Turma Cósmica Portal

The final part of the Turma Cósmica Project (loosely translated as Cosmic Bunch), was the development of the educational portal.

The idea is an aggregation center of educational content with a system backbone that can be either used as a web portal or integrated to a school intranet / extranet.

The system has three different profiles: 

• student / child login
• parent / teacher login
• administrator login

The screens below are a view of the student / child login.

For the stundent / child profile, the feeling of the portal is of a social network, but great care was taken to guarantee the safety of the youngsters.

First the parent or teacher is the one responsible for creating the account of the young ones, that could be either a father creating the account his children or a teacher creating a new class.  If is for a public portal, nicknames can be used for these.

Instead of uploading pictures, the children are only allowed to create and customize their own avatars, choosing gender, physical characteristics, clothing and accessories and a background set.

Another part of this profile is a "News" center where the children receive and send news from their contacts and can also interact with each other making comments on these news.  On a school environment, news from the school or teacher can also be received and commented.

Parents and teachers can access and monitor logs of all the students activities throughout the whole system. Messages sent and received or time of login and logout.

Another tool used by the children is the Agenda, they can write down about home works, exams or any other school activity. The teacher can also write a note on each of their respective student, for example "Don't forget to bring your coloring pencils for school tomorrow."

On a environment outside the school a children could use the agenda as a diary or a calendar to mark birthdays.

Probably the most used area by the children is the games area. All the educational games that were once produced for the Turma Cósmica in the past and previously distributed in physical media format now are rewritten for the web using Unity 3d Game Engine. May aspects of the game play is logged for the teachers to follow what games each student likes the most or has the highest scores. Since they are all base on the school curriculum, an analysis can be made to spot overall difficulties in the given subject for each student or the whole class in general.

There is also a trophy system on the games, so each child can see a raking of the best players on his class or social circle.

Accompanying each game, there is also it's corresponding text to the game's subject. New content can added or available one can be edited by a teacher or administrator in this area.

Besides producing the graphics for the games, I also made the graphic design and was part of the over all concept team.

Turma Cósmica volumes 3 and 4

Before writing in-depth about my current works, I'd like to post here some images from our last two games that were produced for Windows and Linux (under wine).

Turma Cósimica Vol. 3

- Rumo ao planeta Antiqua - 

(Heading to planet Antiqua)

Trailer

Turma Cósimica Vol. 4

- Reconquistando o Brasil - 

(Reconquering Brazil)

Trailer and Game Play

These games were produced almost 4 years ago with Torque Game Engine. The 2D elements were done in Adobe Photoshop and the 3D was done in Autodesk 3DS Max.

Another tool that I used indirectly on Volume 4 was Adobe Flash. I did many animated concepts, game play development and even some coding in Action Script and presented them to the programming team to be implemented in Torque.

Since hardware and software progresses at an amazing rate, the game play and graphics quality in these games are a bit outdated already specially Volume 3, but I still consider them to be of great value to be used in schools or at home following the same curriculum used in a normal class room. These two games were developed for kids in 3rd and 4th grades.

Return to activity

After a long time away from writing, I'll try to to keep it more active now. My work has changed a lot during this last year. I still work at PUC-PR but the educational games unit has changed a bit our focus.

Our new name now is UCDI - Interactive Digital Content Unit (Unidade de Conteúdos Digitais Interativos). Besides educational games for computers, we now produce educational content for tablets (Android and iOS) such as eBooks and Apps, educational and recreational content for planetariums. Actually, the whole last year was almost entirely doing research for the university's newest acquisition.

FTD Digital Arena

More on this later.

Mouth shapes study.

These are some mouths shapes studies I did for a mockup introductory alphabet lessons for preschool kids. They are supposed to show the differences between vows and consonants.  Where, in the vows pronunciation, the air flows out from the mouth without any obstruction.

While consonants, when pronounced are obstructed by lips, tongue or teeth.

The animations were accomplished with vertex groups and morph targets in Blender and Photoshop later on.

Turma Cósmica (Cosmic Bunch) trailers.

Here are some trailers that I prepared for the volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 of Turma Cósmica (Cosmic Bunch), a set of educational computer games we developed at PUC-PR University in collaboration with Editora FTD. 

My duties on this varied through art direction, 2d artist, 3d modeling, texturing, level design and building and sound editor and even some programming here and there and graphic design for the boxes.  The whole development team was of about 15 people including interns.

For this year, our efforts are concentrated in making a web version of Turma Cósmica.

Trailer for Volumes 1 and 2

Trailer for Volume 3

- Rumo ao planeta Antiqua -
(Heading to planet Antiqua)

Trailer for Volume 4A

- Reconquistando o Brasil -

(Reconquering Brazil)

Gameplay of Volume 4B

- Contador de histórias 3d ( 3D story teller) - 

Modeling and materials exercise II - Egyptian chair

I should call this more a materials and texture exercise because that is where the complexities are, the modeling was relatively simple although it was a little hard to get the proportions, I only had one picture as reference.

Modeling and rendering were all done in Blender. Photoshop was used for making the bumpmap for the side panels.

Modeling and materials exercise - Victorian Footstool

This is the result of a modeling exercise I did recently in Blender 2.6. One of my attempts was to do some organic modeling on the dragons (in my case) or gryphs from the reference image further below. I call mine dragons because there are still missing details that would make them look more like cats, such as the tail, and chest and head fur and also a little bit of the proportions on the head. Since most of the modeling I do at work are low poly for games, I wanted to try out the Blender's sculpting tools on these, and also in the cushion and the golden emblem.

The materials were all setup thru the use of material nodes. Two bitmaps for the wood texture, one for the diffuse and specular map and another for the bump map.  The cushion is using a Voronoi procedural on the bump map as well.

The original rendering was done using Cycles inside Blender with full global illumination and depth of field.  In the screenshot below you can see the basic studio setup. One infinite plane and four area lights with 2 of them contributing to the overall illumination and 2 acting more like reflection planes.

In this screenshot you can also see the complexity of the wood material. The other materials are relatively simple phong and metal setups.

Afterwards I reduced the image to 720p and did some color correction in Photoshop.