Blogs - gilesruscoe

Hello and welcome to another blog post!
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Sorry if this blog is badly written and lacking, i just spent an hour writing it in detail only for it to get deleted! :(
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It's been a hell of a busy time here at Iron Horizon as we have taken on alot of new members and have started to really push the boat out in order to get things moving faster for the mod. We've also setup our forums, and our actual website is in the making, please check out our forums here: Ironhorizon.uruproject.com
The main focus for me over the last two weeks has been character modelling and development, its been a great chance to work closely with some of our talented story artists and our lead concept artist Alex, who has done a great job at capturing the feel for the characters laid out by our story artists.

In this blog post my aim was to go through the basic levels of design used for creating one of the characters i have been working on, please note this character is not yet finished i need to change alot of things on him :) so, without further adew..

Concept art drawn by Alex is the starting point, as he drew it without a head, i look the liberty of adding one for him:

From this i made a low poly base mesh, but sadly i dont have any pictures of that at the moment!

After the base mesh was complete i started with the base clothing sculpt in mudbox

After this i modelled other clothing pieces such as googles, belt and boots, here are the goggles untextured:

I then slapped some basic textures on the model and added the accessories onto it:

It didn't take long to realise that i hated the belt and the boots were fucking huge, i also noted it would take a while to texture the goggles.

Next i did a quick sketch over of things on photoshop with my tablet to get a rough layout of the other items needed to be modelled:

Next step, i added some new boots and a new belt!:

Next up was trench coat and boots, and a heck of alot of mesh collisions to fix:(

And finally finished those damned goggles;)

Here is the end result of what i've done so far, since recording this ive fix all the collisions on the coat, fixed the texture issues on various things and redid the normals on the boots, still alot to do on this model, also notice the character now has a beard, which i did not texture at first as the concept drawing had the head of Anold Shwarzenegger... :P

Character Turntable - Wip textures video - gilesruscoe - Mod DB

I hope this blog update was a good insight into how i develop character designs and build on them piece by piece.

Check back soon for more updates!:P

Giles Ruscoe
Lead Modeller - Iron Horizon

Thats right... another blog entry, but this time with a more interesting topic than previous posts!

The great power from above, aka Raider, has let me model something a little more special than the normal machinery i post here. The model is one of many creatures you will encounter throughout Iron Horizon, this one is a nice crispy dead person who's been out in the sun too long, and has been taken over by something dark and, well, just damn right evil!

Started off modelling a basic human with correct proportions and from there i added alot of wear and tear, crispyness and bones to give him the shriveled look, much sought after by super models! After alot of crits and ideas from team members i changed the Sun Strider around alot until i had something everyone was happy with. Once this was done i extracted the normal maps and wrapped them around the low polly model.

The high res sculpt was just over 1million polys while the low poly model is only 6k, dispite the 994,000 poly difference, the finished product looks very similar to its high poly counter part due to effective normal mapping!

I hope you have enjoyed this brief blog update, you will be able to see the model from all angles + animations in the next media update, possibly with some particle systems and ingame footage too!

Yes its time again for me to do a blog of boring content that probably wont make it into the media update for IH.

This week i've been working on content for the mine which has been very fun to do, lots of broken stuff, grimy stuff and mine type props! Some of the props i made have been lamps that have a mechanical lighting system.

Sneak peak at the animated relighting system :D

i've made two different types at the moment and i'll be making more versions soon! Expect to find these throughout the mine and other places as you play through the mod.

I've also been working closely with Raider07 (Team leader of IH) to make some more... interesting models for the mine, but you'll just have to wait till next weeks media update to see them!

The plot thickens.

Boilers boilers and more boilers! Probably the most important thing in the world of steampunk is a trustworth boiler (one that doesn't explode...often) and it was only a matter of time before i had to start modeling them.
They arnt the most interesting things to model.... there is only so much you can do with them as far as being creative is concerned, this is one of the few boilers i've made so far-

You can expect to see these things quietly boiling away in many mechanical area's of Iron Horizons maps, i have some big plans for one of the boilers which looks a little.. different, but you'l have to wait until the media update for that! Hopefully some of the models will be textured before our update aswell, so you can get a preview of the finished style.

In other news, as part of my college course, i need to make a short animation, so over the next few months i will be working on a cinematic trailer for Iron Horizon using highres versions of the models i have made/will make. So look out for that:D

That's all for this post, will be posting some more models here soon!
Giles

First blog post... woohoo!
This blog will mainly be documenting progress made on the mod "Iron Horizon" i will mainly be covering models and textures, but will include any big updates in other fields of development.

First thing i have to share on my blog is the new "sales cart" model, these things will be pushed around town by salesmen. Hopefully these will make the streets seem less desertlet along with a few other things! They still need textures ofc and Neon Gray will be making some bottles/food to go on these.

Model one:

Model two: (FISH!)

If you want to see more... You'll have to wait for the Iron Horizon media update, sorry!

Both models look pretty similar because... they are the same base model! yep, i truly am a lazy bugger.
Let me talk through what these models include (little hard to see without textures)

Boilers: The boilers are the things with pipes + chimney attached to it, the circular 'windows' are doors to stock up with coal/other fuels (one on the boiler is a pressure guage). These provide the cart with a wopping 1/2 horse power!!

Storage: Every salesman needs space to store his goods... right? well the cart of choice for our steampunk bussiness men comes with multiple draw string sacks and top of the range leather pouches! it also features several poles and ropes to hang things from such as jewlery (or fish!)

Nobody likes soggy bread or slippery fruit, so this bad boy has been fitted with a state of the art precipitation blocking device! (often refered to as a roof by us lesser folk..)

No cart is complete without a good set of rims to cruise about on and this one is no different. The cart comes in two forms, the double wheeled cart (50" rims) and the highly customized 'barrow' cart with a single 42" wheel!

Thats all from pimp my cart for this week!

Next blog post will be boilers boilers boilers... Big ones, small ones, square ones, round ones!

check back for more soon!