Last time Principal Artist Jeff Toney finished modeling the magic world tree, Bartleby. The 3d model we left you with doesn’t look like Bartleby just yet!
When I left off last post we had Bartleby modeled and were able to walk around him in our custom game client to make sure we liked his size and the shape of his features. Still there was one major step left to do; we had to texture him.
Textures are pictures we create to give the illusion of different materials (in this case the components of the tree) instead of the flat polygons that we had in place. Bartleby was made of bark, but he had a canopy of leaves and his eye looked more like a human eye than one carved out of wood. You might think we would start with painting the textures first, but we first must plot out where the texture will wrap around the object.
In 3d Studio Max, there is a process called UVW Mapping that lets you decide how a texture gets wrapped around an object. Think of the texture as a piece of paper that you can wrap around the object. We could draw on this piece of paper and the model would reflect that change. Like a piece of paper, you can make different shapes with this texture. A single piece of paper could be folded into anything from a cylinder to a square to just the flat paper itself. Since Bartleby was a cylinder at his basic core, we can wrap this paper around him the same way.
Notice the cylinder around Bartleby in the last picture? This is how his texture will be wrapped around him. Our next step was to unfold the piece of paper back into a flat plane. When we did that, his texture looked a lot like this.
This looked a bit like a jumbled mess, but this is usually how we start. Every line and vertex of the 3D Bartleby model is represented here. If you look at the bottom middle of the previous picture, you can see the outline of Bartleby’s face mesh. From this point, we could tweak and move each vertex to get a better “painting canvas” for our texture. In the end of this process, we got a texture map that looked more like this.
That is more like it. You can see his face was as big as possible in the space provided and the general bark was overlapping with itself. I then used this as a first sketch for my final texture.
I started to paint a bark texture over the whole painting. I made it a bit cartoony in style with not a lot of details at this point.
I then added shadows and highlights for his face and eye, and added some moss and grass to the polygons that touched the ground.
I finally add a layer of shadow and light and some detail bark texture to make sure he looked like a tree. For Wizard101, our texture style is cartoony with just a hint of realism. This texture was then mapped to the model that we already had and he looked like this.
That was more like it! After a few tweaks, he was then ready for an effects pass. This was done by a specialized artist who added all the small environmental animations that surrounded the tree. This included beams of sunlight, small leaves floating down, wind, rain, and anything that helped give the scene more life. After a round of effects, here was the final Bartleby as he is in the game.
I am very proud to have worked on Wizard101 for so long, and always get a kick out of walking around Ravenwood with my characters, knowing that I helped create the great, wise tree that is the center of this magical school. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope it helped in showing a bit of the process of how I make art in Wizard101!
Jeff Toney
Principal Artist
This past week, KingsIsle had the honor of hosting a wonderful young man and his immediate family. Ryan is an 11-year old boy who chose to visit KingsIsle and Pirate101 through the Make-a-Wish organization and was accompanied by his 14-year old brother, 16-year old sister and his parents. Here at KingsIsle we did everything we could to make a memorable experience for him.
Welcome to KingsIsle Ryan and family!
The whole family arrived at 9:30 am, and after a brief look around we introduced him to the 250+ employees here in the Austin office as our newest Pirate101 Honorary Producer. The kickoff was led by KingsIsle’s Senior Producer, William Haskins, who really went above and beyond organizing an incredible visit and some special surprises for Ryan. In addition to these surprises the team put together, the Pirate producers, Jay Gordon and Mike Stone, also worked to pull together a “treasure chest” with an assortment of appropriate goodies.
William introduces Ryan to everyone as the new Pirate101 Honorary Producer
After the introduction, Ryan sailed off to an in-office recording studio we had set up where he and his family got to meet a number of our Pirate101 voice actors. Ryan also met with all the folks in our Sound department to learn how sounds are built into our games, and then he stepped up the mic himself to give voice recording a go. We had some stealthy lines for Ryan to record for a purpose, but we tried to work them in with a bunch other fun voice over lines to help hide what was really up our sleeves . . . .
Recording voice over in the studio
After a short break, Ryan whisked off to one of our conference rooms where he got to play his character on a computer hooked up to a large-screen TV surrounded by KingsIsle’s Creative Director & Vice President, Josef Hall; Pirate101’s Community Manager, Tom Purdue; Lead Creative Designer, Sam Johnson; and a number of other Pirate101 folks. I honestly had a hard time trying to figure out what was giving Ryan more pleasure: leveling up all the new companions we had put on his account, running around Aquila asking Sam for some of the integral details behind the story, or defeating Satyrs in Achaea side-by-side with Tom. The hour we spent in that room went incredibly fast, and Ryan’s parents had to almost pry him away from the computer to hit one of our break rooms before having lunch with a large group of KingsIsle employees.
Playing Pirate101
After lunch Ryan got to put his new title of Pirate101 Honorary Producer to the test. He appropriately started with the resident Pirate101 producers who gave him some background on their jobs and showed him how to track a bug from putting it into the system all the way until it gets fixed. He then got to go and spend time with each department, learning about art and animation, game design and story development. He also got to spend some time on one of Pirate101’s internal servers and be the first non-KingsIsle employee to see a few yet unreleased “cool” things that are coming soon. He really did great work with the designers and was able to give us some very good and specific feedback 🙂
Learning Production with Pirate101 Producers Jay and Mike
Giving feedback on brand new animations and effects
Working with the design team
Participating in a story session
Toward the end of the day we brought Ryan and his family back to the conference room and reveal the special “treats” we had up our sleeves. The first was a custom poster that Josef presented to Ryan that had Ryan’s in-game character surrounded by his top companions. It was a beautiful one-of-a-kind original done by one of our very talented concept artists, Nick Overdiek. We had made sure to have a little time left so we could “let” Ryan jump back into the Pirate101 internal test server again. Here he got to see the newest addition to the Pirate101 game: a Yum-n-ade stand manned by none other than Ryan the Relentless, complete with voice over lines he had performed that very morning. It took a lot of quick work and a few weeks of prior planning, but the Pirate101 team had created a new NPC with Ryan’s in-game character so he will forever forward be known as the NPC vendor for the Yum-n-ade stand. You can check him out in the live game this week 🙂
Josef Hall presents Ryan his poster
Ryan the Relentless’ Custom Poster
Ryan, his family, and the some Pirate101 team members
If you want to learn more about Ryan and his story, check out local Austin news source KVUE’s story on his day at KingsIsle. You can show KVUE and Ryan a little extra appreciation by clicking the share button on the KVUE site to share their story on Facebook or Twitter.
I’m pretty sure Ryan and his family had a great time. What I do know for certain is that everyone at KingsIsle had an amazing time getting ready for the visit and then spending the day with them. We were truly honored that Ryan and his family chose to come spend a precious day with us!
Fred Howard
Vice President of Marketing
Watch a Video of Ryan’s Day at KingsIsle
Sponsoring giveaways, answering questions, and keeping players up to date on the latest game news are just a few of the many tasks our wonderful community managers are faced with on a daily basis! Today we ask Wizard101’s Professor Greyrose and Pirate101’s One-Eyed Jack a few questions about what it’s like to be a community manager at KingsIsle.
What made you want to work with the gaming community?
Professor Greyrose: Like others, I came from being a community leader and working on the press side for another game, to being a Community Manager for KingsIsle. Being engaged in a game and being a part of its community is definitely a driving factor in wanting to work with the players.
One-Eyed Jack: KingsIsle is notorious for having the most amazing communities out there—of course, I’m partial since I came directly from the grassroots of the Wizard101 community myself. Being the Pirate101 Community Manager seemed like a natural fit for me. In truth there’s nothing finer than working for the greater good of a community. When it’s for something you love as much as the community does, I feel there’s a kind of synergy possible that’s hard to replicate and extremely satisfying. I feel our common goal is to enjoy the heck out of Pirate101 and make it an awesome experience that won’t be forgotten. It’s a lot to live up to, but One-Eyed Jack (um, that’s me) hopes you will always remember your time spent in Pirate101.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
One-Eyed Jack: My favorite part of my job is simply seeing what player ingenuity can bring to Pirate101. Many years back in a commercial writing class, I had a teacher tell me that creativity at its basis is the mixing of things/ideas. When I see people mixing their talents of art, music, writing, and role-playing along with the amazing world of Pirate101, it just makes me really happy and proud of our Pirate101 creative community. Getting to see players throw themselves into the game and really be passionate about it is something that can turn “just an OK day” into “a great day”!
Professor Greyrose: Like One-Eyed Jack, the most rewarding part of the job is seeing how our games inspire others to be creative in their own way. From fan art and sculptures to cake decorating and costume making – these extracurricular activities really show how our players bring the game into their lives and make it their own.
Now that you know how much our fantastic community leaders love your creative efforts, why not send them some Wizard101 or Pirate101 inspired creativity of your own! Send us your drawings, paintings and sketches of your character or anything else you’ve imagined about Wizard101. If you are under 13 years of age, ask your parent or guardian for permission to send us your artwork.
If you would like to submit something, send it in an email to community@wizard101.com, community@pirate101.com or mail it to us at KingsIsle Entertainment, P.O. Box 82543, Austin TX USA, 78708 and be sure to include your character name!
It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of work to get done here at KingsIsle, with two major MMOs running and lots of secret projects in the works! Even though we work hard, we also play hard. About once a month, KingsIsle employees from all different departments get together for a company sponsored fun day. These fun days range from playing board games at the office to going to the Austin food bank and lending a helping hand. Last week we headed to a new Austin sensation, Top Golf, to practice our swing!
Top Golf takes the concept of working on your golf game to a new level by adding targets to the driving range and special micro-chipped balls that track each player’s score. Being a bunch of gamers, we obviously enjoyed turning golf into a live action mini game!
We have some impressive golfers here at KingsIsle! I however, am not one of them and was very content to hit the not-so-very-far-in red and yellow targets. Hey, not everyone can be Tiger Woods!
Even though my drives were pretty close in, we had some golfers with quite a bit of oomph behind their swing. Wait a second, is this golf or baseball? I thought the balls were supposed to hit the targets… not the cars!
Of course, not everyone felt like golfing. Many people here are gamers through and through, and that’s not limited to just computer games. Just inside the driving range, several intense tabletop games were going on like Settlers of Catan and WizWar.
Whether you played golf or games, this latest fun day was a great way to relax and socialize with co-workers outside of the office. Having a fun day like this leaves us refreshed and ready for more hard work ahead. Plus who knows, we may get some cool ideas from these outings! Wizard golfing anyone? Just kidding, but you never know… 🙂
Lauren Mauldin
Marketing Website Producer
Howdy fellow Wizards! I’m Gary Scott Smith, but you may know me in game as Duncan DayDreamer. On the forums I post as Arthur Wethersfield. I’m a game programmer that’s been working on Wizard101 for almost 5 years. I first started with player housing. Then I did mannequins, pets and mounts in housing, the maze game, gardening, housing games, wands on walls, housing music players, housing signs, housing teleporters, the Bric-a-Brac Elixir, the Additional Castle Elixir, buy more and sell more, spectator mode, playable musical instruments… and lots of other things!
I have a Wizard101 character that I’ve been playing since launch. As of this post, I’m level 81 and near the beginning of Azteca. My character’s primary school is Storm. With Storm, all fights are over quickly, one way or the other. I also have a level 51 character in Pirate101.
My focus at work is player housing, and other than questing, that’s my main aspect of playing Wizard101 as well. Since we added the Additional Castle Elixir I have been able to buy, acquire, or craft every house in the game – 32 at the moment! I’ve decorated most of them too.
For this blog post, I wanted to share my favorite house. Yes, I know that there are bigger and fancier houses… but I’ve always liked the Wooded Cottage. I enjoy the Wizard City sky in the background and the cottage’s cozy interior.
By the way, did you know that the unicorn that periodically appears in the grove was added before you could put pets in your houses? Now if you want, you can fill the house with unicorn pets and the unicorn that lives in the grove isn’t really necessary, but we’d never remove it!
I crafted the carousel at this house before gardening existed and farming Wintertusk made Black Pearls and Earthquake treasure cards easier to acquire. I sure spent a lot of time gathering Black Lotus in MooShu so I could craft that carousel!
I think it’s important for developers to play the games they work on, both to be familiar with the content and to thoroughly understand what works well and what doesn’t. For example, I implemented “buy more” and “sell more” features after slowly buying and selling reagents one by one… over and over! It made me wish there was a better way. I recently alphabetized the crafting recipes in our crafted recipe lists after hunting for one randomly listed recipe one too many times. For similar reasons, I like to know what players are saying about Wizard101. I read lots of blog posts; I scan our forums, the Wizard101Central forums and I listen to Ravenwood Radio.
The future is full of exciting things! See you in the spiral.
Gary Scott Smith
Senior Software Engineer II
KingsIsle Blog 