parker’s desk

So this week should def­i­nitely be the week I get to fin­ish Alpha up.  Not delay­ing any­more with site work, fin­ishign the resume or any­thing until I get him finished.

Alpha has been a long time com­ing, and the new/final ver­sion is def­i­nitely some­thing I’m very excited about.  It’s been a really, really long time since I’ve felt like I’m really push­ing the extent of what I’m capa­ble of with a project and Alpha’s an excel­lent start to a chal­lenge like that.

The pre­vi­ous ver­sion of Alpha (which was the sec­ond ver­sion, though really more like a “gold” ver­sion after a pre­vi­ous beta) had a lot of things wrong with it.  The mesh wasn’t as cleaned up as it could have been, for one.  Sec­ond, the unwraps – while they worked well for ren­ders – weren’t pretty if you actu­ally got to look at them.  Third, there was a 1024x1024 or higher tex­ture for every sin­gle piece of armor Alpha had…it made for some pretty tex­tures (sort of…learned a lot in the last two  and a half years about tex­tur­ing) and ILM surely does that, but he could barely ren­der and flat-out wouldn’t ren­der with any­thing else in the scene.  I don’t have a super com­puter, and I didn’t know how tex­ture maps and mem­ory worked together back then, need­less to say.

The biggest issue with the pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion, how­ever, was the style.  The char­ac­ter of Alpha is sup­posed to be truly unique…he was the first of the first for what would be mil­lions of Clones.  I wanted him to be sport­ing an alter­na­tive route for how the armor could have evolved between “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.”  A bet­ter, far more pow­er­ful set of armor and gear that wasn’t cho­sen purely for cost reasons…the Empire has a long his­tory of choos­ing the cheap-and-quick route over qual­ity.  TIE Fight­ers are an excel­lent exam­ple of that…they can swarm the enemy and over­power them in fire­power, but they have no shields nor hyper­drives com­pared to the vetter-equipped Rebel fighters.

So the new ver­sion has stepped that up a notch, tak­ing some influ­ences from the Stormtrooper-era armor, a lot from the Repub­lic Com­mando armor, and a cou­ple of per­sonal touches.  Com­bine that with his unique armor col­or­ing and col­ors and he should stand out pretty clearly in any crowd of Clone Troopers.

Any­how, I should prob­a­bly get back to it.  I promise to have some kind of images posted this week!

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