Our game is coming together nicely! Despite repeated sickness and general tragedy, our programmers have powered through every road block, and now its up to the artists. Above the model for player 2, the friendly artificial intelligence, is pictured. The thinking for the model is (like everything else in the game) basic shapes. We will be relying on ambient occlusion maps to do most of the heavy lifting, using fairly basic color schemes for visual interest. We will be taking care of all that color dynamically in Unreal 4′s material system. This is convenient because it means we don’t need to generate all but the most basic texture maps for any given model. Aside from the ambient occlusion, we just need to make a color id map which associates pieces of the model with a specific color so that when the model is in the engine, we can tell it to render different pieces with different colors and effects! Its a simple but powerful approach, and one that makes a game of this scale easy for a small group of students to make as opposed to many of our previous projects. We can’t wait to show off what we’ve made in next weeks class playtest!

Isaac – 3d Artist – Team Evil Panda