capsworkz

Unity

2011-06-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

So... Things are moving on. I´ve been learning and using Unity since the end of last year.

I´m having a lot of fun. Very nice and powerful tool!

ASAP I´ll have some new stuff to post!

Game Development: Head Advergame

2010-01-06T04:31:00.003-08:00

A web advergame for Head brand called Desafie Seus Medos (Challenge Your Fears). The concept of the game, as you will notice is a little different from an original tennis game mechanics and rules. The idea here is something different, you must HIT your opponents with tennis balls!

Unfortunately the game is not available anymore to play, but, sometime, as soon as I have my oficial website running, I'll have a version so people can play online.

This was a hard one, from game concept/design to texture creation, 3D modeling, animation and programming/scripting, AI to testing and deployment. This has been by far my most challenging project, considering it a real commercial project/demand. I´m very happy that I actually finished this project. ;)

I cannot thank enough Dassault Systéms´3DVia for their responsive support (Virgile Delporte and Martin St-Germain! \0/).

I and just can´t put in words how wonderful Virtools IS. I hope they can get back to it someday.

It would be meaningless to speak of this project and not talk about audio. Everything was done by an excelent professional game audio fx, sound track composer, audio editor, and musician Abreu Leandro.

The Levels:

These are the game levels... From training, following a progressive dificulty curve to the championship levels.

The average of each scene in polys is about 4.5k. There was also the use of baked shadows, specially for the court.

This is a quick video preview...

Characters:

For the animation, I tried to get more fluid and realistic movements, so I used video rotoscopy for reference...

NPCs (Non-Playable Characters):

Two monsters were available for the Head campaign, so they both were insered in the game as being the "enemies". Both of these were also modeled in high resolution to get good texture aspect and more realism despite the low poly count and low texture resolution, again, this is a web game, so "less is more"...

"Red Monster"

The Reference:

The Modeling:

The Animation:

"Blue Monster"

The Reference:

The Modeling:

The Whole Making Of: Modeling, High Res Modeling, UV Mapping, Texture Painting, Rigging, Animation...Can be watched with the series of accelerated videos. I hope you enjoy...

The Base Modeling video:

The High Resolution Modeling Video

The UV Mapping Video

The Texturing Video

The Rigging Video

The Animation Cycles Video

Next-Gen Character Development: "Marine"

2010-01-06T04:31:00.001-08:00

This character has been developed for both high-end animation and also real-time application use. Two meshes were built out of one whole process. From the initial design concept to modeling, high resolution mesh modeling, uv mapping, texturing, rigging, animation and exportation. This character was used for demo at the SBGames 2007 Independent Games Festival under XNA catagory and contributed to get the third place. It was also used for the book published in 2008 "XNA 2.0 Game Programming".

Character´s head:

Character Marine Head from Carlos Sousa on Vimeo.

This is a little video animation done with the high resolution character... Skin shader was used for the head and displacement maps were used for the suit...

This is a playblast video of the character done before the render of the animation...

Game Development: Floatbox´s Off-Road Challenge

2010-01-06T04:30:00.001-08:00

This was the first 3D game demo I´ve developed. It´s fully functional (no menus yet) and not just a prototype. It took me about 9 months to get this finished and I did everything from modeling to programmning to testing... The level was built uppon research of local vegetation and landscape in the region I live in Brazil (cerrado). This is a web game so you might tell that no fancy graphics or lots of details... On the other hand, special attention was given to have good playability, so many hours of testing and tuning were made... My friends said they had fun while playing, so this is the most important and satisfying to me...

You can play it here: http://www.floatbox.com.br/off_road/

Here are some screenshots of the level. The whole scene including props, objects, obstacles does not pass 20k polys and it is divided into four pieces for scene graph and clipping opitimzation. The idea here is perfomance, the game is intended for web and low end computers...

Game Development: Estrada Real Digital

2010-01-06T04:29:00.001-08:00

This was a game project developed at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. The goal was to develop an educational game that passed thru famous historic cities in Brazil (Ouro Preto, Tiradentes and Diamantina) showing many cultural aspects like architecture, folclore and legends, culinary and eco-turism in many with a central plot.

On this project, I´ve been assigned Lead Artist (Lead Level and Character Designer) in charge of 3 other artists. I was also in charge of interacting with the programmers and script(story) writers. Along I also did extensive work on character development, scene, modeling, GUI and other artists/designer roles. The full game has over 16 different environments ranging from historical cities to underground tunnels, outdoor scenes forests and waterfalls, also around 40 different NPC characters were modeled and animated to be used in thegame...

Since everyone worked on this project on their spare time, and because of the small nubmer of people actually working, it was very difficult to finish this project but we did it, very proud of everyone´s sacrifice and efforts!

All of the environments, characters and objects used in the game were built uppon historical research and studies.

This is the main city plaza in Ouro Preto. The whole city was built with the minimum polygons possible but maintaining details. The scene was extensively photografed, with topography study and sattelite photos to be as close as possibleas the real world city.

Here is the wireframe to get the idea of mesh density.

Here is a reference photograph of the same place.

This is a satellite photo used as reference:

Characters:

This is the horse and Barbara from the game. Also some animation cycle samples...

Character Animation: Live-Action + Camera Match

2010-01-06T04:28:00.001-08:00

This animation was a school project while I studied at EBA-UFMG, (Fine Arts School from Federal University of Minas Gerais) in Brazil. It is called Homage to Escher. I used live-action for camera match and added the animation, lighting etc.

This is the animation... No Audio... :(

Next-Gen Character Development: Letum Mortis

2010-01-06T04:27:00.001-08:00

I made this character for the Dominance War II modeling contest in 2006. I did all the concept, low poly modeling, high resolution modeling, textures maps application (color, reflectivity, glow, normal/bump) and rigging to submit. Since it´s a real rush to get this done on spare time, I found it fulfilling to have submited and got to the finals... The polycount budget for this character was 7k, this character has around 6.8k... Extensive work on texture maps made quite a difference I guess.

Here is the concept...

Some screenshots and renders of the WIPs...

This is a little animation I did with the character, just a quick little render and animation... I used Displacement maps rendered with approximation editor for MR.

CG Character - The Old Man

2010-01-06T04:19:00.001-08:00

I decided to put this here because it was my first CG chacter developed back in 2002. I think it has something special and I like it. Hope you like it...

CG Animation - Royal Ascott

2010-01-06T04:17:00.001-08:00

This was a short animation I made for a friend. He´s an automotive designer and asked me if I could do something with his concept car model made in nurbs. Hope you like it.

CG Animation - Lumiart Opening

2010-01-06T04:11:00.001-08:00

This is an animation made with Maya´s hardware rendering and particles basically.

CG Animation - Dominos&Dominos

2010-01-06T04:07:00.000-08:00

This is a short animation video I did while I was studying graphic design at UEMG. Nothing really exceptional here, just animated the first domino then added rigid body dynamics to the others... The rest is just camera movement, lighting and rendering...