For the past 4 1/2 months I have been an artist.
Back in December of last year, a decision was made by the program I work for (the Partnership for Plant Genomics Education, or PPGE for short) to develop a 3D educational game. We had already produced one very successful title, “Virtual DNA Fingerprinting Lab”, which was more of a 2D walkthrough similar to Myst. A “sequel” to that game, entitled “Virtual Plant Biotechnology and Genomics Laboratory” was (as of that time) being tested and finished.
Those titles had been developed using older technologies, namely Macromedia (now Adobe) Authorware and Caligari TrueSpace (Adobe Photoshop was used to create the final 2D scenes). Because we wanted to move away from what was an ostensibly “obsolete” gaming format to a format that current gamers were familiar with (think World of Warcraft, Halo, etc.), that entailed learning a whole new set of software…which, given a pressing deadline, isn’t as easy as it sounds!
And so, I have spent months on a “crash course” of Autodesk Maya. This is the industry standard for 3D modeling for use in movies (Shrek, Spiderman…heck, almost every movie with CGI has Maya involved at some level!) and games. It is a HUGE program, with an super-steep learning curve. I got to learn by trial and error (happily not so much “error”), but the results have been pretty amazing, if I do say so myself (see the picture above).
At any rate, I am writing this as I wait upon another texture-bake to complete. In 3D gaming, you have two options in making things look pretty: have the computer render objects in real time as the game is playing (processor intensive), or “pre-render” the objects, “baking” their textures (with shadows and reflections) in advance, so the game only renders what is essentially a “picture”. As this is an educational title, and our target demographic (schools) don’t necessarily have the best computers, we have opted for the latter option.
This means lots of baking. Every object needs it’s own light map (the picture that gets wrapped around an object which contains the shadows, reflections, texture, etc.). It is the most boring part of the process; however, once that light map is wrapped around the object, it just…”pops”.
I’ll post an album of more renders and screenshots, which I’ll try to update as the game develops. And, I’ll also write about the game engine we’re using to create the lab and the experiments it contains.