Funky Friday Ep. IV

Greetings funk masons far and wide...

First of all, let me apologize for my lack of updates -- I've been really busy at my office job and as I result, I haven't gotten much work done on The Groov Cosmos. As I've posted about before, The Groov Cosmos is a pretty ambitious project and I'm starting to realize that I just don't have enough time to be able to work on it consistently enough to make good progress, so I've been thinking that I might start working on a smaller project before getting back to work on the big game.

I do plan on getting back into The Groov Cosmos at some point, hopefully with a small team to help me out. And thankfully, I will soon have the opportunity to work with a group of pretty incredible people at the USC School of Cinematic Arts' Interactive Media Division! As a huge fan of games like Journey (created by IMD graduates from ThatGameCompany) and the Uncharted series (directed by incoming IMD teacher Richard Lemarchand), I'm incredibly excited to learn a lot from some of the most creative people in the games industry.

I haven't completely stopped working on The Groov Cosmos though. I want to share a quick look at a 3D modeling tool I've been creating to make some of the procedurally generated graphics in the game.

The video shows the interface for editing a "surface of revolution" model, which basically sweeps an Adobe Illustrator-like curve around the Y axis and connects the dots, forming a 3D model. My tool also supports other model types but this is the simplest type, and the easiest to demo. Aside from changing the resolution of the model on-the-fly, which you can see demonstrated in the video, it's also possible to take a low-resolution version of the model and add an automatically calculated high-resolution normal map to it.

You can see just how quick and easy it is to create these models, and hopefully it will help lend The Groov Cosmos a really unique look. Plus, I can easily re-save all of the models at whatever resolution I want, which might come in handy considering I'm not sure which generation of game consoles might be out when I'm finally ready to release this game!