working on the ship...

Working on the boat has been the hardest thing I've had to do. I didn't know whether or not to start to scale, or work small and then blow it up to proportion. When I finally got the shape and size of the ship that I wanted, I went to work on the balconies and stairways.

finished the cannon!

When I saw what my finished cannon looked like, I was so happy! I couldn't wait to get everything into UDK to see what it looked like, but I knew I needed a scene to work with so I could set the mood and the lighting to how I wanted. I was extremely proud of the cannon flap I made for the side of the ship.

The scene!

When I saw my things in one little scene, I got so excited at how good it was looking! It gave me motivation to start a few other objects that weren't even on my list. At this point, I had decided that I was going to build the Pirate King's chamber, aboard an abandoned treasure ship that had crashed somewhere. The Pirate King would use this ship has his headquarters, so I started thinking about what types of objects the Pirate King would have in his chambers..

More texturing!

I was starting to have some real fun with texturing by the time February 26th came around. I was especially having a good time trying to get the spec maps looking good. The gold was a challenge, and I knew I'd have to work more on the barrel - no wood is that shiny! I had made enough assets that I thought to myself I could start a little scene to see how everything looked together...

Things get INTERESTING

I was at the point where I had finished over 10 highpoly projections and I was really looking forward to playing around with texturing. I started texturing my low poly models and some of them turned out better than I expected, others I knew I would have to start learning some photoshop skills to make look better...

I cranked out more highpoly projections and created their low polys. By the time I started making the dresser, I started getting worried about scale, but I thought to myself, if it looks right in the editor, then maybe I can just scale it down once I get it all finished and have it in a scene...

What is projecting?

I finally thought I was ready to do my first projection piece. I decided to start with the simplest object I had created: the barrel. This whole process was so time consuming I wondered how anyone actually got anything done. But it was extremely interesting and the more I did it, the faster I got. The better I got.