I'm a game industry veteran turned indie game dev. Since going indie over two years ago, I have done all the code, design and art for my games by myself. I've shipped 3 distinct games on two platforms (XBox Indies and Windows Phone). I'm not a great artist and I'm hoping to start finding people who might be interested in collaborating in some way so that I can raise the bar on future projects. I can't promise much right now but if you are into this sort of thing, who knows what might happen. Since you are reading this, chances are good you are a fan of Softimage and maybe you'd like to get into indie games a bit.
My workflow is centered on Softimage and, to a lesser extent, 3DCoat. I've been making plugins for Softimage for a while now (you may have seen Essential Geo) and I have a very capable exporter plugin for Softimage that lets me avoid most (all?) of the hassles I used to worry about with FBX and Collada. It's designed to work with my custom game engine which I have spent a good chunk of the past two years building. Here's a list of some of the stuff it does:
- A scene is exported as a whole. There are custom properties to limit which branches of the hierarchy are included in the export, allowing the many support objects typically used to create an object to be automatically ignored by the exporter.
- All animations are exported as a dictionary available to the game engine. The game engine supports animation tree type logic as seen in Unreal and most any other capable animation system, although I don't have a cool UI to set up the blending. I currently use it to have upper/lower body blends running at the same time as weapon aim & fire animations on a character, for instance. It can be used for skinned objects, rigid bodies, and user interface elements as needed.
- Instanced rigid body models export as instanced models to the engine. I can make a hierarchy, with Instanced Models scattered in the tree, and the game engine renders them using instancing. This allows for some creative options on complex models like big spaceships (unfortunately I have only tested this with simple cases, not cool spaceships).
- Real time OpenGL shaders can have parameters configured, and the exported assets automatically use these parameters with a parallel HLSL shader used by the game engine.
- Physics data can be configured as a set of objects which are constrained to each other in a non-hierarchical manner. The content pipeline evaluates the polygon meshes and converts to sphere,box,capsule, or convex hull depending on custom property settings. The runtime can use this data to simulate rigid bodies that are compound bodies as well as articulated compounds. The visuals are constrained to the rigid body parts... a full explanation would be pretty involved but suffice to say it supports some physics in the pipeline, and it's not as bad as most pipelines I've seen.
- Supports skinned meshes with arbitrary number of deformers. No splitting models due to bone limits, it's handled automatically.
- The renderer is an Light-Pre-Pass (LPP) renderer with shadows, normal maps, and supports a huge number of lights.
For now, I'm hoping to find some people who are interested in seeing their Softimage models/animations get into some indie games. Right now, I can't offer much of anything in return beyond a place in the credits except for hopefully a little fun in the collaboration. If my games ever make enough money to matter it could mean some real work for anyone I have developed a working relationship and who I have some sense of what they can do. What kind of assets am I looking for? Well, there's a bunch of stuff that would help. Weapons, props, characters, animations, backgrounds... I could use more of any and all of them. If this sounds fun, let me know and I'll try to suggest things that fit your skills and my needs and we'll see where it goes.
I'm happy to work with beginners so long as you have a little passion for it, so don't be shy. On the other hand if you are an experienced Softimage person maybe this could be something you could direct your craft towards instead of just winding up with another cool model sitting on your hard drive unseen by the world.
Anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. Please feel free to PM me or contact me through my website. Even if it's been a while since I first wrote this post, please don't hold back, I hope to be doing this for a long time.
Thanks
Eric Cosky
http://www.cosky.com
http://www.boundingboxgames.com
