi there!

I am Ulises, lead programmer and design assistant of CBS. I’m going to talk you about the first steps we made in our game “A Mad Journey Minigolf”.

We began having some meetings between all the team members related to design (well, we are a small company, so everyone took part). And we decided how we want the game, at first it had 4 characters and 3 worlds, each one with 8 minigolf circuits, we realized soon that this work load was going to be too much for our first work.

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3Jan

Character development Sprunch

Welcome back!

Characters are one of the main feature in games nowadays. In fact, I think that games are one more way of telling stories, and stories usually need characters, so this gives more importance to the topic. Developing rich characters is not straightforward; it needs some work, developing their past life, their personality, those little things that conform their way of acting, what is their main activity, what about their families, the relation between them “¦ As you may guess, the list grows faster, although it’s something worth doing. It helps when you need to draw the character, add background for him, or have to describe how he perform actions. If you know him, you could correctly suppose how can he act. This eases a lot the subsequent work and gives consistency to the project: the player will see that everything is well suited for your characters, as every detail had been taken into account. He sees and appreciates your work.

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25Dec

Lighting up 2D art of our iPod/iPhone game

Tags: 2d

Welcome once again!

In a previous post, I’ve talked about how important lighting is so as to recreate our 3D world. In fact, it’s importance goes beyond the 3D scene, and there comes the 2D part of the game, such as textures, menus, GUI elements or some other related things. As in the post before, I want to spare some background with you, as it may help focusing about what we are talking about.

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20Dec

Lighting up the 3D scene in our iPod/iPhone game

Tags: 3d

Hi!

I’m Rafa del Riego, Art Director at CrazyBits Studios. Now that A Mad Journey Minigolf, our first game for iPhone/iPod, has come to the end of it’s development, I thought that sharing some of the knowledge learnt with you will benefit both of us, especially if you’re a 3D artist or want to become one. In this post I’ll talk about how to light things up, given that light is, perhaps, the most important artistic feature one has to care about when it comes to recreate a world.

I won’t get into tedious explanation about light sensing, but ¦ have you ever heard about cones and rods? Human eye has about 5 million cone cells – color sensing – and about 90 million of rod cells – grayscale sensing. So, most of the information we see doesn’t need color at all, although color is almost a must. See the two images below, taken from the incoming promo video of A Mad Journey Minigolf (UPDATE: it’s already done: watch it here), and the final result.

Ambient Occlusion Pass

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