Finishing up a new portfolio piece using the updated Marmoset toolbag. It's amazing
Cell shading was added in photoshop >_>
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Dale
Finishing up a new portfolio piece using the updated Marmoset toolbag. It's amazing
Cell shading was added in photoshop >_>
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
3 Day Project #1
Alot of the work I make is done for someone else, or for class, or is a team project. And sometimes I just want to make something for myself, that's fun and quick, and just kinda whimsical.
So, what I'm going to try to do is make a fully fleshed out model within 3 days.
From concepting, base modeling, zbrushing, low poly, and then texturing.
And because I'm already feeling antsy about the time limit and the precious moments I'm wasting, let's get started with concepting!
For this project I have two stipulations: That the concept is based on an existing creature/character, and that it has a broad silhouette. So I'll be doing a dwarf inspired by blizzard's style (I hope)
I use al.chemy to create silhouettes because it's quick. It allows me to use a mirror tool so I can prototype shapes on both sides instantly, and it's shape brush behaves somewhat unpredicatably, so happy accidents occur somewhat more easily as well.
I decided that my best choice was probably going to be the right, bottommost silhouette, so I quickly saved out the image, and then used that as a guide while I drew over it in photoshop to get an understanding of the underlying body.
In this case the front was enough for me to work from, both because I had a pretty good idea of what he would look like from the side, and because of time restrictions. So I went straight ahead with this to the base modeling phase.
This was all my progress from last night, so from start to this point has been about 3 1/2 hours.
So, time to proceed onwards!
***
It is now thursday morning. Admittedly I didn't get as far as I wanted yesterday for a couple of reasons (unrelated to Red Dead Redemption), but first I'll show what I accomplished.
I spent the first half of my day playing around with the concept for the armor on and off. It was primarily inspired by this armor set from WoW:
The design was very similar to the visual requirements I wanted for the model; I wanted the design to feel heavy, boxy, and typically dwarf-like. I also wanted it to be obviously magic-imbued, so I thought about it for a bit, and then came up with this, for the front of the armor.
The glowing pauldrons not only helped establish the magic bit, but it also blocked out the silhouette quite nicely, especially if the characters arms are down (though I later discovered the pauldrons could probably stand to be a bit bigger, for safety reasons)
I also took design elements from the lines for the chest piece, as well as the inscriptions, and the bracers, and then I started blocking out the forms for the armor.
Over the course of several hours, in between RDR, breaks, and playing with my dog I got this far, but after doing the upper body I realized a couple things.
One, working on the model was boring me, which isn't good. I think that this is in part has to do wit the fact that I didn't plan far enough ahead, and I didn't invest enough thought into the planning I'd done.
In the concept its obvious I spent more time on the upper body than I did on the low, and I thought I'd just work out some of the shapes I'd implied with more detail in the modeling stage.
But even though I was trying to make this as fast as possible, I probably could have benefited from having fully thought about all the design elements, and unifying them at one point.
I wasn't very excited about working on the shapes I had down there because they're not very exciting. They're pretty standard. When I resume on this I'll definitely investigate having the same overlapping armor on the greaves as I did for the chest and bracers.
Two, also distracting me was the fact that I didn't have any idea what I was going to do for the back of the model.
Every time I brought a shape in the front around to the back it just sat there, taunting me silently.
While I did eventually make time to figure out what I was going to do for the back, I should have done that from the beginning.
Three, I had no real idea how I was going to make a lot of this in a short amount of time, and to a somewhat professional level. The shape blocking in I thought I could get done in half a day (and if I'd been more focused I feel I could have accomplished that), but it was a difficult and tedious process aligning the strips of polygons so that I could eventually shell them out to use as the armor. I just feel like there's a more efficient process out there for that, and I don't know it, so it's taking me longer than a better modeler might be able to do it.
Another thing was how I was going to handle the inscriptions.
I recently modeled a set of arabic alphabets out, and I was going to trying playing around with those through using FFD . . . but I couldn't imagine that being anything other than a very annoying and long process.
My other thought was to use Zbrush to sculpt in the detail, which would also work, since I wanted them to look inset anyway . . . but I figured that would be even more difficult considering I'd have to make the letters very sharp, and exacting to give them the impression of having been etched in armor. And that level of detail in hard-surface modeling is something I haven't done before.
So, yeah. I bit off a lot more than I could chew. I knew it would be tough going into it, but once I realized the actual details of the process I would have to use, and the elements I'd have to create to get this looking anywhere near nice I started to clue in onto this being bigger than a three day project.
Still, it's been a fun challenge, and it's taught me a couple more things about my limitations as an artist, so I'll ask around and try to figure out how to correct some of the technical problems I was/would have run up against. And I'll go back to the drawing board on the design, redo the area's I think are weak, and hopefully have an overall design that's much better and interesting to create by the end of it.
So, time to switch back to one of my other projects, but more on this one, and other 3 day projects, in the future!
So, what I'm going to try to do is make a fully fleshed out model within 3 days.
From concepting, base modeling, zbrushing, low poly, and then texturing.
And because I'm already feeling antsy about the time limit and the precious moments I'm wasting, let's get started with concepting!
For this project I have two stipulations: That the concept is based on an existing creature/character, and that it has a broad silhouette. So I'll be doing a dwarf inspired by blizzard's style (I hope)
I use al.chemy to create silhouettes because it's quick. It allows me to use a mirror tool so I can prototype shapes on both sides instantly, and it's shape brush behaves somewhat unpredicatably, so happy accidents occur somewhat more easily as well.
I decided that my best choice was probably going to be the right, bottommost silhouette, so I quickly saved out the image, and then used that as a guide while I drew over it in photoshop to get an understanding of the underlying body.
In this case the front was enough for me to work from, both because I had a pretty good idea of what he would look like from the side, and because of time restrictions. So I went straight ahead with this to the base modeling phase.
This was all my progress from last night, so from start to this point has been about 3 1/2 hours.
So, time to proceed onwards!
***
It is now thursday morning. Admittedly I didn't get as far as I wanted yesterday for a couple of reasons (unrelated to Red Dead Redemption), but first I'll show what I accomplished.
I spent the first half of my day playing around with the concept for the armor on and off. It was primarily inspired by this armor set from WoW:
The design was very similar to the visual requirements I wanted for the model; I wanted the design to feel heavy, boxy, and typically dwarf-like. I also wanted it to be obviously magic-imbued, so I thought about it for a bit, and then came up with this, for the front of the armor.
The glowing pauldrons not only helped establish the magic bit, but it also blocked out the silhouette quite nicely, especially if the characters arms are down (though I later discovered the pauldrons could probably stand to be a bit bigger, for safety reasons)
I also took design elements from the lines for the chest piece, as well as the inscriptions, and the bracers, and then I started blocking out the forms for the armor.
Over the course of several hours, in between RDR, breaks, and playing with my dog I got this far, but after doing the upper body I realized a couple things.
One, working on the model was boring me, which isn't good. I think that this is in part has to do wit the fact that I didn't plan far enough ahead, and I didn't invest enough thought into the planning I'd done.
In the concept its obvious I spent more time on the upper body than I did on the low, and I thought I'd just work out some of the shapes I'd implied with more detail in the modeling stage.
But even though I was trying to make this as fast as possible, I probably could have benefited from having fully thought about all the design elements, and unifying them at one point.
I wasn't very excited about working on the shapes I had down there because they're not very exciting. They're pretty standard. When I resume on this I'll definitely investigate having the same overlapping armor on the greaves as I did for the chest and bracers.
Two, also distracting me was the fact that I didn't have any idea what I was going to do for the back of the model.
Every time I brought a shape in the front around to the back it just sat there, taunting me silently.
While I did eventually make time to figure out what I was going to do for the back, I should have done that from the beginning.
Three, I had no real idea how I was going to make a lot of this in a short amount of time, and to a somewhat professional level. The shape blocking in I thought I could get done in half a day (and if I'd been more focused I feel I could have accomplished that), but it was a difficult and tedious process aligning the strips of polygons so that I could eventually shell them out to use as the armor. I just feel like there's a more efficient process out there for that, and I don't know it, so it's taking me longer than a better modeler might be able to do it.
Another thing was how I was going to handle the inscriptions.
I recently modeled a set of arabic alphabets out, and I was going to trying playing around with those through using FFD . . . but I couldn't imagine that being anything other than a very annoying and long process.
My other thought was to use Zbrush to sculpt in the detail, which would also work, since I wanted them to look inset anyway . . . but I figured that would be even more difficult considering I'd have to make the letters very sharp, and exacting to give them the impression of having been etched in armor. And that level of detail in hard-surface modeling is something I haven't done before.
So, yeah. I bit off a lot more than I could chew. I knew it would be tough going into it, but once I realized the actual details of the process I would have to use, and the elements I'd have to create to get this looking anywhere near nice I started to clue in onto this being bigger than a three day project.
Still, it's been a fun challenge, and it's taught me a couple more things about my limitations as an artist, so I'll ask around and try to figure out how to correct some of the technical problems I was/would have run up against. And I'll go back to the drawing board on the design, redo the area's I think are weak, and hopefully have an overall design that's much better and interesting to create by the end of it.
So, time to switch back to one of my other projects, but more on this one, and other 3 day projects, in the future!
May UDK post process effect
So with the May release of UDK, something I ran into a problem with was the new Color Grading/Tone Mapping system.
Now it allows you to blanket a part of your level, or your entire level with a certain look and feel that you can either change with a post process volume or through the world info properties. And this change often has to with the color balance within a scene, and the contrast between lights and darks.
It's like playing with the level and hue settings in photoshop, and it's really powerful because you can change the feel of an environment without really touching your lighting or having to make new assets.
The trouble was I couldn't turn it off. The way I had my lighting set up essentially mean that most of the important assets in my level were shaded in too much darkness, and everything else was overblown. And while the effect was cool for a little while, it completely changed the way my level looked. It essentially changed it from morning to deep evening.
(The effect I didn't want is at the top)
The problem was that HDRTonemapper was activated. The key part of this is the High Dynamic Range, and the best way I can relate the concept is that it's the process which makes the contrast between bright and dark more powerful so that the transition between stepping into a light and dark area in a game mirrors how your eyes react when you step into . . . say sunlight from a dark room, or vice versa.
Turning this off meant becoming introduced with the Post Process Editor, a part of Unreal whose existence I was unaware of until yesterday.
The process for accessing it and turning off the ToneMapping was explained in this post by Notorios P.I.G. over on polycount in UDK Master Thread.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1141125&postcount=1011
And if you don't feel like clicking on the link, the process is:
Go into the content browser, make sure you have your object type set to all, and then search for post process.
Open the UTPostProcess_Console, goto UberPostProcessEffect, scroll down until you see Enable HDRTonemapper, click on the button, and you're good to go.
And the best part is that you can still use the post process volume to alter the color's in your scene, without the contrast being taken to extremes of the spectrum. Which is what I did in my second image.
Just figured I'd post this, since it was that I struggled with, and would still be wondering about if not for the amazing guys at polycount.
Also I'll go into Project Black and White in more detail soon.
Now it allows you to blanket a part of your level, or your entire level with a certain look and feel that you can either change with a post process volume or through the world info properties. And this change often has to with the color balance within a scene, and the contrast between lights and darks.
It's like playing with the level and hue settings in photoshop, and it's really powerful because you can change the feel of an environment without really touching your lighting or having to make new assets.
The trouble was I couldn't turn it off. The way I had my lighting set up essentially mean that most of the important assets in my level were shaded in too much darkness, and everything else was overblown. And while the effect was cool for a little while, it completely changed the way my level looked. It essentially changed it from morning to deep evening.
(The effect I didn't want is at the top)
The problem was that HDRTonemapper was activated. The key part of this is the High Dynamic Range, and the best way I can relate the concept is that it's the process which makes the contrast between bright and dark more powerful so that the transition between stepping into a light and dark area in a game mirrors how your eyes react when you step into . . . say sunlight from a dark room, or vice versa.
Turning this off meant becoming introduced with the Post Process Editor, a part of Unreal whose existence I was unaware of until yesterday.
The process for accessing it and turning off the ToneMapping was explained in this post by Notorios P.I.G. over on polycount in UDK Master Thread.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1141125&postcount=1011
And if you don't feel like clicking on the link, the process is:
Go into the content browser, make sure you have your object type set to all, and then search for post process.
Open the UTPostProcess_Console, goto UberPostProcessEffect, scroll down until you see Enable HDRTonemapper, click on the button, and you're good to go.
And the best part is that you can still use the post process volume to alter the color's in your scene, without the contrast being taken to extremes of the spectrum. Which is what I did in my second image.
Just figured I'd post this, since it was that I struggled with, and would still be wondering about if not for the amazing guys at polycount.
Also I'll go into Project Black and White in more detail soon.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Quarter Finale
Yesterday was my last day at HiRez, a day filled with tears, good pizza, fond memories, and fun work. Well . . . not so much the tears stuff, but everything else took place.
I had a great time interning at the studio; Sean, Jerry, Ben, Adam, and Saman are easily the most talented artists I've ever met, and it's pretty fricking awesome to be around people who have such a passion for what I want to do someday.
***********
My time there taught me a few valuable lessons. Life lessons. Technical lessons are previous posts.
- It's not all about the work.
Being able to interact with people, express yourself both professionally and personally, and just have cool conversations with others is important too.
This is a lesson I didn't really discover until really late. I think I handled being at Hi-Rez a lot like a classroom environment, where I'm given a task and assigned it.
That's not bad, but I think I used the work as an excuse to let my mild shyness control me, and it really didn't need to be that way. If Hi-Rez is any indication, game studios are just filled with good, cool people doing what they love most of the time, and having fun in the process.
- You can't beat the 80 hour work week (as a student)
From day one I was humbled by the amount of work, and effort and time that went into just the art side of Global Agenda, but as time went on, and I got to examine some of the process and refinements and tricks that character artists use to get their jobs done efficiently . . . I just realized how heavy it all was, and how much more experienced everyone there was than me.
I think I study on my own pretty hard, and I've kept a fairly consistent and tight routine over the past 10 years (. . . huh. It's been awhile . . .), but the amount of time I can invest as a student doesn't come close to what these guys do and have done for the past 5 years, every week.
Even being really conservative with numbers, if artists at a studio work say . . . 9 hours a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks out of a year, that's about 2200 hours. If you multiply that over the course of a big game like GA's development cycle, that means that the artists on that game have easily been working 10000 hours on the project, and honing their craft by extension.
And that's assuming that they don't work on weekends, don't do crunch, skip holidays, or work on side projects in their off hours.
That is an incredible amount of time they are pouring into their work, and becoming better in the process. And with attention split between different projects and deadlines, many of may not even relate directly to what they want to do, a student can't come close to competing with that type of investment.
I wouldn't say that's depressing, but it reinforces my opinion that school projects should always take a back seat to personal development as an artist.
- No one is an island
A friend and I are working together on making a not so small side-scrolling game. And what the last 3 months of development have taught me is that:
A) Character Art and Environment Art aren't quite as similar as I led myself to believe
B) It is a tough cookie making a game with one Character Artist/Environment Artist/Rigger/Animator, and one Scripter/Writer/Level designer.
Interning at Hi-Rez has made me realize the power of a team of individuals working together, with each of them specializing, and spending their energy directed at one field. Character Artists focus on what they're good at and love, and make characters. Environment artists do the same, and programmers and scripters, and animators as well.
Nothing would get done in a timely manner, if at all, if there were less people wearing more hats. Which is common sense . . . but it's kind of what happens on school projects and mod teams.
It's made me become more aware of my limitations as an artist, and what I enjoy doing, what I can tolerate doing, and what I hate doing.
***
I guess these are pretty broad concepts, but they're kinda of the things I was learning and taking away frmo my experience there subconsciously. And only looking back do I realize that's kinda what happened.
So yeah.
TL;DR
Great people, Great experience, 10/10. Would totally try again.
I had a great time interning at the studio; Sean, Jerry, Ben, Adam, and Saman are easily the most talented artists I've ever met, and it's pretty fricking awesome to be around people who have such a passion for what I want to do someday.
***********
My time there taught me a few valuable lessons. Life lessons. Technical lessons are previous posts.
- It's not all about the work.
Being able to interact with people, express yourself both professionally and personally, and just have cool conversations with others is important too.
This is a lesson I didn't really discover until really late. I think I handled being at Hi-Rez a lot like a classroom environment, where I'm given a task and assigned it.
That's not bad, but I think I used the work as an excuse to let my mild shyness control me, and it really didn't need to be that way. If Hi-Rez is any indication, game studios are just filled with good, cool people doing what they love most of the time, and having fun in the process.
- You can't beat the 80 hour work week (as a student)
From day one I was humbled by the amount of work, and effort and time that went into just the art side of Global Agenda, but as time went on, and I got to examine some of the process and refinements and tricks that character artists use to get their jobs done efficiently . . . I just realized how heavy it all was, and how much more experienced everyone there was than me.
I think I study on my own pretty hard, and I've kept a fairly consistent and tight routine over the past 10 years (. . . huh. It's been awhile . . .), but the amount of time I can invest as a student doesn't come close to what these guys do and have done for the past 5 years, every week.
Even being really conservative with numbers, if artists at a studio work say . . . 9 hours a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks out of a year, that's about 2200 hours. If you multiply that over the course of a big game like GA's development cycle, that means that the artists on that game have easily been working 10000 hours on the project, and honing their craft by extension.
And that's assuming that they don't work on weekends, don't do crunch, skip holidays, or work on side projects in their off hours.
That is an incredible amount of time they are pouring into their work, and becoming better in the process. And with attention split between different projects and deadlines, many of may not even relate directly to what they want to do, a student can't come close to competing with that type of investment.
I wouldn't say that's depressing, but it reinforces my opinion that school projects should always take a back seat to personal development as an artist.
- No one is an island
A friend and I are working together on making a not so small side-scrolling game. And what the last 3 months of development have taught me is that:
A) Character Art and Environment Art aren't quite as similar as I led myself to believe
B) It is a tough cookie making a game with one Character Artist/Environment Artist/Rigger/Animator, and one Scripter/Writer/Level designer.
Interning at Hi-Rez has made me realize the power of a team of individuals working together, with each of them specializing, and spending their energy directed at one field. Character Artists focus on what they're good at and love, and make characters. Environment artists do the same, and programmers and scripters, and animators as well.
Nothing would get done in a timely manner, if at all, if there were less people wearing more hats. Which is common sense . . . but it's kind of what happens on school projects and mod teams.
It's made me become more aware of my limitations as an artist, and what I enjoy doing, what I can tolerate doing, and what I hate doing.
***
I guess these are pretty broad concepts, but they're kinda of the things I was learning and taking away frmo my experience there subconsciously. And only looking back do I realize that's kinda what happened.
So yeah.
TL;DR
Great people, Great experience, 10/10. Would totally try again.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Week 9
So, I made some time to finish up the low poly for the Steampunk helmet, and somehow managed to cram all the detail I had into 2k triangles. It was pretty brutal for me, and I wish I had just another one or two hundred triangles to work with to get it looking like how I wanted it . . . but meh. I'll accept it as it is. Limits are limits after all.
Most of my day last week was spent just tweaking certain area's of the mesh so that they were at 2k, and putting the finishing touches on the texture map (specifically the specularity, for which I used a unique texture given the many different materials on the helmet).
The only parts I was really unhappy with was the little steam pump I added under the headphones, which because of the shapes I used came out looking really awful in the bake. But Seam didn't seem to mind since players won't really seem them up close, at that angle, or at a high enough resolution to notice the error anyway, so I guess it's okay. I still know my error though . . .
Everything else seemed to be alright. I used crazybump to help make the specular highlights for my hard metallic edges . . . I don't really like doing that because it's not as exact as if I'd painted it myself. But at the same time its a lot faster and the result isn't really that noticeable on the final product, so it's definitely worth it.
That was just the first half of the day though.
I got to have lunch with a bunch of the character team, and Coleman and Brady, which was really cool. I had a whole pizza to myself . . . then I got to work on making the female versions of the helmets I'd been working on. Which honestly was a lot easier and took alot less tmie than I thought it was.
Essentially I just had to resize and move the helmets a bit to fit. And since they all went on the head it was like a 15 minute job for all of them. Except for the steampunk helmet. I had to actually move around the verts and get creative with their placement so that stretching wasn't awfully noticeable in places around the neck. But overall it was still pretty easy, and fun.
Then I ran out of stuff to do, because there's very little I could have accomplished in just two hours anyway. And probably because the internship ends tommorow.
So, I don't know how tommorow's going to go. Hopefully I'll have something to do . . . otherwise I'll just goof around . . . maybe make a steampunk themed armor set and see how far I can go with that before the time's up and I have to say good-bye.
***
Technical stuff:
- Take your normalmap into crazybump and use it to render out a base for your specularity map. It's not going to be perfect, because it'll also have highlights where you don't necessarily want them, but if you invert it photoshop, play with the Levels a bit, so that there's a high contrast, and then set the layer mode to screen . . . you should be on the right track.
- Don't be afraid to sacrifice detail in area's that won't be seen. Or even in area's that will be see if you can get away with it.
For me, to fit the steampunk helmet into the limit, I had to remove some of the mirrored helmets, like the antennae, and just keep one of them on one side. I also had to make it so that area's at the front of the helmet, which won't typically be seen up close in a fast paced game like GA, didn't have as many polygons that I felt that they should have.
I guess . . . I realized that I'm making things for my portfolio, which should look perfect, and have soft polygon budgets. I'm making things for a game, where not following the budgets means that programmers get annoyed because you're being selfish and slowing down the game, and that it's not only okay, but encouraged to cut corners to achieve either the same result, or an art result of similar quality in the name of saving time and resources.
It's a hard lesson.
- Get training dvds. This isn't necessarily technical, but it was incredibly insightful watching James Hawkin's from Epic go into how he concepted out the Hydra from Gears of War.
Anyway, gotta get some sleep for my last day!
Most of my day last week was spent just tweaking certain area's of the mesh so that they were at 2k, and putting the finishing touches on the texture map (specifically the specularity, for which I used a unique texture given the many different materials on the helmet).
The only parts I was really unhappy with was the little steam pump I added under the headphones, which because of the shapes I used came out looking really awful in the bake. But Seam didn't seem to mind since players won't really seem them up close, at that angle, or at a high enough resolution to notice the error anyway, so I guess it's okay. I still know my error though . . .
Everything else seemed to be alright. I used crazybump to help make the specular highlights for my hard metallic edges . . . I don't really like doing that because it's not as exact as if I'd painted it myself. But at the same time its a lot faster and the result isn't really that noticeable on the final product, so it's definitely worth it.
That was just the first half of the day though.
I got to have lunch with a bunch of the character team, and Coleman and Brady, which was really cool. I had a whole pizza to myself . . . then I got to work on making the female versions of the helmets I'd been working on. Which honestly was a lot easier and took alot less tmie than I thought it was.
Essentially I just had to resize and move the helmets a bit to fit. And since they all went on the head it was like a 15 minute job for all of them. Except for the steampunk helmet. I had to actually move around the verts and get creative with their placement so that stretching wasn't awfully noticeable in places around the neck. But overall it was still pretty easy, and fun.
Then I ran out of stuff to do, because there's very little I could have accomplished in just two hours anyway. And probably because the internship ends tommorow.
So, I don't know how tommorow's going to go. Hopefully I'll have something to do . . . otherwise I'll just goof around . . . maybe make a steampunk themed armor set and see how far I can go with that before the time's up and I have to say good-bye.
***
Technical stuff:
- Take your normalmap into crazybump and use it to render out a base for your specularity map. It's not going to be perfect, because it'll also have highlights where you don't necessarily want them, but if you invert it photoshop, play with the Levels a bit, so that there's a high contrast, and then set the layer mode to screen . . . you should be on the right track.
- Don't be afraid to sacrifice detail in area's that won't be seen. Or even in area's that will be see if you can get away with it.
For me, to fit the steampunk helmet into the limit, I had to remove some of the mirrored helmets, like the antennae, and just keep one of them on one side. I also had to make it so that area's at the front of the helmet, which won't typically be seen up close in a fast paced game like GA, didn't have as many polygons that I felt that they should have.
I guess . . . I realized that I'm making things for my portfolio, which should look perfect, and have soft polygon budgets. I'm making things for a game, where not following the budgets means that programmers get annoyed because you're being selfish and slowing down the game, and that it's not only okay, but encouraged to cut corners to achieve either the same result, or an art result of similar quality in the name of saving time and resources.
It's a hard lesson.
- Get training dvds. This isn't necessarily technical, but it was incredibly insightful watching James Hawkin's from Epic go into how he concepted out the Hydra from Gears of War.
Anyway, gotta get some sleep for my last day!
Week 8
I generally spend about 7 to 7 and a half hours at Hirez on wednesday. And I really wish I could spend more. I started finally getting comfortable at the studio after both a gentle pointer from a friend, and a gradual realization that everyone there are just people kicked in.
In the beginning I kinda felt like the outsider hanging out with the cool kids . . . and to the most part that feeling still remains, but that's mostly due to me and my peculiar brand of shyness.
BUT! I'm getting over it. I've talked to all the character art folks, and I'm trying to learn more about what they're doing, and why they do the things that they do for whatever project they're working on.
One major thing that's a part of the pipeline is Kit-bashing, which is essentially when you build up a library of parts and pie of varying levels of generic-ness, and then use them in other projects to speed up the development time.
Like bolts, and plates, buckles, and even larger items like shoes all get used and are often combined to make new art assets. Which has the added benefit of making things cohesive . . . not that that's even a problem given the level of talent between all of them, but it helps them pump out things faster. It also lets them focus on making the cool fun stuff, and just plop in the boring generic stuff from a file in their library.
It's a process I definitely want to incorporate in my own art for presentation purposes . . . but at the same time I probably shouldn't, because I should probably still be practicing making these generic items just so that I'm actually good at doing them first.
***
- Besides Kit-Bashing I got to have a look at alot of the training material that they have for a variety of subjects, like environment modeling, character and creature modeling, and a bunch of tutorials for the Unreal Engine. Especially on Cascade, which I'm still struggling to wrap my head around.
Whenever I come to Sean's desk he always has an amazing particle effect playing that he's been working on, and it's incredible the variation of things that you can do with just the particle editor is.
- I also spent the week detailing the Steampunk helmet. I added some light touches to leather straps, so that it actually looks like they fold in places, and I added some engravings to the metallic parts of the headphone, and in between the goggles. I made goggles for the helmet btw.
At this point the Steampunk helmet's ready to go to the low poly phase, so . . . yeah.
In the beginning I kinda felt like the outsider hanging out with the cool kids . . . and to the most part that feeling still remains, but that's mostly due to me and my peculiar brand of shyness.
BUT! I'm getting over it. I've talked to all the character art folks, and I'm trying to learn more about what they're doing, and why they do the things that they do for whatever project they're working on.
One major thing that's a part of the pipeline is Kit-bashing, which is essentially when you build up a library of parts and pie of varying levels of generic-ness, and then use them in other projects to speed up the development time.
Like bolts, and plates, buckles, and even larger items like shoes all get used and are often combined to make new art assets. Which has the added benefit of making things cohesive . . . not that that's even a problem given the level of talent between all of them, but it helps them pump out things faster. It also lets them focus on making the cool fun stuff, and just plop in the boring generic stuff from a file in their library.
It's a process I definitely want to incorporate in my own art for presentation purposes . . . but at the same time I probably shouldn't, because I should probably still be practicing making these generic items just so that I'm actually good at doing them first.
***
- Besides Kit-Bashing I got to have a look at alot of the training material that they have for a variety of subjects, like environment modeling, character and creature modeling, and a bunch of tutorials for the Unreal Engine. Especially on Cascade, which I'm still struggling to wrap my head around.
Whenever I come to Sean's desk he always has an amazing particle effect playing that he's been working on, and it's incredible the variation of things that you can do with just the particle editor is.
- I also spent the week detailing the Steampunk helmet. I added some light touches to leather straps, so that it actually looks like they fold in places, and I added some engravings to the metallic parts of the headphone, and in between the goggles. I made goggles for the helmet btw.
At this point the Steampunk helmet's ready to go to the low poly phase, so . . . yeah.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Week 7
Week 7 had me starting on my most interesting project yet.
Sean had a concept and an idea of a leather cowl that players would wear, that would be further adorned by steampunk headphones and possibly goggles, because the subject is awesome, and the contrast with the high-tech nature of the rest of Global Agenda is pretty cool as well.
So, I thought up a design that was kinda similar to the above picture and started modeling. Shortly thereafter I realized that I had no idea how to effectively create the strips of leather that would make up the cowl, without taking an insanely long time to create. So, I referenced one of my favorite game modelers, who I know primarily as slipgatecentral aka Vadim Bakhlychev.
His tutorial allowed me to come up with a slight modification of the process so that I could quickly create designs for the leather strips, without spending hours pulling and pushing verts into position, only to discover that I didn't like how something was looking. Which happened by the way.
***
- So, what I learned was how to use retopology technique's to quickly create detailed geometry layouts that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do without pulling my hair out. Which is essentially what retopology is for, in this case, instead of using it to create a low polygon mesh, I was using it to create the base for my high poly mesh.
- What I did was I subdivided the base head that is used in the game, exported that out, and started playing around with flow of the leather strips.
In retrospect it would have been smarter to simply take a screencap of the head and then draw over that whatever designs I thought of until I settled on one.
- After some trial and error, I settled on a style that I wanted, that had the strips flowing in one smooth, sweeping direction down the skull, with a hard spine for the cowl at the back and along the top of the skull.
- After that I took the strips back into 3dsmax, defined the initial hard edges, and put a shell modifier on them.
After that it was simply a matter tweaking the mesh so that all the strips overlapped properly.
- I also began working on the headphones, which was another new experience for me because I began experimenting with heavy instancing of repeated elements, and the use and creation of very fine details. I still have a lot of stuff I need to learn about hard surface modeling though. Personally, when to create to create floating geometry as opposed to modeling details onto a mesh has been something I've struggled to learn :/
Sean had a concept and an idea of a leather cowl that players would wear, that would be further adorned by steampunk headphones and possibly goggles, because the subject is awesome, and the contrast with the high-tech nature of the rest of Global Agenda is pretty cool as well.
So, I thought up a design that was kinda similar to the above picture and started modeling. Shortly thereafter I realized that I had no idea how to effectively create the strips of leather that would make up the cowl, without taking an insanely long time to create. So, I referenced one of my favorite game modelers, who I know primarily as slipgatecentral aka Vadim Bakhlychev.
His tutorial allowed me to come up with a slight modification of the process so that I could quickly create designs for the leather strips, without spending hours pulling and pushing verts into position, only to discover that I didn't like how something was looking. Which happened by the way.
***
- So, what I learned was how to use retopology technique's to quickly create detailed geometry layouts that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do without pulling my hair out. Which is essentially what retopology is for, in this case, instead of using it to create a low polygon mesh, I was using it to create the base for my high poly mesh.
- What I did was I subdivided the base head that is used in the game, exported that out, and started playing around with flow of the leather strips.
In retrospect it would have been smarter to simply take a screencap of the head and then draw over that whatever designs I thought of until I settled on one.
- After some trial and error, I settled on a style that I wanted, that had the strips flowing in one smooth, sweeping direction down the skull, with a hard spine for the cowl at the back and along the top of the skull.
- After that I took the strips back into 3dsmax, defined the initial hard edges, and put a shell modifier on them.
After that it was simply a matter tweaking the mesh so that all the strips overlapped properly.
- I also began working on the headphones, which was another new experience for me because I began experimenting with heavy instancing of repeated elements, and the use and creation of very fine details. I still have a lot of stuff I need to learn about hard surface modeling though. Personally, when to create to create floating geometry as opposed to modeling details onto a mesh has been something I've struggled to learn :/
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