Back After A Short Respite

Hello Everyone!

Sorry it has been a while, I took some time off after Super Monster Dance Party to relax a little so I can start on new projects with renewed energy. In this down time I've been working on a 3D scene for two of our classes. The project is creating a culture and an environmental issue that it faces. We were allowed to work in groups for this so I teamed up with Andrew Talarico and Ryan Hess. We have two cultures and three environmental issues. Anyway, one of the cultures is called Praxis and the other is Ryatopia. I decided to create some tools that the Praxians might use. It started out with just some rope and a barrel, but I thought that they didn't have any context and wouldn't do the Praxian culture justice. I just kept adding items to the scene until I thought it felt right. Praxis is a colony that is built unto/into the cliff faces of huge a crevice. All of these objects are on a suspended platform on one of the cliffs. I ended up with two variations(Click on them for bigger images):

A still of Praxian life - Pickaxe only

A still of Praxian life - Pickaxe and Shovel

I think I like the one without the shovel better, simply because I couldn't get the shovel head to not look really flat due to the positioning of the lights. I don't want to move the lights since I like the rest of the shadows. I do like the added variety that the shovel provides though. It makes it look like they use more than one tool. 

The texturing isn't anywhere near perfect,but I think it gets the point across fairly well. Still trying to get the texturing thing down... Seems like a lot of times it is harder than actually modeling the object. 

That's what I've been working on for the most part. I've been a little restricted  when it comes to Umbra or other UDK based projects since UDK decided to stop working correctly. I'm in the process of doing a re-install to see if that fixes it. If it does fix it then it back to trying to get level streaming volumes to work and programming a queue system for actions/attacks/events.