Visual Board Game MKIV

An overveiw of the board so far:


It's still missing something and it feels like there are too many blank spaces. I'm going to have to rack my brain for new pieces to fill the environment.

3D Visual Board Game MKIII

I've been working on some more background pieces for my Visual Board Game. I thought I'd make a rib cage looking piece.

First of all I made a flat square In the top view. I choose to make it a box and not a planar because I wanted some height to the base. Then i extrude the pillars and with edge select lengthened one side to make a slope.

I had to then move some vertex's up so the arching part wouldn't be as thick:


After this I simply selected the now smaller polygons, extruded them and then raised them to make it diagonal:

3D Animated Board Game

I've jotted down quite a few ideas for my Animated Board Game. I don't want to give much away just incase I can't figure out how to animate it or someone ninja's my ideas.

Using the Helix spline I made 3 parallel Helix shapes. The outer 2 were lofted with a circle to make the visible track. The centre one was then joint via Animation Path Constraints with a sphere. This centre track was then raised vertically to give the illusion of the ball sitting on the visible tracks.

Helix Track Ball Test from Jay Jackson-Hicks on Vimeo.

Rendered at 24FPS and 100 frames long with high quaility mental ray and codec it took ~8miniutes to complete. I'm quite sure that wasn't as fast as my computer could do it as iTunes was running fine as it was going. When I move on to bigger stuff i'm going to allow rendering 100% CPU power.

I’m aware that this video is really short and the ball moves incredibly fast, but I’m planning to have a very fast paced animation.

3D Visual Board Game MK II

I've completed the actual board area and now I'm working on the environment. At the moment I still have the standard black background which is going to be replaced later on with a light blue or green.



The floating shapes in the background are not part of the board. They're there to bring more depth and enthesize the disjointed nature of the area even though it's made of such primary shapes.

3D Visual Board Game

After watching a trailer for new downloadable content (DLC) for one of my favorite games I decided on the style of which I was going to set my Visual Board Game to look like.


The game is called Mirror's Edge



I've always been a fan of that style and found it most intresting in Russian war propaganda posters:



I'm going to create a game board which has very bold flat colours and shapes but still has enough individual style to make it original and fresh. This is what I have so far to give you an idea.

Term One - Board Games Overview

This term I've been set the task of making 3 different types of board game. One in real life with functioning rules, and two in 3D which can be as abstract and physics defying as I want. The two in 3D will be assessed individually on aesthetics and animation.

Work is coming along quite well on all of these projects, I just hope I don't get too wrapped up in them that I forget to do my SPP essays. Or atleast clean my kitchen.

Super Mega Lack Of Posts

I'm really disapointed in myself for the lack of post's I've done so far this year. Well all that's about to change. I've recently signed up to Vimeo which is a video hosting website much like youtube apart from you can host much high quality videos.

I've been playing around in 3D Studio Max for a while and I'll be posting some high quality videos as soon as I finish rendering them.

So stay tuned for some good stuffs.