Done with art for a while

I've spent way too much time fooling with the Blender-Panda3D content pipeline, so I'm moving back to working on gameplay and coding.

That being said, the art was fun while it lasted. Here's a sample of the results:

Wrestling with Blender pays off sometimes.

All art in this screenshot was created by me. The arena geometry enclosing the map was created by extruding individual faces of an icosphere. The texture maps were drawn in the excellent Inkscape, then touched up in the lightweight-but-useful Paint.NET, then crunched by the incredibly flexible and powerful CrazyBump for the normal maps. The whole process is recorded here for posterity:

This pattern was drawn in Inkscape directly over a screenshot of the UV-unwrapped geometry from Blender.

I tweaked colors and added noise with Paint.NET.

CrazyBump generated this normal map from the color image.

The moody red lighting in the screenshot was done with a 512x512 lightmap image generated by Blender. I had the most success with the Add texture blend mode for the lightmap, otherwise it didn't mix with the in-game lighting.

I'm starting to develop a visual style here. Lots of dramatic lighting, rusty metal, and glowing shiny things. :)