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.

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.

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.