Underside,
Quote: "I am beggining to think my 2D art course was a waste of time and money."
As with any form of instructional learning, It really depends on what your willing to take away from it. If you were expecting to be handed a bag of magic tricks, then it might not have been worth the money. The only thing I really took away from mine was the importance of craft and some other round and about things that were never explicitly taught. Maybe that's why I dropped out
Anyhow, I end up making tons of revisions going back and forth between the game and photoshop to get things looking how I want. It also helps that I use a LCD with 1000:1 contrast ratio which is excellent for pixel pushing. One of the things I'm fighting with now is undesirable color-drop when saving maps to DXT1 compression. At 24 bit uncompressed (what is shown in the screens in this thread) things look just a bit nicer than they do compressed. But the download would be huge for a pack with full 24 and 32 bpp textures, so I've gotta do what I gotta do.
Quote: "I am interested on how you do those animations, is it just simple joints or do you attach the entire guns and hands to a skeleton rig or something? Also what program do you use?"
Using 3DS for animations and exporting with pandasoft exporter.
Both hands are fully rigged and vertex weighted to a custom skeleton that I built. There's a pictorial of the rig on my forum and a video of it on youtube and filefront. The guns themselves use simple hierarchy animations.
If you want similar capabilities without the cost of Max, I'd recommend XSI. The ModTool version is free and more suitable for people trying to get into the industry than other modelers such as wings, milkshape, etc.
Quote: "I haven't had enough experience out of Art School, never gone for commercial game development, not "qualified" enough lol"
I had no experience when I started either. I actually learned to model on the job and how to do proper textures for game art. I thought I was pretty good in photoshop before that but I learned otherwise soon enough. If anything you're probably just in the wrong city ... or country to get into the industry. If anyone is actually serious about getting in, they need to move to Southern California and be willing to be paid poverty-level wages as a junior artist or to work in a test department at any of the dozens of studios down there.
Smitho & Cheese Cake, glad you guys like the zombie hands. There's also some fun attack animations that go along with them
Duplex, I'm glad you like them! I was afraid they'd be too weird but I liked them so...
vorconan, thanks. The sounds are all hooked up. Nothing too fantastic but I think comparable to what FPSC users are used to. I would have liked to do more but most options were not attractive to me in the sense of requiring sizable investment or further delay.
mastercheif 193, don't worry about it. They're quite different other than being black with exposed fingers.
Anyhow, start saving your pennies now. Release is not too far away. I'm just fixing odd bugs here and there that popped up in build game.
