Interactive Storytelling

In interactive storytelling we learned about as much as anyone who has ever read a story, but we did get introduced to a program called Inform 7 that is free to download.  It is meant to be a program for writers to just be able to tell a story and make it interactive without having to know programming.  THIS IS INCORRECT!  You don't have to know a legit programming language, you just have to learn to write how Inform wants you to, which is basically learning a computer language.  I had an infuriatingly frustrating time writing my story, but it was worth it when I let my friends beta test it to find all the kinks.  It took me a while to find a place to post it, but now I have and here's the link:

Colonist Interactive Fiction Game

The play in browser button is in the top right hand corner of the browser labeled Play Online, above the Show Me How button.  The game is about a colony ship that has crash landed, leaving you as a sole survivor trying to escape.  There are nine different endings and one easter egg so feel free to try it a few times.  Good Luck!

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 1

The first assignment was simple enough, we just had to model and skin a futuristic box.  This assignment was to get us familiar with the materials side of 3ds max.  Once you make one box it's simple to duplicate it until you have a whole mess of 'em.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 2

Assignment 2 was to model and skin a wooden box.  I went a little overboard doing two dynamite boxes and one treasure chest complete with gold doubloons and rubies.  The dynamite box models are just plain boxes but the treasure chest took a bit of modelling.  The assignment was to test out diffuse and bump maps to add more depth to the objects.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 3

Assignment 3 was to model a globe, map, and bottle and then apply a material suited to all three.  I had a blast with this assignment and went with a Game of Thrones theme.  I pulled the map and label images off of Google and tweaked them a little for my purposes.  This assignment was a little modeling heavy but it was fun to put materials on something that I modeled myself instead of just being given something to skin.  The table and room were extra.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 4-5

Assignment 4 was to take a generic dough boy model a tweak it to make it unique and then get a clean unwrap of the model.  Assignment 5 was to then lay a material on it.  I went with a Braveheart/Viking marshmallow dough boy.  This was our first unwrap of an organic model and it is more difficult than I thought.  There is no easy unwrap program, just something that points you in the right direction.  The hardest part of adding the material to the unwrapped model is getting all the edges to line up properly so you can't tell where one side ends and the next begins.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 6-7

Or first room assignment.  The room was pre-modeled and given to us with a blank material list.  Assignment 6 was to add at least three light sources to the room.  I went with an omni light placed inside the bedside lamp, an orangish streetlamp spotlight outside the window, and another omni light for the ceiling light that is position behind the camera for the high shots of the room.  Assignment 7 was to lay materials over everything.  The professor said I apparently focused too much on the desk under the lamp and not enough on the rest of the room but I was happy with how it turned out.

3D Materials and Lighting, Assignment 8

What a beautiful picture of a room...Oh wait! It's not real!  While I wish I could claim the modelling rights to this room I cannot.  The room itself was given to us fully (and beautifully) modeled, but with a plain grey material covering everything and zero light source.  So our assignment was to splash some color in there and make it shine!  We were tested on our skill using diffuse, specular, and bump maps for all our materials which control the color, shine, and push out of said materials.  The light source I used was a daylight light which pretty much just adds a sun at a specific point in the modelling realm.  The daylight light source is neat because you can tell it a location in the world and what year, month, day, hour, minute, and second it is and it will show you at what angle the sun was at there and then.  I also used a mental ray photometric skyportal that refracts the light in the room at a different angle, as if there were glass panes in the windows, which allowed for more light to enter the room.  For this render I set all the render settings to very high and to mental ray (mental ray gives very realistic lighting) which cause the render process itself to take about 12 hours.  It gave a little me cleaner finish than had I set it to normal render settings, but the 11 hour and 50 minute difference in render time did not make it worth it.