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.

Beach Scene Fixed Up, Starting on Simple Environment

I played around with Time of Day settings a bit and more importantly now understand how the terrain texture layers work in CryENGINE 3. Was a little strange to me at first but now it makes sense. I tidied up the texture color and made it seamless, and scaled down the tiling as well for more detail. Also played with darkening the texture under the water instead of just painting it blue, def looks better. Here's 2 different versions:

Also, after watching 4 episodes of Halo: Legends last night, I've developed an interest it perhaps trying to make a few environments from the Halo universe in the engine as well, simply for rendering/artwork purposes. I think I'll do an interior first... probably the Control Room of Installation 04. Then try an outdoor scene.

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

Weapons Room for the Nimitz

Most of this idle-blog time has been spent on scripting for ArmA 2, unfortunately, instead of modeling. Most of that scripting involved developing the targeting system (acquiring aircraft targets, filtering out friendly units, and prioritizing hostiles based on range & threat imminence) for the Sea Sparrow. Another community member has been very helpful and is getting the missile guidance done, which would probably have taken me a little longer than forever. Other than that, lots of bug fixes/improvements.

Hopefully I'll get that done and out by the end of the month, along with the newest sub-project for the Nimitz: an aircraft munitions storage room to be used in conjunction with rearming services to aircraft aboard the carrier. Along with this feature to resupply planes, I'll be scripting in areas for aircraft to be refueled and repaired. Others have done this with scripts but hopefully having to transport ordnance in this fashion will add a little more interactivity to it.

 

Currently:
- Elevator & Shaft are done (need very minor tuning on textures)
- Storage room is modeled, no detailing or prop-work has been done yet.
- Any type of scripting has yet to be done, but that's the easy part.
- Plane is to just use the stock towing tractor, possibly later model/incorporate a weapons dolley