Art = fun

Well, I've been having a lot of fun with the art this last week, I drew up a list of props and doodads I think I need, and have been tackling them in order of least complexity upwards. And as I practice, I'm starting to pick up speed nicely.

I have to be honest, although I have always wanted to get into the art side, it was somewhat...daunting. I was putting it off. Basically, I'm a coder. The art stuff is outside my sphere of experience, I'm a rank beginner, and although I can draw, in the back of my mind was the concern that maybe I couldn't really hack it. I was mentally braced for a lot of frustration and set backs.

But its been surprisingly easy to get into and get going. Once you figure out what helper nodes are needed by the exporter, getting your stuff into torque is a snap. Even the texturing isn't that hard, thanks to the awesome TextureMonk texture library I bought (after reading Phil Carlisles post about it). Now, I'm talking about simple props here, not characters or animated objects. Those will certainly be a lot harder. But you can do some cool stuff with just simple primatives.

Well, enough chitter chatter, time for some pictures!


Started simple, with some paintings :



Then played with transparency in the form of carpets:



Any cool dungeon need torches on the walls for proper atmosphere (will obviously add fire particle effects in the game ;) ) :



Now onto something a bit more substantial, some furniture to make house interiors more interesting :







And this is what I'm currently working on, I'm done with the modelling but need to work on the texture, at the moment I've just slapped a wood texture on it :




I could probably go back and add some interesting bits to the textures, maybe some wood carvings for the desk or something. But, all in all, I think they look pretty decent.