Archive for the ‘Lightning’ tag

Pulling it appart

Some of the art of M:A:D has to be done following rules from the coder’s side. Even though this may sound limiting, in some cases it helps the artist reduce the image number and keep his assets organized. For the case of the units in M:A:D, we created a hierarchy based movie clip. The mechs have legs, the drones don’t, because they… OOPS, best not say everything.

The unit is made up of a body, a set of legs and the weapon. Reason for this is that the weapon should rotate independently from the body and the legs are just a 10 frames animation. The body was created in 3D and animated to rotate in order to have a realistic depiction of the lighting on the unit, to make it the same as the structures. as the unit rotates the rotating body moves along the frames to match the frame to the rotation, while the legs are a movieclip being rotated.

The other element on display there is the the structure being slightly damaged and we used smoke to illustrate that. Dents will be added later. The smoke is done with on 16×16 particle being scaled rotated and having the color and transparency changed.

Hope you like the little sneak peek inside the backstages of some of the art in M:A:D.