Early adjustments to the Traffic Cone

With Nicks advice i decided to go back re-model the Traffic Cone and here what i proposed to do:

After looking at my model i went away and made some adjustments to the traffic cone and at this point i started to think about optimizing for the first time. Here is what i produced:

Here is some more advice Nick suggested that i should take on board notice that he points out that there are some verts on my model that dont serve any purpose.

Current Tri count 64

Modelling the Traffic Cone

For this project i will be using Maya as this is a program that i have studying over the past few months since graduating but not really got my teeth into and thought that this will help me gain more confidence in Maya.

I started to model the traffic cone starting with a cylinder and re-shaping it accordingly mostly with the scale tool creating a very simple base.

Here is what i produced:

This was very much in its early stage but i decided to seek some advice from Nick Sadler at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. I sent my work to Nick and Nick sent me a screenshot of some early observations he had made. Here is that screenshot:

Even at this early stage my tri count was very high considering that it wasnt the complete build yet and at present the tri count stood at 128 tris. This would need to be address further on down the process.

Learning to model as done within the Video Games Industry

Hi guys well i haven't posted anything up here of late and i have been thinking of a project i could get stuck into. So i have decided that i am going to start modelling some environmental work that you may find in a game like the Motorstorm series or any driving game for that matter.

The first thing i would like to point out is that there seems to be a dramatic difference in how a developer would build an object for a video game and the way that a student would be shown how to build academically.

• In the industry optimization is very important and the artist must optimize their models as much as possible. So artists have no problem using triangles in their models to get the best results. I still believe that a developer would attempt to use quads where possible but the priority is to to keep tri counts down to a bare minimum.
• In college or university speaking from a personal account i was always shown to work in quads as much as possible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being told to work in quads and in fact it is very good practice to do so. If there is anyone reading this i would suggest to keep to quads as much as possible.

I have decided to start off with something quite easy to build, well when i say easy as you will see things are not as easy as it seems.

I started off by picking some reference material from the internet and i have chosen to try and build a traffic cone. Reference material is vital to any build that you will make so get as much material as possible. Here some of the reference material:

This is very much a learning process for myself but thought that i would post everything that i have been shown by people in the industry. Hopefully John Dwyer and Nick Sadler at SCEE will put some input into this process, but please feel free to add comments.

More Maya work

Creating my Portfolio

Hi John here is what i have produced for my portfolio so far i have still got plenty to do so let us know what you think?

My Graduation 14/07/2010

I just thought that i would let everyone know that i have now fully graduated from Huddersfield University. It took place last Wednesday on the 14th of July and it was a great day and by far the proudest day of my life :)

Here's some pics from the day:



I have also got some very exciting news but unfortunately i cannot talk about it at this time but i will make a announcement very soon so make sure you check back in the coming week or so.