Demo Reel

Well, my senior year here at Oklahoma Christian University is finally coming to an end (Graduation is tomorrow; wow that came faster than expected). I have experienced much learning, hardship, friendship, and life experience while attending here. I think most of it was for the best and I feel more or less ready to tackle real life haha.

For our senior show we had to do a presentation in front of professionals in careers related to Gaming and Animation and our lower class men (and women of course) to show what we had learned while here at OC. After it was over I got a mixture of feedback and a realization that no matter how cool you think your stuff is, do not be shocked if someone has some harsh things to say about your work. As designers we need to take feedback, learn from it, and then make any necessary changes. Here is my current demo reel that I showed that night; although I am sure I will make changes to it soon:

Joshua Mullen's Demo Reel (April, 2014)

Hopefully these blogs won't cease to exist and so that I can relate my growth and experience to you all (and that you will benefit from them).

Dragonfly Racer

Hello all, I wanted to try my hand at creating another space racing vehicle for my racing game. This time I got inspiration from pod-racers and dragonflies. Here is some of my process:

Okay, so sometimes in class I get to doodling random pictures and sometimes I get these grand ideas for certain model designs. While I do need to brush up on my traditional art skills, here was one of my beginning ideas for the front of the ship.

I wanted there to be eight engines, a spherical cockpit, two blast shields, and two guns. Things changed along the way, but I will show you my development process mostly in the form of screenshots.

I started by modeling the general shape of the engine that I wanted.

I added some extra edgeloops and front propeller cap, along with an exhaust cap and an exhaust opening.

I brought my doodle into 3Ds Max and attached it to a plane. I tried to use my drawing for the basic shape and to place the engines where I wanted.

After I created a simple engine that I was happy with, I began to duplicate, re-size, and place the engines into their appropriate locations.

I also began trying to connect the engine modules together.

Once connected, I used the "Symmetry" modifier to mirror the top engines to the bottom of the model. I also wasn't liking the look of the cockpit and needed some inspiration and so I began to search further. The engine placement started making me think of insects and so I stumbled upon dragonflies and liked the idea of having the upper engines represent the wings of the insect. I started building the cockpit by making it into a dragonfly body shape.

Here are some of the screenshots of the ship's body development.

After connecting the top wing/engine portion of the craft, I decided that the four bottom engines might not be necessary. A friend of mine (Jesse) also remarked that having all of that weight in the front of the ship looked a bit awkward and that I might want to tone it down a little. So I ditched the bottom engines and focused on the top ones.

This sci-fi turret (picture bellow) isn't mine, but I still wanted to give credit where it is due. As I was googling turrets I found this image and saved it as one of my inspirations. I like the shape and geometric look of the cylindrical barrels. So I gained ideas from examples I saw on the internet and then tried to make my own variation/twist of my ship's gun barrels.

First I started out with a eight sided cylinder and extruded portions of it outward.

I added extra edgeloops and liked how it was looking smoothed.

I wanted to gun barrels to be connected to the racing craft in a way that look more like dragonfly limbs and so I gave it a jointed arm appearance.

Picking out a color scheme is always hard because you can have many different appealing combinations. I started looking through color variations of dragonflies and tried various green color combinations. For one reason or another I just wasn't liking the direction the green was going, it just didn't look sporty enough. Most sports cars that I know of are composed of lots of blacks, reds, yellows, etc, and so I found a dragonfly reference that I could still use and get the sporty colors I was looking for.

I finally settled on choosing yellow and black for my two main colors. In Max I started experimenting with where to divide my colors up and how they could highlight portions of the vehicle and still look cool. These are the un-rendered colors on the ship.

Because Keyshot is awesome, easy to use, and available on one of our computers, I decided to use it for my rendering choice. Here are some of my renders. (I copyright these images as being the property of Joshua Mullen as of April 24th, 2014. I allow people to distribute the photos under the Creative Commons License, but with "All Rights Reserved").

Here is also a small animated turn table of the ship in Keyshot:

I hope that one of these days that this will be included in my space racing game. I will let you all know if any major developments occur and hopefully I can get some people to play test it for me. Peace!

Race in Space

Hey guys, my next project that I wanted to work on this semester was build a single racing level and get my space racer to fly around on it.

Why a racing game you ask? Growing up I have a lot of fond memories playing lots of Mario Kart, 1080 Snowboarding and Star Wars: Pod Racer (all for the Nintendo 64) with my friends. I wanted to create a crazy combination of some of those games and create something new and fun for others to play.

I wanted to use the sci-fi track models and the spaceship that I had modeled before and try to make a playable level. I wasn't able to completely finish it as I would have liked. I got some of the controls working, but not smooth enough for me to let others play. Anyways, here is what I did with this project.

This is where I left off last semester:

It was a good start, but it was lacking more dynamic lighting and some of the seams were showing. So I built another model (an archway) to hide the seams. Also my professor graciously supplied me with the pro version of Unity 3D so that I could mess around with the HDR lighting.

This is how the spaceship looked in Unity. I was able to get a propeller animation working two using expressions in Max.

Here is a brief video showing it flying around the track without proper animations and physics.

I modeled a simple archway to help hide the seams, UVed, and textured it and then brought it into Unity 3D.

Here is the whole track with added hdr lighting and a cool space skybox.

And here are a few shots of the track from the game view.

I was asked by one of the judges (senior show presentation) why I choose to use green lights for my race track. It was an interesting question to be sure, but I guess I choose it because it looked visually appealing to me and there were parts of the texture like the glowy-looking circles on the track that were also green. I was told that I should try playing with the lights a bit more to create more interest (example: blinking lights or different colored lights around the level).

This is what my race track looked like by the time senior show rolled around. I do agree that I need to set dress a bit more in order for it to start becoming a better looking level. I also need to work on game mechanics a bit more. I will soon post a blog labeled "Demo Reel" that will show some of the animations I worked on with the space ship flying around the track. 

Ooo one thing that was pretty cool, that I forgot to mention, was that my Game Programming class got to use these models for one their projects. I have been trying to learn more programming every semester (every since I found that it was crucial for a career in level design). I did have to drop the class near the end of the semester, but I did learn more about Unity and programming. My teacher told me that he was going to try to put together a compilation video of all of the students' race tracks and post it on our school's website. If I find the video I will post it here and show you all. After sitting in on their final presentation I realize that we have some talented programmers here at OC.