BRAINSTORM: Ideas for personal projects
polycounter lvl 20
I thought I'd get a thread going on various personal projects I'm starting to build reference for in hopes of a.) igniting discussions on them to help the brainstorming period and b.) see what others are also working on in their personal time.
I should note that I am not sure which one I will do first. They all have their own ways of interesting me so its undetermined where I'll go next.
The 'Road Home'
The 'Tsar Bomba'
Ben Throttle's bike
'The Party Wagon' - aka the Ninja Turtles van.
TTC Streetcar retrofitted for apocalypse survival.
So, thats what I'm building references for and creating ideas around in my head. Right now I'm leaning towards 'the Road home' as it'll be a more fulfilled environment, not a vehicle, and has avenues I can take later for more engaging, funny, or otherwise interesting ideas once the original take is done.
What are you building up?
I should note that I am not sure which one I will do first. They all have their own ways of interesting me so its undetermined where I'll go next.
The 'Road Home'
- Created as a short video. 4 minutes would be perfect.
- The idea is based on the Woodbine Avenue drive from Toronto to Keswick Ontario, where I grew up.
- The idea is just a dirt road driving through farm land. The goal is to produce a video of melancholy feelings. From here, though, I could go on to doing variation clips. Or "alternate endings" as it were. UFO crash landed, barn silo acting as a space ship dock, etc.
- I drove up there at the beginning of May and a couple weeks ago I put my references up on Youtube for myself to easily reference later. It can be seen [ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L84tv5_QJsI"]here[/ame]. - I'm waiting for Crymod to be released to start on this one.
The 'Tsar Bomba'
- Much like my Fat Man model, this would just be a fun highpoly exercise that I could knock out in a few days.
- When I had finished the Fat Man I thought doing a series of 'famous' bombs through Earth's history would make for an interesting gallery.
Ben Throttle's bike
- Ben Throttle was the main character of Lucas Arts' FulL Throttle.
- I want to do a highpoly model of Ben Throttle's bike based on real-world mechanics and bike parts.
- I know nothing about bikes, so this would require a lot research before hand - which I love.
- I'd love to pair up with a character artist for this and have a real-world Ben Throttle created, to be posted on the bike. This would also be 'high poly' only, but I wouldn't mind baking it out to in-game resolutions.
'The Party Wagon' - aka the Ninja Turtles van.
- I want to do a recreation of the TMNT's Van using a Chevy van as the base model. From there I'd add in all the additions that makes the Party Wagon the Party Wagon.
TTC Streetcar retrofitted for apocalypse survival.
- Food, ammo, electricity and healthy bodies are limited in this world. Your colony has retrofitted a TTC streetcar to patrol the perimeter of colonies home base.
- Gasoline is not scarce at all - in fact its not even considered to be tradable - so the street car has been switched from electrically powered to gasoline powered.
- This street car has metal plating everywhere, 4 Ford F-150 engines powering it, 2 40mm mounted guns on the back end, etc.
So, thats what I'm building references for and creating ideas around in my head. Right now I'm leaning towards 'the Road home' as it'll be a more fulfilled environment, not a vehicle, and has avenues I can take later for more engaging, funny, or otherwise interesting ideas once the original take is done.
What are you building up?
Replies
My Personal Projects
1. FBX - UDK tool for Maya. Using this to learn MEL.
Basically a batch export tool which can center to grid and export them out. Currently messing around with string manipulation so artists can name as they are exporting though running into some loop problems. Once I get everything done, gonna use this project to learn python and pymel.
2. Photoshop script that pior wanted that basically saves with a time stamp. Figured out the saving bit and trying to learn/mess around with python and photoshop.
3. Batch ASE export for UDK. Again for maya though this has been on the backburner for quite a while. Got a couple of reference scripts to look at.
Hopefully somewhere in this learn some rigging, unrealscript and keep working on my HLSL shader.
[ame]
I personally wouldn't do another bomb, since it would hardly enrich your experience as an artist. Do a motorcycle while waiting for cryengine.) I've done one - it's a lot of fun modeling parts. I love some preproduction and research myself so, yeah, I would go for the bike.
haiddasalami, nice ideas there man.
I'm actually saving up reference for
1. A desert scene with some sort of a huge temple or colossal statue. Greatly inspired by the amazing Lawrence of Arabia(1962) movie. Sand could be a lot of fun to create a live dynamic environment.
2. Brightly lit street under heavy rain with all the cool rain effects, mist, drops "ricocheting" off the ground and all of this pierced with colorful lights.
But I'm not very active about right 'cause I'm waiting to see how my job search will turn out. Dying to find myself a proper studio to try to settle down at.
I've always wanted to do a claymation-styled environment. Could have some fun with shaders and FX...
Here are my projects... (way too many to do all at the same time
1) sciTe like text editor for OS X which lets me launch scrips, has a tabbed view, doesn't have too much bloat, is stable, is not an IDE, makes most use of my macbook air's widescreen display. Qt/C++
2) simple picture viewer for OS X, xnview like interface, no bloat, high quality scaling, no crashing. Writing this in Qt/C++.
3) The officer - a nazi villain which I started after seeing inglorious basterds. Face is done, most of the uniform too. Zbrush/3dsmax. I posted some wips long long long ago I think...
4) my tile based unity engine + map editor. So far it's just a tile engine (no dialogue, combat, etc) but I'd like to put together a small proof of concept game, similar to Ultima V, but in 3D and with a few tweaks.
5) spheremapper/cube mapper: convert sphere maps to cube maps and vice versa. Rotate cube maps and save the output as new cubemap. Also in C++. Python is just too slow for all the vector math I'm doing in here.
All the programming projects are basically learning projects. Although I got pretty annoyed that I cannot find a stupid and simple text editor/picture viewer for my mac.
+1 for the Full Throttle bike!
This is what's in my brain vault (not in order of importance)
1) FBX exporter for ZBrush. Obj sucks! If I can properly hack my way around it that is!
2) A C++ rewrite of my ZTool autosaver that works together nicely with ZBrush's stupid plugin handling. And add support for ZProjects as well!
3) A true to the concept sci-fi character from Ville Ericsson, my portfolio needs one of those!
4) Finally wrap up MageMaze...
5) Building a robust modeling toolset in Softimage, it lacks quite a few proper tools!
6) Maybe pick up Python at some point, but I seriously hate indent sensitive languages! In that respect I'd be much more willing to try to learn Lua instead. Lua actually looks very charming (anyone got some first hand experience with it?), but Python is quite the standard these days so I guess there's no way I can avoid it anymore.
7) Get started on one of my game ideas that will set me back a couple of years.
2) I'm also interested in doing a series of scupltures for practice based on the art of Jason Chan. He's my favorite concept artist. I think it would be good practice to be able to bring his (or any other) 2d work into 3d AND make it work.
Man... everyone has so much stuff in the works. I've gotta get on it.
Not that long ago, I was speaking (online) to the guy that made the original 3D model of it that's used in the game cinematics :P
As for myself, I'm currently working on my Final Year Project. Third person adventure set on an earth-like planet. I'd like to include some sort of photography/research aspect to it, but I'm undecided as to whether to include native fauna yet. Gathering reference for impressive vistas and rock formations (aiming for a heavy bent on climbing and navigating environments - a bit of a free-roaming Shadow of the Colossus but in tighter environments).
--A set of 'modular' spaceships for a pirate faction.This set would include 4 or 5 types of fighter class spaceships in a variety of weakest to the strongest one.The key feature is to make most of pieces modular(obviously need some unique pieces).Think as weakes ship has one engine and strongest has 4 and all ships using same cockpit template but some minor additions etc. Something like in freelancer game as you might know but more advanced.
--Lonely island village.A village which settled on an narrow island.Other side of the island is a cliff so there is no settlement you can only see a wall of rock.And a road towards to the lighthouse placed on the highest point of the island.Actually I'm inspired by a drawing that I made when I'm 12.
--An alien flora.I feel like I'm super inpired to draw alien plants,I have a diverse interest to do this.Biggest limitation is need more zbrushing skill..
--A diner scene in retro-futuristic style.Mostly outside looks of the diner.
--This one It's imposibble to explain.Some environment inspired from childhood memories.(meh,maybe that one will never happen)
--Recreation of some gun in UT99 by covering its 'oldskool' style.Indeed...!
As everyone me too have tons of game idea that I want to create.Heh but thats a big task
I've always thought that picking something from Shorpy or opacity.us and recreate it would be a good personal project.
Making that bike sounds awesome. I really doubt that it's a real bike though. It looks way stylized. If memory serves, that company was called Corley Motors, which is a clear reference to Harley. So it's probably just a Harley bike that's been elaborated on for visual-awesomeness sake.
As for me, I got a medical anatomy book with autopsies. So I'm doing a full sculpt of the skeleton+muscles. Every single bone, every single muscle. Even those that you can't see. It's a damn fine study. Learning a lot.
If you wanna tackle something from Shorpy - another thing I'd "love to do" - tell me. I'm in.
Any bike nuts out there able to recommend the type of bike I should look at to base Ben's off of?
Me: "Hey @TimOfLegend - What bike was Ben Throttle's bike based off of, if any?"
Tim: "@adambromell Peter Chan designed it from scratch, but I know we were inspired a lot by that Clown's bike in Akira."
So, there you have it.