Bobby Spivey's Blog

Not the voice of an Angel

bspivey — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:36:50 +0000

Voice overs are incredibly hard to do for people who don’t have a great love for public speaking or theatrics, so my friends were a bit apprehensive about chipping in for this voice over work. However, with the promise of tweaking the voice a bit, I do have a voice over for a scene that I’ve designed. First, however, I present a few sound effects.

All sound effects are MP3 Format. Some of them may be loud, even on low volume. All sound effects were made in “Audacity.”

Gun Reload

This sound effect was done by reloading a plastic airsoft gun.

Gun Shots

This sound effect was done by using a smaller version of a musical instrument called a “whip.” The sound effect is supposed to be gunshots impacting from a distance.

Gunshot Ping

This sound effect was done by shooting a Red Ryder BB Gun into the grate covering the CPU fan of a desktop computer. Desktop computer was not included in the making of this sound effect.

Low static

By creatively tuning my radio to a non-existent station and dropping the gain in Audacity, I was able to create this low static background noise.

Static Burst

Exactly what it says on the tin. I used the low static background noise and just upped the gain. Watch your ears on this one.

Shovel Scrape

This sound effect was made using a shovel, and then scraping it against the side walk to get the sound of a shovel scraping against cement.

Big Explosion

This sound effect compounds a handful of other recorded sounds, here is a list:

The sound of a glass bottle shattering.

The sound of shattered glass shaking.

The sound of metal tools shaking.

The sound of a metal speaker frame smashing.

The sound of a pizza box full of crusts shaking.

Finally, here is the voice over scene with all the sound effects included. Also, the voice is somewhat hard to hear even with full gain in Audacity, so be careful when turning up the volume to hear, because there are some louder sound effects. Try starting low and working up.

Voice Over Scene

Here’s my BMG

bspivey — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:08:22 +0000

Audio is something that is incredibly hard in comparison to other art forms. As a result, these bits of audio aren’t exactly Beethoven’s 9th Sympathy. These few bits of audio were made using an audio looping program known as “ACID”. Along with this program, there are some bits of audio picked up from “Find Sounds.”

All links are work safe, and all sound bits are MP3 Format. Start with low volume: Some of the sounds may be over powering.

Background Ambient Sounds (Background Sound)

Background Ambient Sounds (2) (Background Sound)

On the Move (Background Song for moving units)

Building (Background Song for building bases)

Detailed Playing Field

bspivey — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:55:27 +0000

This playing field is a more detailed playing field than the one previous posted. In this playing field there are a few more features.

There are a handful of features. It’s easy to pick out the purple/red rocks and the structure in the middle. To the right you can see a lake of tar. Now here is the same background with the lighting added to it.

There was supposed to be a day/night cycle using both red (day) and purple (night) colored omnilights, but in order to show the difference I made the cycles rather quick, so it would appear the day and night are passing in a few short moments. First, here is a closer look at some of the features.

(Closer look at the lake).

(Here is the basic structure near the center. What’s on top….)

(Of course. The wobbly decrepict structure always has explosives near the structural weak points…)

It would be rather boring if this was all there was to showcase the playing field, so here is a short video tour of the playing field with a day and night cycle in the background.

And here is the character from before interacting with the box of explosives. That doesn’t look very safe…

Character model

bspivey — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:16:20 +0000

This character model is a basic character model that uses a few modifiers to make things easy. Every piece of the character started out as a box, and using all tools in the tool box for editable polys, I was able to make a pair of boots, legs, a torso, arms, and a head. However it’d be incredibly troublesome in order to make this character boot by boot, so I used symmetry modifers in order to reflect a left foot across a mirror. Then I applied the same idea to all body parts that work in pairs.

Yes, I know. He could use for a face lift and those knees sure look… interesting, but more importantly, he doesn’t look very symmetrical. This is the character after having bones applied to him in order to animate him. However something important to point out is the fact that the textures aren’t stretching across all the body parts. UVUnwrap is a modifier that allows me to turn this character into a, even by a little bit, more realistic character.

(This is the render map for the hand).

Now I mentioned animation. This character has a very simple animation, spread across 100 frames, and using roughly twenty key frames per bone (not including the spine and hip bones). The end result was this “throwing animation.”

Finally, here are the few textures used to give this character some clothes.

(Boots)

(Legs)

(Torso)

(Arms)

(Gloves)

(Flesh-tone for the head)

Basic Playing Field

bspivey — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:30:50 +0000

The basic playing field is something that I designed using 3D Studio Max (3DSM). All it took was a single plane converted to an editable poly, and soft selecting vertices. From there, it was a simple matter of scaling and moving vertices in order to add specific character to the land, like craters. Finally, in order to make the land seem less uniform, I added a Noise modifier.

As you can see, there are a few more features near the center of the playing field. Let’s get a closer look.

This is what was supposed to be a destroyed building with some debris inside. However, there is a surprising amount of debris lacking on the inside, as well as a problem with the texture stretching vertically. This is why the title of this post is Basic Playing Field, because it uses basic techniques to make a playing field. However that tire looks a lot better close up…

If you look closely, you can see the grooves of the tread. This was a painstaking process of using extrude and inset a great many times. It all started with a cylinder.

These are the textures used in this playing field. If you look at the Background texture (Third one down) you’ll notice that it has three textures in one .png. This was to give the playing field a bit of variety without having to include multiple textures. Instead, it has multiple textures in one material slot.

(Tire Texture)

(Destroyed Building Texture)

(Background Texture)

Introductions

bspivey — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:51:20 +0000

Hello, my name is Bobby Spivey. This blog has the main purpose of being an online portfolio of my progress at the University I am currently attending, DeVry. My hope for a career is to be a video game programmer, working for any one of a number of companies that produce quality, or innovative, video games. Thats it for now.