Monday, June 29, 2009

3D hair ,UVs alphas and plug-ins


Various methods can be used to create hair alpha maps, hair and fur, plug-ins and various other methods. Although for a low ply character in my opinion it is best to keep it simple by extrusion of the base head mesh and apply hair to it especially if it is going into an engine as a playable character and not for a cinematic inside the game engine or in a program such as Maya or Max for animation and export into the engine. However you can get creative with the way you create hair by adding accessories to the hair in this case two chopsticks in the bun of the hair, this is not regulation for military personal but it gives character to a other wise plain hairdo. This also helps when you do not want to use a lot of extra polys in game however, I will do a model with hair applied to geometry later which could be used for a cinematic or higher res character. Although this is a simple method for creating hair more realism can be added with alphas for certain areas around the head.
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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Work through the texture


I am going through this model thinking about what direction to go then it hit me that CG has a secret agent challenge, like you did not see this coming, well on to some drawing.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Greatest day


I love antiques and old school stuff shows like what's happening, charlies angels and movies like electric bogaloo and breaking. I love unwrapping but I love texturing (painting) just get faster at uv unwrapping. I know there are programs that do this easier but learning to unwrap and pack UVs should be done in the modeling program first to learn the pipe line and the reason why and how it is done, then move on to the plugins and programs that make this easier an free up your time to create better textures.

Crossbow modeling challenge


Crossbows are often left out of most games as a viable weapon of distinction and worth. A few games have used the crossbow with justice and the reference that they should , Bioshock and Halflife. A crossbow is more dangerous than a bullet,because of it's accuracy and has it's ability to penetrate body and helmet armors, so shields, vests and head armor are rendered useless, especially with some thing like this. My task is to model this and make it a viable weapon for the female character model I am working on, marksmen do come in the shape of a female. Additionally I will redesign this to become a collapsible weapon that can be carried easier and allowing for a smaller and more concealable footprint.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

From Mr. to Mrs.



It is surprising what can happen when you take a well modeled low poly head and body a little make up and anatomy changes, can create multiple characters this character went from male to female with a few changes in Max and Photoshop. This is the way to create and army of various characters for any multitude of uses. As you can see I am starting with the texturing first then a sculpt primarily this character was suppose to be a low poly one which is great in the sense that it could also serve as a minimapped character for the higher resolution.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Low poly generic soldier





Low polygon models are successful in giving the most bang for your polycount buck.

Mip-mapping also gives you the same results but with portable and higher resolution capabilities by many of the console and higher GPU and CPU systems creating good looking low resolution models is just as important now as it was in early gaming development. The lower the resolution the more multiple characters and objects you can have on the screen at one time without effecting the speed of the game and or animations. Here is the mod

My goal was to develop the best looking quad model possible that would be easy to port to an engine and have as many textured NPCs in 3ds Max and or an engine such as unreal 3 before the app crashes.

Sound modeling begins with reference so the drawing was taken from concept to photo reference and modeled in 3ds Max to be rigged either in Max or exported into Maya for animation sequences.

Shown here is a solid quad model and reference of the head of the character, later a helmet and or goggles or accessories can replace the facial information and or be changed to create multiple faces with various different looks.

The breakdown of concept drawing and additional reference images will be added to this post so look for all updates and image posts to update here until more solidification of the model and texture maps develop.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Last Keeper Render for a while


This is the render I created it seems to be OK.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Keeper pose



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This is the posed keeper character looks OK but needs at little more tweaking since light source is set it should only be a short time before final render completion. The character will get an additional tension sculpt to strengthen the overall composition of the normal map. By sending the low resolution pose into Z-brush the smoothing looks applied however this model because of the edge flow in quads it is still built using only 5, 187 polygons the difference between the two models is obvious and the low res still yields good results.
The top picture places the thumb in a more pleasing position with ambient occlusion and normal map applied. Next I will apply the textures again and additional maps for the lighting setup that I created with the static pose previously.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Keeper Test Render


Well for those that do not know lighting anything in CG is problematic it takes normally three lights and lots of tweaking. There are formulas to follow some yield better results. Here is the Keeper Character with texture maps applied lit and rendered, although this is a test I have a few more things to do with the character, posing the character is one of them and some additional lighting effects.

Monday, June 1, 2009

T1-80




Model of this gun was tricky to get the look of a fantasy gun but also maintain the look of something futuristic. I took the idea from old flintlock and added the futuristic barrel and other insets that give the appearance of something custom since this is a Princess the gun had to be something that would have been custom made and not the standard weapon types that would fill her world.