The 3D Thread

[Asura]

hey not bad i guess, not too stylistic texture wise. Wish I'd done that test for them, would have been a good portfolio piece

Thanks The textures were photographic and the model was to go into a PGR game, so it had to be as realistic as possible. That was difficult as all the photos were taken from ground level and they had to be unique textures; no tiling.

[Rossco]

Hey Asura, is that for Bizarre Creations? Was looking at them yesterday, gonna give it a shot too!

What ever happened to your Gears of War style project? Was really interested in that too.

[utero2001]

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.

the way its going, Dundee is the place to be for games devs

unfortunately we filled our last placement at Ruffian yesterday. But regardless that art test is great for practice. If you do have a shot at it, think "stylised"

[Rossco]

Yeh Dundee is looking good place to be right now.

I didn't know you worked for Ruffian, is this a new job you just started? What's your exact position there mate? Are you working on CD2 then?

I've never really went for a stylised texture style before but I am going to give it a shot, started the modelling last night so a wee bit to go yet before the texture stage.

[Asura]

Hey Asura, is that for Bizarre Creations? Was looking at them yesterday, gonna give it a shot too!

What ever happened to your Gears of War style project? Was really interested in that too.

I lost it all in a catastrophic loss of data - I had two hard drives and a USB hard drive crash less then 5 days apart. I lost almost all of it, and with starting a new job around the same time, couldn't bring myself to go back to it.

[Rossco]

Oh yeh I remember you saying that now, what a shame.

This Ruffian test is taking AGES to model. I know for sure I'm doing it the long winded way and there must be a quicker way of modelling the windows but I'll manage for now until I work out a faster way.

[utero2001]

Yeh Dundee is looking good place to be right now.

I didn't know you worked for Ruffian, is this a new job you just started? What's your exact position there mate? Are you working on CD2 then?

I've never really went for a stylised texture style before but I am going to give it a shot, started the modelling last night so a wee bit to go yet before the texture stage.

I'm an environment artist there, I started about 5 months ago. Working on Crackdown 2, its a great project, great people to work with.

Stylised doesn't have to be hard, its just refreshing to employers when you don't go for the gritty realistic texture sets. I looked at CD1 and old cell shaded games for my test model.

[utero2001]

Oh yeh I remember you saying that now, what a shame.

This Ruffian test is taking AGES to model. I know for sure I'm doing it the long winded way and there must be a quicker way of modelling the windows but I'll manage for now until I work out a faster way.

it shouldn't be too hard if you plan it out more, build 1 section and copy it around. It shouldn't take more than a few hours to model. Easy way of getting the windows in is inset or bevel and selected face and extrude it inwards. Its all good practice.

[Rossco]

Yeah it's good for a change I suppose as I spent my whole third year project trying to be realistic as possible so bringing a bit of colour and style to the mix will be interesting. I have been extruding inwards for the windows but I feel it's tricky getting all the polygons partitioned off to be extruded and I'm rubbish and getting good 3 and 4 sided polygons, everything looks a mess on my wireframes I feel. And I often end up with a big poly that had countless sides that seems to take forever to fix.

Must be fantastic working on Crackdown 2 though, so jealous! I really need to put all my spare time and effort into this now as I don't want to lose the opportunity to work in the games industry and setlle for something less.

[Number 28]

Probably took me more like 5-6 hours. Bit rusty.

Cba to map it though...ugh.

[Capwn]

Looks great, if anything certainly stick it in your portfolio.

I'm really slowly getting there. I have like the worst possible setup here, wobbling table, most painful chair in the world, my tiny A6 wacom drivers are messed up no matter how much I reinstall and causes these random little jumps every few seconds, can't open max and photoshop at same time so can't keep checking my changes.

So I'm sort of doing it in little 30-60min chunks here and there. Thankfully I can afford to do that as it's just portfolio work.

[Number 28]

Ha, can't really put it in a portfolio without textures. It's just a block with lines down it.

[Capwn]

Ha, can't really put it in a portfolio without textures. It's just a block with lines down it.

whaat?? don't be daft it's showing that you can take a concept and recreate it.

[Number 28]

But, but, it's not finished is it. I suppose if I was going for a modeling job, then ok, but how many of those are around that don't expect you to create textures too? Not to mention all that normal map malarky. Whatever the case, it's not very impressive anyway is it?

[Rossco]

Hmmm I agree with 28, not many places will look upon that as alot of work. I'm not putting you down by the way Number 28, as your model looks far better than mine so far! Just agreeing with you, would need to be fully textured impressively in my opinion to be worthy enough.

[Number 28]

Exactly. Anyone can model anyway, mapping's where the real challenge comes in. There's a million and one ways to do it, and I for one cba to figure out which is best.

[Rossco]

Haha I do enjoy it so I will try this plus I really want a job when I finish uni so need to have good work to show!

You are right though, mapping can be very tricky, I think capones work on this particular piece is spot on, very professional looking.

[bingowings]

Probably took me more like 5-6 hours. Bit rusty.

Cba to map it though...ugh.

this is the kind of thing i do for a living - not mahoosive skyscrapers, but architectural modelling. with a model like that i would have to knock out all the windows and replace them with separate panels, add mullions, frames, door details, the whole bit. sometimes it can a fucking pain in the arse as the .dwg will all be exported in one colour, which then entails 4 hours of picking it apart and placing everything onto new layers.

a couple of quick plastic renders for a pedestrian bridge that is being built on the site of the new Swedish national stadium and The Mall of Scandinavia, of which we're one of the architects. designed by me (with some help from one of the achitects) woo!

[Number 28]

See, something like that I wouldn't mind doing. I mean, if you were texturing that, as long as it doesn't take a year to render, you're pretty much free to use whatever aren't you?

[bingowings]

there are some constraints - the supports are concrete, the people-catchers along each side are toughened glass, and the walkway is also concrete. we discussed what the other materials should be but nothing is definite, except maybe the vertical uprights and handrails which will have some kind of reflectance. but with architectural rendering, textures and the illusion of texture is the key. you don't need super-detailed maps because 99% of images are going to show the building(s) at a distance. you can get away with so much if you plan ahead.

we use Maxwell Render, which despite its mind-buggering complexity renders things pretty quickly and V.2 is going to be 100% quicker in some cases. i did maybe five views of that bridge and set them up on my work machine which is just a regular Core 2 Duo, 4gb workstation. left it running overnight and they were done 16 hours later. of course, that was using a sky dome with a plastic texture, if you start adding reflections and natural light into the mix the renders will take a lot longer.

with Maxwell you need to spend a lot of time setting it up correctly - we did two elevations of the Mall of Scandinavia and ran them through Maxwell. each image was roughly 12000 pixels wide. the model contained our MoS model, the complete arena, the hotel and a lot of other detail. i think when i imported the entire thing, it was running at nearly 10 million faces - out of all that surface area we used maybe 10 distinct textures - two types of glass, a couple of metals for the facade, some simple plastic, Maxwell's default flat, grey material, and an HDR sky. chucked it onto our 8-core rendering beast and let it burn away for 3 days solid - at maximum capacity. the results were shit-hot despite only having a handful of textures. all the shadows were there, the depth, and the reflections. after that we photoshopped the absolute fuck out of it by adding people, shopfronts, cars - all the crap that would take years to render. with architectural rendering it all comes down to trickery and lies - less is more. as they say.

[Asura]

Probably took me more like 5-6 hours. Bit rusty.

Cba to map it though...ugh.

Can't be arsed to map it?

That'll take max an hour to UV, and it'll be a joy to texture. Buildings usually are, lots of flat areas. Big blank canvas.

[Number 28]

Yeah, it'd be easy if you could afford every poly to have its own UV space, like your Bizarre piece. As it is, you've got one 1024 map to cover the lot, so you have to decide how to divide that map, when to tile, when not to tile, what to afford where, etc. Deceptively difficult. There's also the fact the building could be made exactly to that concept with about 3500 tris, so there's 1500 left to play with. It's not half as straight forward as it looks.

[FozZ]

In preparation for zspheres2 and the awesomeness that appears possible with them, I figured I'd fire up ZBrush. Haven't looked at it since first trying during some downtime last year, and never used ZSpheres. Anyhoo, here are my efforts so far after 2.5hours

Needs way more detail adding, and then a lot res cage building and unwrapping, but I'll be taking this right through to a finished "in-game" asset (hoping to be able to do some character stuff at work, so it's good practise)

[Capwn]

In preparation for zspheres2 and the awesomeness that appears possible with them, I figured I'd fire up ZBrush. Haven't looked at it since first trying during some downtime last year, and never used ZSpheres. Anyhoo, here are my efforts so far after 2.5hours

Needs way more detail adding, and then a lot res cage building and unwrapping, but I'll be taking this right through to a finished "in-game" asset (hoping to be able to do some character stuff at work, so it's good practise)

That's really nice FozZ, well done. Only real crits would be neck, legs, and arms which don't seem to be that defined. The base for the legs/arms seem ok but there are no defined elbow etc. Neck is the main issue though, the connection looks unnatural.

[Capwn]

dp

[Asura]

I'd love to give ZBrush a try. Never used it; the tutorials always seemed so long-winded and I don't even regard myself as a master at MAX yet.

[Rossco]

Capone, did you retract that last post or something? I seen the pictures you uploaded, looks fantastic texture work, really impressive. Have you used any actual photographs for it or do you produce them completely from scratch?

I eventually finished the modelling yesterday, started it again as I was doing it all wrong with lots of polys having more than 4 sides, all sorted now though and I managed it in about 2 hours an have space for about 2000 more tris.

Will start texturing now though I think this is where I will struggle. Don't have alot of proper texturing experience or teaching especially for something stylised like this. But I shall try!!

[utero2001]

Can't be arsed to map it?

That'll take max an hour to UV, and it'll be a joy to texture. Buildings usually are, lots of flat areas. Big blank canvas.

to be honest, when i did my model, it took a few hours to model then a night to sort the unwrapping UVs, then another night or two to finalise the textures. Thats gotta be my weakest most time consuming area of expertise.

[utero2001]

ah just re-read my old post, that doesn't make much sense, I suck at UV unwrapping basically. It takes me hours

[utero2001]

thought I'd post up an old Uni project I did with a bunch of guys, I remember at the time we were so chuffed with it, now it looks like a joke

my stuffs the panning over the landscapes and seas, a bit of the main character animation, lighting, editing and sound

caldera