I usually arrive to work early (noon-ish) so I can get some work done before the rest of the stragglers crawl in. After making some coffee, I checked my messages and discovered that new art is needed for a spell icon and inventory. After a brief discussion with my Art Director (Terry Robinson) and some rough sketches, I begin to work on animating the spell icon. John Lindemuth, who has done the majority of the spell animations for our game, graciously supplies me with a 3DMax file with the camera I need for a consistent-sized render. The modeling takes very little time. I spend the majority of my day lighting and texture mapping. I'll do a test render, change some settings, do another test render, etc… The particle system seems a bit fickle and doesn't want to render for me. I try to figure out why it won't work. It's getting late. I finally leave in frustration.

Tuesday, October 28, 1997

Coffee; my hot bitter friend, bring forth awareness and lucidity! O'kay, all better now. I begin where I left off yesterday, trying to make cool sparkles animate. My render finally works, although I don't know what I did differently to make it so. At 10:00 AM, a hand-full of us take a break and go outside to play hacky-sack. It's always nice to get away from the computers for a few minutes and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts. We kick the bag around for a while, then head back inside, revitalized (albeit a bit sweaty). I need to work on a new inventory item now. Luckily it's a variation of an item I've already designed and modeled and should take little more than reworked texture maps. I also like to have more than one thing near completion before I seek approval from my Art Director. He's busy and often difficult to track down. So, when I finally do get his attention, I'd like to have constructive direction that wastes as little of Terry's time as possible. I mess around with texture maps ‘til I'm relatively pleased with the render. I help Mike out with a beta-testing session before going home.

Wednesday, October 29, 1997

That coffee thang' again. I've finally received one of the character models I'm supposed to animate, from one of our Softimage Artists. I finished the character sketches months ago and the last of the character models are done or near completion. I'm always curious to see how another artist will interpret my character designs. Karen Lewis has done a good job on the Ugarte model. I still need to tweak some of the textures so that they map to our character palette. The voxel looks okay but doesn't come close to showing the level of detail a render of the model would show. I silently curse the "Game Art Gods" that have put such limitations on our (art teams) work. Much angst. Time to split.

Thursday, October 30, 1997

Coffee, my seductive brew of sobriety. Now that I'm awake, I show the Ugarte voxel to Terry (Art Director Guy). The facial characteristics don't read well in the voxel format. We agree that the model should be characatured so the eyes read better. I spend half the morning tweaking the model and doing voxel tests. I fit the character with a biped skeleton. A biped figure linked to the characters' mesh gives me more options and generally makes animation easier. I begin working on one of a hand-full of animations for the Ugarte character.

Friday, October 31, 1997

Double Frappamochalottacino. The majority of our panoramic backgrounds were done by our Alias' Artists on Silicon Graphics workstations. I visit the SGI room and request some background data from Renee Dunlop. The Ugarte character sits on a bench in the Thieves' Guild. I need either exact measurements or an exported 3D-mesh of the bench so I can do animation of the character seated appropriately for the room. I also get room coordinates so the animation can be placed in the room by programming. Exciting stuff, eh? At lunch I make a mad dash to put together some sort of costume for the Halloween party. I get a couple of fidget animations done before I call it quits.