A Quick Spin

After I give her the hand and foot treatment, I'll give her [a] head.

"Nasa-Woman" Begins to Take Shape

Applying what was learned with Starman to a female model.

The Funny Plate Got Screwed

A little over two weeks ago I fractured my right proximal humerus. I had surgery to install a plate to put everything back together and hold it all in place. Today I visited the doctor for a post surgery review. The prognosis is good (start physical therapy in two weeks and get a return-to-work review in four) and I feel happy to finally be "on the mend". The below 3D "sketch" is my portrayal of what the x-ray that was taken today shows. Yes, that's right: one rather largish plate and nine screws... a rather significant piece of hardware, if you ask me.

Welcoming Starman

The "Starman" model is finished. He celebrates with the following series of poses.



Which is LVX -- the Light of the Universe.

One Step Away

The model is now one step away from being finished. All that is left is to add basic animations (walking, running, jumping, etc.) and then drop it into the test world and call this learning experience done. And then its onto more "real" work -- in terms of putting all the pieces together into a game.

Out of the Lab

After a few experimental stabs at the complexities of uv mapping, and going back to fix a few bad/amature modeling mistakes, I have finally stepped out of the lab and have begun to put this guy's skin on.

In the Lab with UV Texture Mapping

Getting the base checkerboard material right....

The Bones Are In

The Sign of Shu (the Egyptian God who holds up the sky)

Updated Development Environment and Technology

The present development environment and technology for 3D worlds and RPG endeavors consists of:

* Workstation: a fairly high powered Gateway PC with dual core AMD CPU and NVIDIA GPU
* OS: Windows Vista Home Premium
* IDE: Eclipse
* Language: Java
* Game API: LWJGL and jME
* 3D Modeling/Animation: MilkShape3D
* UV Texture Mapping: Unwrap3D
* Painting: The GIMP

A Few Shots of a Model in Progress

Here are several progress shots of a model that I am presently working on:

A First Post & Greetings

Greetings! I'd like to welcome all of you to my new journal/blog. Herein you'll find a bit more of a serious view of the persona known as Ashton V.: the dreams, the endeavors, and those peculiar bumps in the night that we've all come to know and love. So, without further ramblings, here is a video that I shot for a friend about a month ago that demonstrates my progress up to that point in time with the jME 3D graphics/game engine and the Blender 3D modeling program. Presently, other subatantial progress has been achieved and my development technology has changed somewhat (which I'll recount later), but the following video stands as a good representation of the initial strides and bounds taken toward developing full-blown PC/Console targeted RPGs.