Rashad's Art Web Log

Dale

2010-07-18T19:38:00.005-04:00

Finishing up a new portfolio piece using the updated Marmoset toolbag. It's amazing
Cell shading was added in photoshop >_>

3 Day Project #1

2010-06-01T21:02:00.007-04:00

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!

May UDK post process effect

2010-06-01T12:33:00.004-04:00

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.

Quarter Finale

2010-05-27T13:02:00.002-04:00

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.

Week 9

2010-05-26T00:43:00.003-04:00

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!

Week 8

2010-05-26T00:26:00.003-04:00

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.

Week 7

2010-05-25T20:16:00.004-04:00

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 :/

Week 6

2010-05-25T19:46:00.004-04:00

Week 6 was a weird day for me. I worked on finishing up the Safari Pith in the morning, which was just me doing some final touch ups on the texture, and then I started on the Beret flair item. Which was doomed from the start for a number of reasons.

Given that the hair is a model that's replaced whenever a characters a piece of headgear, we have to design all of the headgear to disguise the fact that there is no hair under it. This means leaving enough room in the silhouette to block a casual glance from the player's viewing angle at the back of the head or neck.

Since I've made hats and helmets I hadn't run into an issue with being able to hide the "no-hair" thing.
This changed with the beret.

This is what I generally think of when I imagine a beret:

But my design for GA meant changing the design so it could more fully cover the back of the head. This had the unintended side-effect of making it look nothing like a Beret. It was too long and narrow, and the fabric didn't fall in any kind of realistic or even slightly believable manner. So Sean decided it was best to put the idea to sleep. Permanently.
And then we moved on to making the Steampunk headgear. Which I'll go into in the next update because I essentially scrapped all my work at the end of the day. Because it was awful.

***
This week wasn't so much a technical learning experience as it was a . . . social one?

- It's important to always check in with the art director to make sure you're on the right track for what you're doing, and you don't waste time making something you may have to redo. But at the same time it's important to balance that with having autonomy and not having your hand held all the time I guess? If that makes sense.

Week 5

2010-05-25T19:34:00.002-04:00

Week 5 at Hirez saw me further refining the process that I used to make the flair items I was working on, while also dealing with unique problems having to do with the shapes of the item I was working on.
I was also still pretty shy at the time. At my last internship the focus was more on practicing and working on my own, and not really interacting and learning, so I kinda fell into that mindset at Hirez for the first couple of weeks. And looking back I didn't really have to; they're a bunch of really cool guys who are insanely talented at what they do.

***

Anyway, that week was the Safari Pith project, and it was difficult because the flair item ideally had to be one mesh, and fit under 1k triangles, but it possessed several elements that broke the silhouette and would make baking difficult if I didn't handle it properly.

To help out with that I retopologized the hi-poly of the model so that the low poly and hi-poly matched up as closely as possible, which is pretty standard stuff.
What makes the process interesting each time is that each model is different and presents its own unique challenges, like the weird silhouette elements in the buckles across the front of the hat.

Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be able to come back and post the actual model itself, as it should be going into the next patch for Global Agenda, which is awesome :)

Hirez Week 4

2010-04-25T17:43:00.002-04:00

Week 4 was kinda uneventful.
Given the rather painfully short period that I can be in the studio, I often only get partially done with the models that I'm working on, and so I often take whatever project I'm doing home to finish it up.
Unfortunately I either forgot, or saved the wrong version of critical files so that when I came into Hi-Rez, I had to work on something else. Which is why last week I had two models done on Wednesday instead of just the one, which were the Desert Boonie (fully textured, and final model files) and the Desert Cap, which was also fully textured.
That was the week leading up to midterms, so to finish before I came in on Wednesday I really mastered the process I've been using to do these models. I explained in the last post everything up till the texturing stage, so I go more in depth about what I learned about this last week.

***

- I baked out the normal maps and ambient occlusion for the hats first, so that I could use the AO as a base for the texture, and the normal maps to make sure that my forms fit with silhouette I'd created for the hats.

- After baking I assembled a couple of the images that I'd been using to depict the fabric of the hats. Most of the pictures just came from cgtextures.com and were large images of tight and small cloth weaving. One was an image of clean fabric, which would give the basic pattern, the other fabric was darker and filthy, since the hats were meant to look beat up. These I put in a layer underneath the AO, so that they were shadowed, and already my work was half done.

- I then found a camouflage texture and overlayed that as well.

- I cloned some of the areas, so that there were only a few places of high contrast, tweaked the values of the layers so that I got the color balance that I wanted, then used the clean fabric layer to create a normal map in Crazybump. Then I overlayed this normalmap atop my original, lowered the opacity, and this gave me a pretty subtle fabric effect

Total creation time is about an hour and a half. Including the baking and compositing of the initial maps. I might also add some light areas of color if I think the texture is too monochromatic.
I also don't have to worry about a specular map; since the hats aren't that important I learned that it's sometmies better to just use the diffuse texture, and combine it with a color constant, then apply the result to the specular fields.

Hirez Week 3

2010-04-25T17:28:00.002-04:00

Week 3 actually happened a couple weeks, so I'll be spending some time catching up on what I did and learned as I go forward this week.

So, my responsibility as of now is to be working on flair items that you can find in the desert or will be granted as a quest reward, and week 3 saw me primarily working on a Boonie.

I've since then finished it, but it was a fun project while I was working with it, and the second cap that I had to do. I wasn't really used to making specific items and giving myself a large detail limit on them; pretty much till now, when I've made a character all the elements of their design are fitted together on one texture sheet. But then again I haven't had to design character's so that they could be varied, so . . .
Anyway, now it's pretty easy. The boonie hammered home the process that I wanted to use for the rest of the hats, and it's thus far been pretty effective and speedy.
- Set up the base mesh for the high poly
- Sculpt the high poly
- Retopologize the high poly to make the low poly
- Set up the uv's based on the seams that I made on the sculpt
- Texture

And texturing has its own set of processes that I'll talk more in depth about next time.

***

-That week I learned the import process for getting a character into Unreal . . . well, more specifically a hat. It requires that you rig a bone to the piece that you want to import, and then send it through actorX.
ActorX creates a package that unreal can import, and then the rest of the process is similar to setting up the materials for a static mesh. The only notable difference is that we have to make TextureParameters, instead of just TextureSamples, so that we can change out the texture through kismet or code if needed (for customization purposes)

For Fun!

2010-04-02T15:59:00.007-04:00

I haven't done enough characters of late, so I'm taking up a couple different character related projects.

One is a female replacement for the characters in Team Fortress. Valve's art direction for this project has always fascinated me, and it's amazing the amount of thought and design went into making the character exactly as they did. So I'm gonna try and follow in their footsteps as far as making design decisions.
Dunno for sure which I'm gonna do, but I'm leaning towards the Spy and Scout.

Going from their character models (the max files for which they released here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1306131/TF2CharacterSourceFiles/TF2CharacterSourceFiles.rar ) there are a couple restrictions I'm going to be facing no matter which one I go with.

I'm not really an animator, so that cuts out the need for making my own rig, but it also means that I have to build the character around the existing rig.
I also need to develop a silhouette that's similar to the existing class I choose, but different enough that you can tell that it's a female version of the character at a distance and up close.
Later on that also means considering color placement to attract attention to the important parts of the body (i.e. the area holding the gun)

I also want to incorporate some sort of story into each of the character's design. The Meet the Team shorts definitely added a bunch of personality to the individual characters, but before that you could still infer alot of things based on the character's dress and voice.
E.g. The Scout is a mail runner from New York who likes Baseball, and the Spy is a French agent who takes after James Bond

Another project I've been playing around in my head with for a long time, is a Bastila Shan model. Bastila being one of the leading characters in Knights of the Old Republic. Kotor was one of my favorite games for a really long time, and having replayed it last year (and considering doing so again in the near future), I really want to pay homage to one of my favorite character's from it.
There's not that much room in the design for creative interpretation, but I can play around with the style some, and I think I'm still missing a really strong proportionally and anatomically correct character from my portfolio. So I'll probably be aiming for realism.

Here's what I got on her so far:
Still some work to do; she doesn't really feel like Bastila, and even though it mostly a block in of shapes, it's not all that realistic either.

A project I've already started on, and is actually a continuation of a kid I never got past the concept phase for 2 years ago.

I wanted him to have a clear character, and easily discernable ability from the start. The hoodie is magic, and when he puts it on it essentialy takes on a life of its own. And a large part of the back of his head, which I thought was a neat use of contrary shapes.
The sword was supposed tie into the hoodie's personality as well, and all three were going to play off one another.

He's fun, and I've already learned a bunch about making specific materials. I also learned that I've gotten into a process for making textures for my models, and I'm not really getting any better. So I'm hoping to change that with the other two projects.
Not too happy about the way I handled the hair though. Hmm.

It's gonna be tough making time for these. At least once a week I try to steal some time away from school projects to work on personal stuff and have some me time with the Cintiq's. Between making a board game, an Unreal level, and my internship it's a lot.

There are not enough art projects at art school :(

Hirez Day 2

2010-04-01T00:41:00.004-04:00

Wednesday was pretty productive :)
I finally worked out a schedule I think is going to allow me to be up at the studio at least 1 full day out of the week, which is pretty awesome. First time was wednesday.

I got to pick out a project to work on for the day, which happened to be a combat helmet. It's not something I've ever modeled before, so it was a fun experience blocking out the base mesh as fast as possible, and then moving on to the sculpting bits.
Plenty of seams and folds to play with in the design, and then I got to add in a lot of wear and tear on the fabric.
It took the better part of an afternoon, but Sean said it looked fine, and I think it came out pretty okay.

***

Tech stuff I learned:

- It's important to maximize UV space, especially for the helmet's I'm working on. no matter what texture resolution I start at, a 256 is what's going to end up in game.
- To facitilitate this, I'll be splitting up my UV's wherever possible. The best way to do this is to hide the UV seams inside of the real seams.
- If it's unavoidable, you can have a seam in a more visible area, but this creates two problems:
1) any color difference between the edges of the seams is obvious on the object, and difficult to correct (although there's an interesting technique for doing so that I'm going to experiment with here: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=71467)
2) In Unreal, if you have a high or noticeable spec value on an object, uv seams become really obvious. In my case I can get away having a seam across the top of the helmet if I wanted, because cloth has a low spec value, but if it was something shiny, the transition would have been really noticeable.

Sean also sent me a link to a really fascinating set of brushes for Zbrush from The Gnomon Workshop, that allow you to really quickly sculpt in seams on clothing. You can find them . . . here: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/category/168/Free-ZBrush-Tutorials
Just go down to "How to Create An Alpha for Clothing Seams" and you'll find them under Clothing brush Set A
There really awesome in conjunction with the Selwy Brushes: http://www.selwy.com/2009/zbrush-clothes-tutorial/

That is all for now!

2010-03-27T12:49:00.001-04:00

Funny. I've always thought about coming back to this thing and starting a bunch of update things and such on a daily basis but I never really got around to it. Ah well.
I could do a year in review thing, and spend the next three hours giving a summary of the events of the past year OR I could jump right into stuff as they are now.

. . .

. . .

I'll do the latter.
I officially started my, er . . . Special Project at Hirez Studios yesterday. It was me and four other interns also from SCAD (getting my MA at SCAD now, btw). We didn't really DO anything related to what we're planned to do and learn, but we did spend a couple hours getting acquainted/re-acquainted with Global Agenda, which is alot different from how I remember, but still pretty fun.
Sean McBride also introduced us to what we'd be doing there, like making neat hats, and heads, and possibly weapons. Which would be pretty cool since I've barely done weapons, and they have some really neat designs and workflows for creating them.
Now I just have to work out a schedule that allows me to be there all day!

2009-01-03T10:51:00.001-05:00

New character in the queue; she's a companion for the one below.

2008-12-30T21:13:00.000-05:00

More or less finished this girl. Sits around 8500 polygons. Still some optimizing to do before I port her into unreal for some render tests, and create her companion
Also found an incredible realtime viewport shader for 3dsmax, created by Wang Jing (http://rtshaders.deviantart.com) which I decided to use.

Happy Birthday Dad

2008-10-15T20:27:00.000-04:00

Been doing a lot of art work in my free time, even though I haven't been posting it up here. Much of it is still work in progress, but take a look and give me your opinions

Also, happy birthday dad :)

Afternoon Sculpting

2008-07-01T23:50:00.000-04:00

Keepin' in practice

June update

2008-06-27T14:11:00.000-04:00

Dominance War 3

2008-03-07T14:29:00.000-05:00

I've been quiet the past couple weeks from focusing on the dominance war and moving into a new place.

EDIT: My entry is gonna be a female tribal void summoner. Moves fast, relies mostly on her speed and the strength of her summon to keep her safe. The armor is made up of shards from destroyed technology, now bereft of their original strength, but imbued with the magic of the current age.

I'm more or less finished with her design now; might try some animal or tribal patterning for her cape, but I think I'm ready to move on to finishing off her summon's design.

I'm probably not going to make the deadline, but on the other hand, I'm doing this for fun, so its not that important I submit it anyway.

Project Valkyrie Released

2008-02-06T12:31:00.000-05:00

We had our first release for Project Valkyrie a couple days ago. If you're into Metroid-ish type sci-fi Death Match gaming, and you possess functioning arms, eyes, and a copy of Valve's Orange Box, you'd enjoy checking it out.

http://www.project-valkyrie.com

Keep an eye out for us too, as we've got a lot planned for the coming months!

Tutorial: Normal Map Correction

2008-02-06T12:01:00.000-05:00

Sometimes in baking my normal maps, I've found that the lighting and normals information on the lowpoly

got carried over into the texture, as seen here.

Now this is my fault. Normal maps are supposed to take the advantage of the normals on a high poly model, bake those into a texture, and transfer said normals onto the low poly via the texture, giving it the same smoothshaded look as the high poly. At least that's the theory.

The reality is that, if you bake your high poly onto the low poly, and the low poly doesn't have enough detail, some of the smoothing errors you wanted to get rid of with the normal map are going to carry over anyway, and the illusion of their being more detail than their actually is will be broken.

Because I have so little detail in the low poly, and so many triangles in that one area, they're all catching light in different ways. In addition, I have some pretty sharp changes in angle for that area of the model, which isn't helping. However, I want all the polygons to be lit uniformly.

I can correct this in two ways, and the first is altering the smoothing groups, or Hardness and Softness of the edges. By giving the main body, and then the inset area's different smoothing groups, I'm forcing the normals in certain area's to calculate their lighting differently, thus giving the model a hard edge without use of the normal map.

[Smoothing groups defined on the model, override the normals that are transferred in from a texture, which is why most models have one uniform smoothing group when a normal is applied to them.]

The second correction is going into the normal map, and painting out the errors, and this can be done in two ways.
You can paint in RGB (color) mode on the normal map, or in Photoshop, you can go to channels, and paint in the individual red, green and blue channels (greyscale) of the normal map.
Painting in RGB is somewhat more complicated because of way the colors express different hardness and changes in direction for the normals. Its the faster of the two solutions, and if you're meticulous, or just have large swatches to correct, might be better suited.
Painting on the greyscale channels breaks everything down to a much simpler level. White is up, black is down, and its easier to match the tonal differences in a given area, so that you don't accidentally create a bump, or perturbation in the normal map where there shouldn't be.
On the other hand, there are three of these, which means if you make an adjustment on one, you'll likely be repeating those adjustments on the other two. And because they all represent different Direction for the normals, copying and pasting work from one channel to another is unwise.

Going from this

to this

was essentially me using the base color (RGB: 128,128,255) and some minor variations of it, and using a hard brush to paint over the parts in error. For the lower eyes I retained the hard brush, and grabbed colors around the radius of each eye to paint out the errors, then smoothed the results with the smudge tool. I could have also used a soft brush, but pen pressure wasn't working at the time for my wacom.

Hope's this helps you guys pump out better normal maps.

Fin.

Helpful/Vital Resources:
http://poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow_3.htm

PV Hover Drone

2008-01-26T23:28:00.000-05:00

Project Valkyrie's having a release in the exceedingly near future, and you're invited. Head on over to www.project-valkyrie.com to see what you'll be getting yourself into.
In the meantime, a bit of something I've been working for our RC

I still got alot to learn about hard edged modeling. Getting there though, haha!

Wip Sculpt

2008-01-10T13:32:00.000-05:00

Just a practice session in Zbrush I'm thinking of taking farther. Very much a work in progress. And those ears are massive

Updated

FANART?!?!

2008-01-09T00:05:00.000-05:00

Ichigo, from Bleach. 1000 triangles, and he'll end up with a 512x512 diffuse map.
4 hours of work, and modeled in Max

Portfolio

2008-01-08T13:23:00.000-05:00

Here's a couple of stuff I've worked on in the past year that I am (or once was) proud to put my name to.
Most of it is personal work, or for a contest, but the Metroid-ish stuff are made for an awesome Source mod I'm working on called Project Valkyrie (www.project-valkyrie.com), and those were based on the concepts of David Boyle and Jordan Ratzlaff (check them both out here: http://www.jordanratzlaff.com and http://www.dmboyledesign.com/ )

Big Huge Creature

Project Valkrie

Game Artisans Naruto Contest

Game Artisans Mini Creature Comp

Misc Works