Teams, Personal Projects and a Tutorial
It has been a while since my last post as things have been really busy lately.
Team Project
A lot of progress has been made with the team project. We have a lot of the core mechanics and assets in game with most of the work on polishing and refining them. I have also been in charge of modeling and rigging the main character as well as working on some of the smaller assets. It is coming along well, with the bullk of the modeling done and the skeleton and rig complete, we can now start animating to a more accurate character.
For more info on the project, check out the dev blog here.
Personal Work
I have also been continuing on modeling custom assets for the Trainz Simulator. While I wold still like to get the 70 class locomotive and the C-Set into the game there has been a few challenges that have slowed progress. One of these has been the way the game handles textures and materials. I am not 100% certain what the issues is, although I have been slowly eliminating possabilities. Curently I have been able to import the models into the game and use a couple of assets made by others to get them running (mainly engine script files written in a custom Trainz Script format).
Aside from the larger trains, I have also been modeling and importing smaller assets with more success. I have already posted about the road and signs, but recently I had a go at creating a signal. I have created a light rail tram siganl, used on the Sydney Light Rail network, and have been ablt to import it into game and work some what realisticly (i.e it will change the lights depending on the state of the track; clear, slow, stop).
Tutorial
One of the features of some Trainz assets is that you can have customisable names that will appear on the asset. This requires the asset to have a point the text can be attached to as well as a few extra lines in the config file. It is simple enought to setup and I have used this on a number of the assets I have been creating.
It inspired me to try and recreate this in Unreal engine and Unity. I had done this a litle while ago, with the Unity version being implemented into the team project.This has saved us a lot of time, not havning to make custom textures for every sign combination. I have decided to work on it a bit more to improve the usefulness (particularly of the Unreal engine version) and write a tutorial of how I went about it. The tutorial will be available a little later down the track. There will be a web version available on my site as well as a downloadable PDF version. This would be my first tutorial, so I will be trying to keep it simple.
Thats all for now, keep an eye out on my website as new stuff is always being worked on.
I am now on LinkedIn as well, so check out my about page and follow the link.
