Rossco

Hello there, haven't posted here since I finished uni for the summer in May. I ended up winning Best Third Year Animation at our end of year show which I was quite chuffed about! And also, seeing as this was third year, I got my degree, but I also got it with Distinction which I don't think anyone else has which is also great!

Haven't done any 3D work for 3 months though now so just having a wee go at the Ruffian Games application test, looks like they've taken it down off their site now but I'll give it a go anyway and send it off, need to get back in the game before uni starts next month. I'm going back for my honours year but I'm starting to apply to just every games developer in Scotland, and I guess I should branch out to England too. Don't expect to even hear anything back but worth a shot. Gotta start applying some time.

capone_adam, really liked that building front you had started work on a page or so back, did you ever finish the full thing?

Hey guys, just realised I had a PM about this 2 weeks ago, any chance I can get in on the action?

Playing with my mates the other day for the first time in ages, came second in the first game we played, made all the right calls just a bit unlucky, wasn't too mad about that one. Second game though, came second again, all in on flop with AQ suited for a ace high flush, and get beaten by full house on the river, it really hurt!!!

I sat up to 2am last night, hunting for agility and hidden orbs. It's so fun just running around the streets, then climb a building and jump from rooftop to rooftop. I really, really, really hope we'll get a worthy sequel to this. ASAP.

Agility Orb collecting was so fun, I loved it too. What was the news with a sequel, didn't they say for ages no, and then recently that something might happen now?

Sadly, my hard drive died two days ago. I've lost the rig for the mobile suit and everything I didn on the fountain after I finished the high-poly version, so the low-poly version and all the textures.

Man that really sucks! A bit late now, but for future you should store your files on the internet. I use something called DropBox, 2GB of data for free, and you basically set up a folder on your PC where you want, and everything you save in the folder is automatically uploaded to the internet. It's really good, you can access it from any pc again by downloading it from their website again or sync the folder with several PCs so if you upload something at home to the folder, go to work PC and it'll be on that!

Great work Ross!

Cheers!

The more work I see that others have handed in, the more happy I am with mine!

Pretty good 28, I like it!

I got my main project all edited together and finished last night. Spent about 2 hours on the title screen in Photoshop too, none of which helps for the marks but I like to keep with the theme of the video buy doing things like that.

So here's the final version on Youtube, the quality is AWFUL by the way, I can never get good uploads onto youtube, I tried uploading a really good quality .mov file earlier but it crashed at like 95% of the 400MB file! So this one will have to do for now so you get the idea of it all, obviously choose the HQ box to make it slightly better.

That video is great mate, really like it. Considering I'm doing an animation course, 3d character animation is very new to me but I definitely appreciate the time it takes to produce something that good. Walk cycle is fairly easy compared to others like dancing about and all the other movements you've got in there.

I'm now onto animating Master Chief picking up a box and setting it on a table. It's really quite tricky!!

And it's done. Quite a crude compression for Youtube but looks alright. Not too bad for my first attempt learned in one day, I'm happy with it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k05C6haoZhY

Looks a bit like that fatbob, from that still yeh!

Been getting some animation work done while my other project is rendering. Never done any before so today spent ages learning how to and rigging my first character and making the full walk cycle for it too. Spent about 12 hours on this alone today!

No video yet, haven't rendered it but here's a shot of it in the same scene as my other project. Not my model by the way! Not trying to take credit for that, we're allowed to use any model you want.

We have to make the character walk 20 steps, pick up a box and lay it on a table, walk up 3 steps and jump down them, sit on a chair and stand up from it and then lip sync a few seconds of speech!

Really try to manage your time. Remember, you could have a superb, industry-standard Unreal map for one module, but then still fail your degree if you don't do the others.

Well I don't think I'm in danger in failing just yet! I'm alot more competant than the majority of students in my year!

But I obviously it's more important to spend the majority of time on the subject I prefer as I wouldn't want a job doing anything else anyway!

Totally know how you feel mate! I've bene on this modelling project for MONTHS spending so much time on it every day and it's eventually nearing a finish with 6 days to go, I'm trying to get it rendered and edited while still having two other projects do, one as a character animation which I detest and have no idea how to do and one is making a 2D Flash game which I also can't stand and have no idea where to start on how to make it!

I'm just starting to lose interest in it all now and want the year to be over, hate having to do classes that I don't like and don't plan on doing when I leave uni. But that's life!

Although one bit of good news is w got marks back for a piece of animation I done with a car several weeks ago, didn't really put alot of time into it at all but I got 69%, just off an A. Gives me a bit of confidence but obviously doing character animation is totally different, I really can't make it work right at all. Using IK but it's just crap and so am I!

Yeh thats my rant over, think I needed to get that out, I feel better now!

Nice one fatbob! You must be chuffed with that!

I've also got a character to rig and animate now too. Although I hate character animation so I'm gonna probably be rushing through it and handing in a piece of crap.

haha one hour a frame that must have really sucked! I just got home to find 300 frames rendered in what was estimated to be 10 hours but was actually done in 5 so it was rendering some of them at under a minute a frame with two AA passes too! That's much quicker! :-)

Snip

Jesus! No wonder it's creaking! Are the volume lights really that neccesary to your scene?

Well maybe they don't really need to be there but they do what I need them to and I don't know any other way! I wanted the fog style and particle effect given by the lights so had to use them unfortunately! It's looking good to me anyway so I'm happy with it. About half way through rendering now. And it's not due until May 1st so plenty time! :-)

I know it looks massively better, I tried it but the lighting wasn't what I really wanted so had to go with the hard edged shadows. Using 4gb ram on a q6600 quad core. The scene is rendered in about 30 seconds then another 90 for volumetrics, then I have two passes of AA on. It takes alot longer on the several other pcs I've tried! That's for a scene which involved looking through 5 volumetric lights at once though, the other scenes are under two minutes with the less complex lighting. I didn't expect it to be any lower, maybe Lightwave is just has a slow render engine?

Well I don't use Max if thats what you're talking about but I don't think it's precalculated at all ever. Radiosity is a realistic lighting solution where it calculates the bounces of light off numerous objects, so it has to be calculated when you click render. There are various caches and baking solutions but as far as I know, radiosity adds alot of time when done properly to a render.

It was a toss up for Radiosty for the more realistic shadows, or volumetrics for the fog/particle effect and sort of bloom lighting, and I think volumetrics suited the needs more for this time for me.

Looking nice. The next thing I might humble suggest is getting those shadows soft edged with radiosity/ AO . This will increase the render time, but will make a world of difference

I wanted to do radiosity from the start but I really just don't have the time considering the scene I'm rendering just now is going at about 4 minutes a frame! And I'm doing in excess of 3000 frames! If I render it again though for a portfolio in the future then I guess I could use radiosity then when I have no time limit.

Apart from that though I'm really happy with the way it's turning out, I'll be sure to post the final video when it's done.

Yeh I knew that was a problem but didn't really think about it properly, cheers for highlighting. Always helps when other people point out things!

Sorted it now, didn't want to change the lights or add more so just upped the luminosity for the ceiling and it worked a treat I think!

Doing the first set of renders overnight now for a 15 second camera pan. See how it turns out when I get up in the morning, better go well for 450 frames at 2 minutes a frame!

Here's the updated shots with the ceiling fixed.

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I'm in for Saturday 16th already!

So I haven't been around for a while, just been so busy with uni work! No time to even play games, never mind mince about on a games forum!

But I've made loads of progress with my uni assignment in the last 2 months. Modelling is done, texturing is just finished in the last few days and I'm onto setting up the lighting now before setting up some basic camera animation and rendering all before May 1st deadline!

I wanted to get some foggy atmosphere in there but don't really have the time for it anymore so some volumtric lighting will have to do to set the scene.

Here's some various in progress shots from the last 2 months anyway up to todays lighting tests.

Any advice on what to do for camera? I'm doing about 1-2 minutes of video for it, just wanting to show most of the scene with some slow panning camera angles, cutting between sections. Ideally it's to be used as a showreel for potential jobs but I know it's not good enough for that seeing as I still have another year in uni anyway.

There is supposed to be sound in it, but I'm not sure what to do. I know in the grand scheme of things, sound doesnt matter for a portfolio piece as I just want a job in 3D modelling but I'm undecided as to whether I should animate the camera around a soundtrack so it cuts and moves in time with the music or just chuck a soundtrack over the top of it when I'm finished and thats it.

And since we're on the discussion of poly counts, this is 59,000 quad polys, I use Lightwave and work in quads, so I convert to tri's and says it's 133,00! Constantly worked on keeping it as low as possible so it rendered fast. And the final shots with the volumetric lighting and shadows on and 1xAA, render at 20 seconds/frame. So once I ramp up the AA a bit, I'll be happy with 1 minute/frame render which is what I originally intended.

Yeah I've used real life sizes for everything as much as I could, but done what I think looks best for alot of it too! I'm not going too detailed as it's supposed to be for a game level and using Call of Duty as reference, I'm trying to keep in line with it's amount of detail for modelling. That's why alot of the broken pieces etc won't be extremely high detailed. But I'll keep that in mind obviously and try to do the best I can.

Asura, about the 3/4 sided polys, I know this is an issue but it's something we've never been told about in uni which I think is ridiculous to be honest since it's such a big deal obviously so I'm not focusing 100% on that since I can't see them taking it into account too much. Some some things I've made the effort but others, I've not been too sure how to go about it. Can you explain why this is the case anyway? I've always heard that 3/4 sided polys is best but I don't know why exactly. Can they be rendered faster or something with as little sides as possible?

And FozZ, I forgot about that, I was quoting polys and not tri's so yeah I'll need to remember that, it's actually Lightwave I use and not Blender so not sure what Blender quotes by default.

To be honest, when I was doing the single small room, I was a bit underwhelmed and lost at how I would make it look amazing. And I thought it would be better to just go for a much bigger project and I think it's going well so far anyway so maybe come May I'll regret it and wish I'd stuck to the smaller project but so far so good anyway. Almost finished with modelling and will be starting the texturing by this time next week anyway.

I've also started considering using Source engine instead of Unreal but can't find as much literature on it on the internet though so may just have to stick with Unreal. But won't need to think about that for another 3-4 weeks until texturing is complete.

Thanks for the help so far anyway guys!

God this thread is quiet!

Another work in progress for the modelling. Starting to add in all the objects and deforming the scenery now. It's coming along well. Total poly count for the full level so far is at 15,000.

Bottom image there just a quick render with low radiosity to see what it was looking like, hence the grain.

Hey guys, long time not posting in here.

Got results back from last semesters work and I got A's for all my 3D work, came second in the year for one of the modules too out of 70 odd people.

Now started my main project for this semester. It's called 'Vacant'. Was originally supposed to be one fairly small room in a near-future style a la Gears/Doom 3/etc focussing a lot on things being broken,smashed, old, rusted, etc as so often your taught how to model and texture things that look perfect with no imperfections so I'm wanting to show I'm able to take it a bit further than that. I then changed the plan slightly to make a full multiplayer map that I'm planning to implement in Unreal Editor eventually so it's playable as a multiplayer map as that would obviously help as a portfolio piece since thats exactly what I want to get into when I leave uni. I'm not going for such a future-esque feel to it anymore though, keeping it fairly standard modern affair. Lots to do before the fun with UE3 starts though including a massive texture job!

I need to find out from lecturers and general opinion what my options are for textures. I know UnrealEd has a ton of pre-made materials that look fantastic so should I be using them to make my environment look as best as possible or should I go about sourcing and making my own textures?

Anyway, here's some in progress shots of the modelling phase so far after 2 days work on it.

Any opinions/constructive criticism welcome!

And we're back! Just saying there how Steelers QB won't have been on the field for about an hour and 20 minutes when they are next up for offence. Think that could affect him?

Holy fuck! That was awesome, as much as I want Cardinals to win, that was pure class!