Back to Work

Man, 3 months since my last entry! Winter Break, Skyrim, Shogun 2, Bastion... lots of time-killing going on. I did manage to teach myself some more about web design though, and became more acquainted with creating sites solely through code with HTML and CSS, even learned the Joomla content management system and made a test template for it!

Soon I'll have to put up an entry on web design stuff, but for now... it's back to work with 3ds Max and Photoshop, and also now... Unity 3D! I've mustered together a couple friends to work on a super-duper top-secret eyes-only videogame. As its stands its just me for asset modeling and texturing so I'll have my hands full with stuff to practice on now. So far I've made some "Stone Ruines" set pieces, was pretty fun. Got a couple different size walls with damaged versions, archways, bridges, columns, pedestals, decals... the works.

Stone Ruins Assets in Unity 3D

We're still working on the proof of concept stage so we're figuring out an art style but I've become quite fond of the "Cutout" filter in Photoshop. It's almost like a cartoony posterization.

Cutout Filter Before > After

Aside from modeling, the texture work has gotten me reacquainted with the clone stamp tool and the healing brush, for making seamless/tiled textures. I must have done this to 10 images last night but here's one that stands out the most.

Seam Removal Example

Just today I decided to try my hand at concept art for the first time ever. Put some light logic skills that hadn't seen daylight in a while to work. Here's the result, some ideas for health pickups (yea, some of the colors don't go together, was just throwing in variation).

Health Pickup Concepts

So hopefully now that I'll be in max and Photoshop quite often from now on, I'll get around to finishing some other higher-quality models and eventually putting them up here. But at least I'll have stuff to start posting on here again.

B-25 Engines & Propellers

This morning the engines got finished as well as the proplellers, though I'll probably end up adding more details inside the engine cowl.

Not sure which part to do next. I guess either the belly/top gun turrets or start working on the nose/tail turrets.

B-25 Wings & Engines

Today I was working on getting the base shape of the engines done and getting it to smooth out with the wings. Also cut out the ailerons & flaps. Most of the work was all the cutting/bridging/chamfering to try and get the engine to smooth out to the shape of the wings and not appear as an entirely separate component. I realized I'm still operating in low-poly mode for some reason... sort of hesitant to use cylinders with more than 18 or so sides. I'll just TurboSmooth it at the end and add more details I guess.

B-25B Mitchell Started

Started on the B-25 yesterday, modeled in the rear elevators, rudder, and trim. Next up, either the engines or the elevators on the wings, not sure which order yet. Had some trouble getting some smoothing to work where the tail connects to the rudder (not shown in this picture), took a while to get it right.

Textured Artifact, Portfolio Start

Finished texturing and setting up the glow map for the Artifact today, came out pretty awesome! I might end up trying to add the portal above it also, not sure yet.

I found this great free model of the Chief also. Currently trying to figure out how to refine vertex assignments in the 3ds Max biped system so I can animate it without some vertices stretching out improperly.

Also I figured I should start working on / organizing a small portfolio of sorts, in case I want to try and join a mod or indie team sometime for some more practice. Most of the stuff I have done is scattered in multiple places. Started working on a list of things to model and texture, including refining a few things I've already done:

• AIM-54 Phoenix dolley
• Mk82 bomb racks
• Military laptop & radio
• B-25 Mitchell
• Some stylized melee weapon, like a sword, axe or hammer
• A scene of an alley with a bunch of dirty props
• A scene of some fictional setting, perhaps medical labs or a dock

And eventually... I'm going to have to model try modeling a character and some organic stuff. Don't know why I'm hesitant to do so, probably just because I haven't before. I'll stick to getting some of these hard-surface models done first.

Halo - The Artifact

Decided I'd do the Ark Portal (The Artifact) first as it would be the easiest in terms of modeling and would let me play with terrain sculpting in CE3 some more. Not being able to use a brush greater than 200m wide sucks when you're working with a 8x8km map. My "Artifact" is about 4.8 km in diameter... the "real" thing is 120km wide, supposedly. I think the scale looks pretty decent in-game. The only unfortunate bit of this... is that I don't think I'll be able to put in a glow effect for the molten rock on the edges of the artifact, where it should have been recently "glassed" by the Covenant. Because first, the Terrain.layer material type does not support emissive glows, and the material type that does support it seems to fade from view rather quickly when painted onto terrain (thankfully it seems it'll still work for the artifact, given its size).

What I've got so far, untextured artifact and mostly done terrain (will have to add some overhanging cliff ledges here and there). Will also end up having to model and texture the Forerunner Dreadnought.

Safe Textures Finished

So I got the textures done. Learned a few tricks doing this, though I'll have to learn to refine those tricks for use in game assets probably. First off, before this I'd only ever had normal/bump maps baked from a higher-poly model. This uses both a bake from a higher-poly safe, as well as a hand-crafted normal map texture for the paint chipping areas and such. The specular mapping wasn't too bad, though I had to contrast the image to some extremes and up the specular levels in max a little for it to really show. Still, came out fairly well. Not only that but this may be the most work I've ever done on a diffuse texture, starting off with baking and adding ambient occlusion onto the uv layout. I also ended up downloading a bunch of new brushes for GIMP to use, got tired of using a simple "dot" brush to make scratch effects. I'm happy with the way this came out in the end.

Top to bottom:
-Wireframe
-Shaded
-Normal Map
-Normal + Specular
-Normal + Specular + Diffuse

Thank god I didn't know how to add specular maps or detail bump maps like this when I was making the Nimitz... I think I'd still be working on textures. What to do now? Hmmm...

Texture practice and CryENGINE 3

I recently downloaded the CryENGINE 3 SDK to toy with and attempt to learn, which is what Crytek used to develop Crysis 2 with. Needless to say, it's very powerful and in my opinion a little more towards the bleeding edge than the Unreal Engine. Played around with terrain sculpting some, used voxels to make a small cave, but was mostly interested in trying to get my own assets incorporated. So for a test and to learn how to do it, I made a beach chair, umbrella, and cooler to import into the engine and make a scene with. Below is the result of that effort:

 

The terrain texture could use some work but I kinda rushed that with some basic sand I found, haven't really played with tweaking terrain textures yet, just know how to apply them. The color under the surface of the water is a bit of an abrupt change as well. One thing that would really improve this is if I new how to make specular maps for the chair and umbrella, like having highlights on the frame and such. I realized I needed more practice with textures, specifically specular maps and overall just adding detail to diffuse maps. Because of that, I started working on some simple model of a safe:

 

It's still WIP and I'll definitely post when finished. Right now it only has a mostly-completed diffuse and bump map. It's nothing more than a 6-sided cube (granted, chamfered edges) with some hinges and a knob modeled on.

Ordnance Storage

This is the most actual modeling I've done in a while. Usually it's small simple things here and there but these took a little while, especially the unwrapping for the Phoenix's dolley, jeez! So last night and today I've modeled out the interior of the storage room below decks, added some props like an intercom, doors, chair/table, whiteboard... most of those I had already used in the ship and am just re-placing them here as well. These Mk82 ammo carts and the Phonix dolley are new. Myke was generous enough to allow me to use his ordnance models as a base to work these containers off of, though I did all but redo the Phoenix as it had way more polys than required. So this'll all be part of the "Maintenance Upgrade" to the Nimitz at the end of the month. I'll probably eventually also make some more weapon containers and release them separately for people in the community to use as they will.

Note this screengrab is from Max, not the game :)

Mk82 racks and Phoenix in dolley in storage room

Sea Sparrow & Normal Mapping

After a tutorial and hassling to figure a few things out on my own, I finally got baking normal maps in 3ds Max under wraps. At least, as well as I need to for now. Added well over 100,000 polys just for the rivets all along the launcher tubes for the Mk29, baked into a normal map, and now in the game. Figuring out .rvmats and how to properly get the normal map into the game without making it look crazy took a few tries also.

Now I just need to make a actual texture/diffuse map for it. Definitely not taking the time to get the config and everything worked out so it can be used in the game yet though, gotta start on my dropship! It'll just have to be eye candy for a while.

Mk 29 Sea Sparrow Launcher

Today I got the urge to finally start modeling the defensive turrets for my Nimitz carrier, starting with the Sea Sparrow missiles and their launcher. Most of the modeling is done, a lot of the finer details (bolts/rivets and such) will just be put on with normal maps probably since it's for a game.

I'll probably get around to modeling the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile and launching system next.

Project Start - Gauss Artillery Cannon

So school ended last week, and the whole time I was learning and using Maya for everything from modeling to rendering a 20-second animation. Later on I'll have to post the end product but for now, back to this...

I figured this summer I'd start using 3ds Max again beside Maya, so that I could work on and release updates to the USS Nimitz and HMS Queen Elizabeth models I made for the ArmA II community. Upon entering Max I found my control of the camera and shortcuts were devastatingly corrupted after using so much Maya, thankfully someone in the ArmA forums pointed me to a plugin that makes it all like Maya, and I changed shortcuts to match too.

Anyway, so I decided to make some small object just to get used to modeling in Max again, but it turned into an entire artillery piece which I'm hoping to be the first model I really put a lot of detail into, both in terms of the geometry and the textures. I don't plan on personally realizing this model as a working piece in ArmA II but there seems to be some interest in sci-fi models so perhaps after it's all done I can give it up to someone who will see it through.

Here it is (playing with the Acrylic view in Max for these shots):

I've been told it looks like a sewage pipe in the first two but hopefully once it's done that'll change, still a lot of detail to add to it. My basic concept for it is that the blue objects are the magnetic plates, and when firing, they collapse back into the barrel of the cannon in rapid succession, attracting and shooting out the magnetic round (which by the way is 7 inches in diameter, its a big boy). The piece itself is about 18.5 feet in length.

Still to add:

- Power cables from each of the panels that run all the way down the cannon, into a generator or power source somewhere on the base

- Various other things as they come to mind, mostly props and stuff on the base