June 22, 2006

Welcome to my first production update of The Dig Tour!
So far things are going very well, actually better then I thought.
At the moment im working on the 3D models needed for the first release of the tour: "The Asteroid".
Here are some screens of the models im working on right now:

You can see below my incarnation of the alien space-rock. Its totally different from the original, mainly because the old one is simply, in 3D terms, outdated.
That's because the resources and the budget for 3D models at that time, especially for a game, wasn't really great.
Thanks to major software developments for the past 10 years, it's actually not that difficult anymore to make 3D models and animations for games.
Examples like Maya and 3D studio Max are affordable, easy to learn and you can make fantastic images and animations at the same time.
That's why im using these programs for the Dig Tour.

The asteroid was rendered with multiple layers: the color image, occlusion image (black and white image, to make the contrast higher), and a tint image (to make it more brown).
I composed these layers with Photoshop.

This is my version of the very beginning of The Dig (the cloud where you can see the Lucasarts logo). Its still a rough composition, but you see it has the same colors and form as the original painting.
The clouds where made with an 3D max plugin called Afterburn. Clouds, fire and smoke are a few examples of what you can make with Afterburn.

Here you can see a very early version of the Space Shuttle. There are no textures and details as you can see. Although it will have a small role in the first tour I still want to make a nice realistic 3D model of my favorite space ship.

Well, this is the end of my first update, I hope you enjoyed the images as much as I enjoyed making them.

Next update I will cover:
- The computer console where it all started
- The alien ship
- The Asteroid core, and more!

See you next time!

- Robin Alexander