Game Menu

It's been a while since I've posted here but lots has happened!  I now have a website so be sure to check out www.kennethkozan.com for my portfolio pieces.  This blog will be a more laid back and "non-official" approach to my work and what I'm currently doing.

So during the past few months I've been working on a student game project.  In the first months I worked on an idea with a team but after a while we realized things weren't really working out so we decided to start over from scratch.

The assets were all scrapped but it was a great learning experience.  I was in charge of creating our 3D menu and it was actually really neat to use Maya to create something that isn't traditionally thought of as an asset.

This is the original concept for the menu done in Photoshop:



And here is a render of the actual 3D menu put together:



Since there are so many dynamic elements to the menu, a still really doesn't do it justice.  Here's a render of the 20 second loop of the different elements that move around and do other crazy stuff.  All of these animations are tied to joints so they carry through the game engine seamlessly.


It was really fun to use cards and texture to create this complex looking menu.  The entire structure is "flat" but has depth to it.  Each element that moves was bound to a joint so the animation could be baked down and exported out of Maya with no troubles.  Since each option was attached to a specific joint, the programmers were able to gather information though that, allowing it to be as easy to implement as possible.

I did a quick render of the perspective view in Maya to show that the menu isn't flat, but rather tiered down with transparencies while being looked at through a "flat" camera with a very large focal length.