Shawn Woods Creative Director

The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability. Shadows behind windows help us see which window is active. The physicality of the iPhone’s user interface makes the device more natural to use…. continue reading article…

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/01/21/realism_in_ui_design/

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Social Gaming Network Connections

Social Gaming Network Connections

Finding the idea for an iPhone game is one thing. Making it all work together is another. It can be quite overwhelming and confusing. Which is exactly why I decided to take a more visual approach to connecting these social networking outlets.

It all starts with the iPhone App or Game. I believe every new app should include the basic necessities and viral hooks: Connect to Facebook to brag to your friends and compete on leaderboards, post high scores to Twitter, tell a friend through email, even bump and email if you get that far.

If you post a message on Facebook (or Facebook Pages), it should automatically feed into Twitter. AdMob (now Google) has a great system of sharing similar apps and cross promoting one another. If I am playing a game I like, I will click an ad at the bottom that appeals to me (Tap Tap by Tapulous does a great job of this). Posting on my blog should connect to Facebook, which in turn puts a note on Twitter. The company website is separate from the game website and linked together. LinkedIn takes feeds from your blog. It all works together.

Create a CafePress storefront for print-on-demand t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, environmentally safe grocery bags, calendars, etc. Stores can be created for free or you can upgrade to the premium model with unlimited products for a small fee of $5.95/month. Linking to your store and back creating yet another link in the social networking ring. Of course, as you create movies its wise to post on all the major video sites like YouTube, and Vimeo.

And then there are your “traditional” online advertising campaigns through Press Releases, Google Adsense, and good old fashioned emailing to noteworthy bloggers, news sites, and gamers. A company called Moo has custom “mini cards” for a cheap price ($20 for a 100 pack). These are excellent quality cards with a waxy finish. They are great for in person promotions and starts an interesting conversation to break the ice. You can customize each double-sided card with your app on the front and information how to download it on the back.

If you’d like you site linked here, I’ll start a list below to make connections. Or post a comment/ping back below.

Wildfire Game Labs
Magic Word Party Game on the iPhone – Follow us on Twitter! – Facebook Page

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Dominance War IV Storyline:

The two heroes in the third Great War for Dominance foresaw what would happen if Machines were allowed to continue their hostilities, but it was too late. 5 year’s after their sacrifice to end Machines’ disruptive means for war with unstable dimensional travel, the sinister threat they foretold, emerged!

…Reality collapsed.

Everywhere, dimensional tears opened to hellish realms and everywhere, nightmares emerged! In the first wave alone, Machines were struck down with such ferocity that for the first time in any war, Machines had to take a more conservative stance. Norms were clearly outnumbered on all fronts and had to withdraw to their great magically protected cities. It was a new era and everyone soon began to realize, including Machines, that it might very well be the beginning of the end in a new chapter of the Epic Dominance War Series: The Rise of Demons!

But there is still hope. The tears in reality are not normal. Something is keeping the dimensions destabilized. Both machines and norms have the mystical power or technology to correct the crisis, unfortunately, to find the source of the problem and to revert everything back to normal requires a luxury neither Norms nor Machines have… time. With death beating down on their walls, and darkness looming around every bend, the missions are as follows:

Norms:
Your mission, again, armed with a powerful magical weapon, is to protect the cities, lead an assault to other worlds and destroy the mysterious force that is keeping the dimensions destabilized.

Machines:
Your assigned tasks: Protect homeworld, destroy all resistance, terminate the dimensional rifts caused by a yet unknown source, and reclaim your rightful dominance over the entire planetary system.

New Race: Demons!
Your purpose: Destroy every man, woman, bot, alien or child. Leave nothing unscathed!

Topic:
Choose and create a character class from one of three races: Norms, Machines and an all-new class – Demons!

Time period:
Post-apocalyptic futuristic fantasy where magic exists.

Dominance War IV Races: Demons
Demons are a new race in the Dominance War universe. Unleashed by Machine’s dimensional tampering, Demons are the shadows from untold nightmares made real. Pure evil in nature, they only care for chaos, feeding and destruction. Demons cannot manipulate or wield magic, but they do possess a single fusion of power with one of the following elements: Fire/lava or Ice/cold or Death/Darkness.

Demon Prince – Demon Princess
Demon Princes are human sized demons with human-like or alien-like characteristics. If not for a few demon-like body traits (bat wings, horns, tail etc), they could easily pass for a natural intelligent human, alien, elf etc of that kind. Demon Princes, like Demon Lords, can manipulate their inborn fusion of power.

My Dominance War Entry Thread on CG Society:
‘Demon Prince Maluum Ex Nihilo’ – Evil Out of Nothing
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=282&t=744261

Your creation’s budget:

	Up to 10 000 tris max for everything (everything = characters, laser beams, shield effects, glows, other special effects, magical weapon, gear, steed(s), pet(s), twin(s), multiple characters, summoned monsters, personal equipment, etc).
	1 x 2048 Color Map *1 x 2048 Reflection Map *1 x 2048 Specular Map *1 x 2048 Specular Color Map *1 x 2048 Normal Map *1 x 2048 Bump Map *1 x 2048 Opacity(transparency) Map *1 x 2048 Glow map *1 x 2048 Glossiness map *Optional Important – You cannot break your 2048 sheets into smaller sheets.
	2-sided tris are permitted.
	Shaders: All shaders from any game engine or 3d software package on planet earth, is allowed.
	Lighting/rendering: All lighting/rendering solutions from any software package on planet earth, is allowed.

Your Presentation Pedestal’s Budget:
ALL 3d entries must include a pedestal in their Presentation Image. You have unrestricted polygons and textures to create a pedestal with the following guidelines:

	A pedestal is NOT a floor and/or it is NOT a room. It’s a block, pillar, coffin, box, crate, stone slab, etc. Pedestal Examples: Hela by Chang Gun Nam | The Mole by Rémi Monier
	No additional weapons or gear that your character can pick up and use can be put on the pedestal.
	No additional characters, pets, animals, pieces of characters, dead characters, etc, can be put on your pedestal. Only Bones and skulls are fine.

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

The Making of the Greater Knarloc (Tau Race)

About the Greater Knarloc…
A huge dinosaur-like creature from the Kroot genetic family. Originally, they were used as beasts of burden but were later trained for war after proving as effective at eating enemy infantry as at carrying heavy loads.

I had a lot of fun creating the Greater Knarloc. The original Dawn of War game did not support normal maps… only diffuse maps were used. However, I tried a different method. Instead of using zBrush to create a high resolution normal map, I used to to build up the musculature in a seamless way and then baked out a grayscale diffuse and lighting map. After that, I could paint over what I had and add the colors as overlay layers. This worked out well since our team coloring for the game was also done using overlay layers.

It was a different method to texturing old school but i am happy with the results! If I had only known zBrush back when I modeled and textured the Ork Squiggoth. That was time consuming trying to create a seamless texture!

Knarlocs have a lot of stuff on them, like a camel caravan in the Sahara Dessert. This worked out great for the animators to add secondary motion to their animations.

They also look a lot like a T-Rex with a more bird-like head. I referenced the skeletal structure of the T-Rex to make sure he was anatomically correct. These photo references from Forgeworld worked out great for the details of the skin.

For his skin, I looked at many reptiles like alligator skin and how it cracks and splits, along with the pattern along their spine.

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Wallpapers

Here are a collection of wallpapers I had created for the Dawn of War franchise. Every single character in the original series of games (excluding Soulstorm) were rendered using their texture maps and model from the game with the Brazil Renderer.

Most characters in the original series used one 512×512 diffuse map. A few characters had additional reflection maps or glow maps and sometimes another small diffuse map. Larger units like the Squiggoth and Greater Knarloc used two 512×512 maps.

Additional Texture Maps:
Specular, Raytracing, Reflections
Lighting using Brazil

I create 90% of the Orks, the Kroot Warriors, Squiggoth, Krootox, Greater Knarloc, among others. Click here to read more about the Making of the Greater Knarloc.

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African Safari Calendar featuring original photography by Andrea Woods and Shawn Woods. A beautiful set of African wildlife from the Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro Crater, Mount Kilimanjaro and the Masai Tribe.

We visited the beautiful country of Tanzania. It is filled with some of the most exotic tours in the world and the game viewing is amazing. We camped in the middle of the Serengeti surrounded by laughing Hyenas at night, had afternoon tea beside a pride of Lions, and even witnessed a Cheetah hunt down it prey (unfortunately she did not catch the Gazelle this time).

The photos below are high quality and print beautifully.

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The Outfit by THQ (Developed by Relic Entertainment), 2006

Role: Character Art Supervisor
Duties: Model and Texture game characters using “next-generation” techniques including a high-resolution zBrush model and Shader 3 technology. I also pinched in for some UI Design and art creation of the Achievement Medals you earn on Xbox Live.
Maps: Diffuse, Specular, Reflection, Normal Maps, and Occlusion (baking in shadows).

These are character sheets I designed for the six main characters in “The Outfit”. They were originally designed to be used in the game for character selection, and also for marketing promotions as features in magazines. Sadly, they never ended up being used as I created them too late in the production and the game had more important issues to take care of, like the driving model.

The three Allied Hero characters; Tommy Mac, JD Tyler, and Deuce Williams are high-resolution models from Blur Studio who also made the original Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War cinematic intro and Company of Heroes cinematic intro. You can view the “Making of ‘Warhammer’ Cinematic Trailer” here.

The Axis Heroes are the actual game characters rendered from 3D Max using the Brazil Renderer with added reflection maps, falloff and lighting. I modeled and textured General Viktor Morder, leader of the Axis in the storyline. General Morder is also featured in the Game/Broadcast Design section of Ballistic Publishing’s Elemental 2 book, along with my Allies Scout.

I will later post my process in creating some of the characters for the game.

About ‘The Outfit’

The Outfit is a squad-based action game built for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, set within war ravaged Europe during the Second World War. The game combines squad-based combat and easy to use strategic gameplay elements with cinematic interludes. The Outfit gives players the option to control three different squad leaders (voiced by Robert Patrick, Ron Perlman, and Terrence “T.C.” Carson), each with their own specific skills and abilities.

Character Sheets

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The Wonder-Juice Machine is a brain game of Executive Functions (Logic) that strengthens your deductive and visual skills.

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New games added every month!

Fit Brains offers a collection of fun, scientifically-based Brain Games that provide a balanced workout across the 5 Major Brain Areas: Memory, Concentration, Language, Visual & Spatial, and Executive Functions (Logic & Reasoning). Each of the games offers multiple activities that target a broad range of mental stimulation.

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The Outfit – Published by THQ, Developed by Relic Entertainment

The achievement medals for THQ‘s “The Outfit” were created using 3D Studio Max and Adobe Photoshop. This game was Relic Entertainment’s first foray into the video game console world.

The achievements are high resolution models rendered out using the Brazil Renderer from SplutterFish. I was Art Supervisor on the visual appearance of the models, as well as creating the art assets for modeling, texturing, rendering, and post-production work done in Photoshop. I split the duties with another talented artist at Relic Entertainment, Jacob Binkowski, who helped model and texture half the medals. Since “The Outfit” was a fictional World War II game, we could not use the real life medals. For some, we took artistic liberties to keep the essence of the original, and in other cases we came up with a completely original piece. What was cool in the end was that one of our medals was actually created into a real-life medallion give to everyone who worked on the game. In total, it took 3 weeks to create all of the medals between two full-time artists.

Here is the full list of the 41 achievements for The Outfit.

Coming Soon – Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts Achievements

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