Semester Project Mars

We are currently working on our animated short film called ‘Mars’, which tells the story of mankinds first landing on the planet Mars.

Every student had to develop a movie or game concept and present it during a pitch. The audience (lecturers and other students) could vote for their favourite projects – my idea was chosen to be one of the three (out of 13) concepts that should be realised in a team of five. You can watch the animatic i created for the pitch below. Be shure to check out our little blog, where we post new media from our development process.

Destroyed Procedural City Featured in new CityEngine

My bachelor thesis project that revolved around creating procedurally destroyed cities is featured in a new CityEngine demo called “Downtown Damage”. A lot of my assets and rules were reused and I really like the new layout and especially  the bridge the team at Procedural created for this demo. Thanks again guys for featuring the project as a demo and  letting me use your software for my thesis in the first place Check out the Procedural Inc. website and take a look at the new demo, klick here – you can additionally visit the CityEngine showcase of the original project here. Don’t forget to look at the game the procedural city was used in, just browse to the ‘Dark Realm’ page and take a look at some ingame screenshots.

Concepts

Here are two concepts I did for the ‘Design for Film and Games’ class. The first task was to create a concept for some kind of new pandoras box – I decided to create a asian/chinese version, of course with a dragon handle to open the box. The concept art was quickly sketched with zBrush, I painted over it in Photoshop afterwards.

The second task in this class was to develop two characters. I like fantasy settings a lot, so I created this dragonling concept – half dragon, half human – and sketched it using zBrush (and Maya for the armor). I wanted him to be really tough and battle-scarred and tried to get the proportions right. The second character is not quite finished (only a drawing), maybe I’ll be able to model and post him some time in the future.

I plan to further detail the quick sculpt, so I can eventually texture and pose the drakeling. Additional armor as well as weapons are on my ToDo-list, too. Sadly, I’ve got too much to do right now, but maybe there’ll be some spare time after this semester.

Audio

Our first task was to create a small animation for a given audio example. You can watch my animation below, the sound was created by Roland Keil. The animation was created with Maya and AfterEffects.

My first digital sculpt using zBrush was an university assignment for my “Digital Arts” Master’s course at the FH Hagenberg, Upper Austria. The task was to create a ‘hybrid’ character concept – I came up with this insect-human hybrid creature, which was inspired by Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis‘ (“Die Verwandlung”).

Check out these images and the turntable video below. Click the images for a higher resolution view, so you can check out the details.

The Tower is a “Room-escape-game” realized with Flash (AS3), Maya and Photoshop. The main goal in the game is very simple: escape the room you’re in. That may sound easy, but the door is locked and it’s up to you to solve the riddles and puzzles hidden in the room to get the final key. I created and animated the room and the items with Autodesk Maya and rendered 360° movies of the room and images of the details. We used these videos and images to create an interactive environment in Flash. Watch the video and take a look at some ingame screenshots!

Dark Realm is a 3D Action RPG settled in a post apocalyptic, zombie filled, dark world. It was developed in a team of five during the fifth semester of my studies of Mediatechnology and -design in Hagenberg. I modeled, textured and designed the level of the game, an abandoned town. The game is coded in C++ and uses the Ogre 3D engine for rendering, we use normal/specular mapping and shading, ambient occlusion,deferred shading and a fog shader to bring our level to life.

We wanted a really dark and abandoned look for the first level of the game – also, we did not want our city to look like the typical US suburbs, where most zombie films/games take place. So I decided to go for european styled buildings and sqares, which should be partly destroyed.

Procedural level creation

I created the city level of the game with the software “CityEngine”, a procedural modeling tool also used by game developers like Blizzard or SqareEnix. The reason for modeling a large part of the city procedurally was my bachelor thesis, which evolved around the procedural creation of destroyed buildings and cities. You can additionally view a showcase of my work here on the Procedural Inc. web site (CityEngine Developers).

The city level’s area is about 10.000 m² (approximately 300.000 Triangles), it features over 50 buildings, a church, parks, lots of rubble, destroyed cars, zombies trying to eat your brain and more. It was important for me to have a huge level, so that we would have enough space to place objectives / quests or additional enemies and items. In addition to the size, I tried to create the environment in a way that helps the player in finding the interesting places quickly.

These buildings were procedurally generated.

Business Master Cities is an educational flash game designed for schools. I designed the game, programmed it with Action Script 3 in FDT and created the graphics. The whole project was done in a litte more than three months in the last semester of my bachelor studies during my mandatory internship.

The game is focused on two player multiplayer – of course it’s possible to play against an computer controlled opponent. Both players have to found and upgrade commercial firms, they can build and invest in them on the game board. Every position is surrounded with four building or bank fields, where the players can build their companies or get money from the bank. But before a company can be bought and built, the players have to answer questions about various business related topics.

The more businesses a player has, the higher is the chance that the opponent visits one of his companies. If that happens, the opponent has to pay a specific amount of money according to the investment level of the company. If one of the players loses all of his money to his opponent or the bank, he can still sell his existing companies for cash. The first player who loses both his invested capital (companies) as well as his cash has lost the game.

There is also a multiplayer lobby with chat and an invitation function, so pupils from different schools could compete against each other. The best players are listet in the highscore tables on the official website. There was also a Business Master Cities  competition started by the Kronen Zeitung (Austrias largest daily newspaper).

You can play the game here.

Business Master Smartphone Game

I also designed the iPhone quiz version of Business Master sponsored by TMobile.

Old stuff that I made.