More 3DS Max Today
I spent a sizeable amount of time learning more about 3D modeling w/ 3DS Max today. I've just been going through the tutorials one by one... today i created a bunch of chess peices. Tomorrow I'll be modeling a claw, and perhaps moving onto my low-polygon aircraft. After that, it's on to texturing and shading and such. 3DS Max definitely seems like a pretty cool tool... I'm not quite sure how it will fit into my gamedev plans yet though. It seems like a number of engines use characters and levels created with 3DS Max, while many other engines come packaged with their own level editor and such. I'm guessing I'll be at the point where i can create decent looking levels with 3DS Max by the end of next week, if not sooner. I'm trying not to rush through the tutorials, because it seems like I retain more when I learn a little bit at a time, but I've been having a hard time pulling myself away from it.

I figured out how to render models as JPEG images so I can display my lovely work online. Right now you can see my chess set models here. You'll be able to see my Apple model, my Mars/Phobos/Deimos scene, and my asteroid model here once I render them and upload them (I'll do that before I go to bed).

As of right now I don't have any classes on Tuesdays =) so I'm sure I'll find time to do some 3ds max work and post about it here.

Welcome!
I've been thinking for a while about keeping a log of my gamedev progress. For a while I kept a brief description of current projects in my AIM profile, and I considered just doing plain text documents... something like a John Carmack style .plan file or just a regular old journal. Finally i decided to just create a weblog. Unfortunately, UNH doesn't appear to have PHP or MySQL installed on the student webpage server, so I started off by looking for a free webhost that gives you access to PHP & MySQL. I found a few, but none I liked. Then i realized how stupid it would be to spend my time coding a weblog when i could probably find some crappy free webhost that had a blog toolset. That brought me here, to Tripod. Perhaps this will be elsewhere in the future, but for now this will do just fine.

Anyways, I've been learning a bit about game development lately. Or at least I've been trying to. You'll find countless tutorials online explaining complex gamedev topics, but very little beginner-level stuff. I'll have to try to remember to start up a good beginner-level gamedev site once i get my head around all of this. Right now GameTutorials.com is the best i've found.

Last semester i did some basic ASCII-based game dev... you know, your basic mazes and such. Nothing noteworthy. I spent a little time over break looking at Win32 programming... which i don't like at all compared with the stuff I've done for my CS classes. Stupid Microsoft. I don't really mean that, i'm just not used to the whole concept of using windows APIs and callback functions yet. Yesterday I took a bit of a break from learning my way around win32 programming and learned a few things about C++ that i didn't know before: template functions, the ? operator, macros (which, by the way, are cool), and probably a few other things that i can't think of ATM.

Today was sort of fun. After spending a portion of last night reformatting both my laptop and my desktop, I spent the morning loading all of my crap onto both machines. I installed the Fly3D SDK (which came bundled w/ a book i got for xmas) on my desktop with the idea of starting some level editing. I needed a change of pace, and at this point i know little enough about game development that i can just run rampant picking up random bits and pieces of info along the way. Eventually i'll become more organized about this. Anyways, the tutorials that come with the Fly3D SDK all involve designing levels in 3DS Max. After a lengthy installation process i found myself thinking "hmmm... i've never used 3ds max before, and i have no idea how to." So, until i get bored and start moving in a different direction, i'll be using my free time to go through all of Discreet's 3ds max tutorials. So far i've taken a scene composed of a table, bottle, orange, apple, and knife and made the objects fly about the air in a nifty little .avi movie, and i've created a texture-mapped Mars/Phobos/Deimos scene that looks pretty cool when rendered at 800x600 with 128 segments per sphere. For now my movie is available here, but i'll take it down once i need room here for other things. BTW, it's a 1.5mb file.

I'll be doing the class thing again tomorrow until 4. I'm sure I won't make it through the whole day without touching something gamedev related, so i'll undoubtedly be here to blab about it tomorrow.