There are a lot of Ages/areas on the project list and a lot of them require a technical skill that I, quite frankly, do not possess at this time.
Rebek and Venalem require changes to how swimming is handled, Kahlo requires stuff for flying around on the Kamkenta, Kalamee requires some degree of inventory, and pretty much all of the Ages require new avatar animations.
I’m an art guy, I can model (with varying degrees of success) and I can make things look nice, so I have been focusing on building the content over the coding of the content.
So I have taken up one of the smaller projects to start with, the Ae’gura Aquarium. I took at look over the previous concept art for the area and after bugging Ryan at Cyan for extra info and feedback on direction it wasn’t long before the basic frame was up and ready. A lot of the concept art shows tones of blue and design elements which weren’t quite right for the D’ni city, so after looking extensively at other areas in the Cavern as well as concept art for D’ni I eventually made some changes to the structure to make it a bit more in keeping with the D’ni design aesthetic. Naturally the blue tones went away, with the aquarium being under the D’ni lake and with the large viewing windows letting the light of the lake in it stands to reason orange would be the dominate colour of the room.
Due to how the content is planned on being added to Uru at this time, the Aquarium has to be a stand alone area. The concept art for the area shows a lack of any doorway into the Aquarium (although not all views of the walls are available in the artwork) but as a public place it would be likely there would be a doorway into the room. Eventually a door was added but rendered unusable due to certain issues (water rusting the mechanism shut over a 200 year period), solving both problems.
Over the course of the week I managed to get 98% of the interior done and textured, with some tweaks needed here and there to finish things off. Lighting of the room is more or less complete (although the lamps require some redesigning as I’m not happy with how they look) and collision is waiting to be done.
Outside of the room is where things require more attention. Whilst modeling the bottom of the D’ni lake isn’t to much of a problem the wildlife and all the animation that needs to go into it will be. The D’ni lake had some pretty big whale like creatures in it which I’d certainly like to make an appearance, unfortunately I have limited experience animating complicated meshes.
Work continues on..