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Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

DefMech posted:

If the program at SCAD hasn't changed too much since I was there, you won't be using Max unless you're taking classes in the interactive/game program. Everything else will be Maya or Houdini.

There is no reason for 3d other than video games :v:

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Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Kuato posted:

Did a little more on this. It's at about 4k trinagles now, Thats reasonable for a modern game engine right? Im pretty sure i have the structure nailed down now so its mostly a matter of finishing the uvw mapping, adding a bunch of crap and giving it some kind of interior. Any critiques/ suggestions would be great.


ugh my post about this got eaten.

4k is fine for a vehicle, low by modern standards, but then again you didn't build it with normal maps or anything in mind so I figured this is more of a get your feet wet type thing than a "lets make AAA assets on my first go" kind of thing.

post wires, don't show off the textured model with a rendered AO pass, what size texture are you planning on using?

The ropes around the boiler are ridiculously dense, should probably be a band with ropes painted on instead, if they're still renderable splines their tri-count isn't being added into the triangle counter in Max because Max is crap.

You've got weird smoothing on the wheels, they're too small, and your wheel-wells are so form-fitting I bet this can't even steer.

Add some thickness to the exhaust pipes, and for the interior you can merge all the interior bits into a point, so the end of the pipe's cross section looks like this:
code:
 __      __
|  \    /  |
|   \  /   |
|    \/    |
give it some basics of an interior and make sure you could fit someone in there. If you don't have a player model handy make a Max Bi-ped and pose it.

why is the shovel floating? find a way to attach it. Are the doors supposed to open? Because you didn't model them so they can.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Martytoof posted:

Sorry I didn't mean to come off sounding like approximation isn't a valid concept to use when modeling, I'm sure it has its uses. When it boils down to it, there were only two incidents that really made me scratch my head in the tutorial in question:

One was when he modeled handlebars for the "jet-bike". Instead of capping the extruded surface he just scaled in the end verts. I guess that's OK but it just seems like a sloppy way of doing it if you can cap your object.

The other was when he eyeballed the placement of something that should have been symmetrical.

No huge deal either way. I've been working in 3D for a month and this guy has been teaching for years so I guess he has his reasons, and again it was a beginner's tutorial so I guess perfection wasn't the ultimate goal :)

maybe he scaled and welded the end-verts? I haven't seen the video, but what I'll do for some shapes when I'm doing edge-extrusion modeling when I'm capping stuff is rather than mash the cap button I'll pull out another very short loop and collapse the verts (which is like scaling down and then welding). When you smooth this it winds up giving you a slightly rounded cap instead of a flatter cap, which is similar to some shapes (like rubberized grips on a bike).

Eyeballing something that should have been symmetrical seems weird, though. Symmetry is dirt simple to do. Was it obviously eyeballed and imperfect or maybe it he was taking a shortcut or two that wasn't explained that made it look eyeballed? Like he mirrored a piece, and then dragged it over into place, but what you didn't see was him turning on grid snap or something?

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005
Finally have some work to show off, kind of:

Click here for the full 1280x1479 image.



Click here for the full 1055x2048 image.


Our beta went public today a little bit ago and we've got those out to explain the weapons and backpacks better.

I did all the weapon models/texturing, and did all the backpacks except the jetpack, and did the backpack rack.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

A Sober Irishman posted:

This is an AK-47 model I chose to model for an assessment at my college, which was to create a game asset or vehicle. The tri limit was 3500, and having 1 1024 texture page. The model is now 3200 polys, but I don't have a texture because I ballsed it up the first time round, and now I have added extra detail. The assignment is finished, I'm just cleaning up the model a bit and adding some detail so I can use it for a portfolio piece.

I'm just looking for some critique on the actual model and geometry before I go off to unwrap it again for the texture. I will be making a 1024x1024 texture for it. Could I also have some advice on how I should unwrap and texture it, ie should I just have 1 1024 texture page, or should I break it up into 2 pages? If I should break it into 2 texture pages, how would I go about doing that?

Another thing that would be helpful is any comments on my lighting/rendering setup. At the moment I am using a 3-point set up, but I am not really happy with it, and I'd like to learn a really good way to show off my models after they're done.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.



Click here for the full 1600x552 image.


Click here for the full 800x319 image.


if it's a first person model you don't need to model anymore of the detail on the right side, in fact honestly the switch is probably not neccessary considering how flat they are - I doubt it will ever be seen in a first person view. You didn't curve the wood on the front and your clip's extrusions are too shallow. Honestly since the clip isn't usually seen from the regular FPS view, and typical FPS animations turn the gun to the side during a reload, you can probably just normal map the fat ridges that go down the clip, but it might be nice to model them with a bit of geo. You should definitely model the nubs on the left side of the gun, the one that will be facing the player all the time, because thats where the most detail of the gun will be seen. The sights could probably do with more love, too, since those are important. You should show the gun in your portfolio from FPS views in addition to a nice side view.

Have you thought about giving the gun some kind of personality other than "standard AK"? A strap, taped mags, etc? Everyone and their mother has made an AK47, and while most of them are pretty poorly done, adding something recognisable and different makes it easy to make it "your" AK. Perhaps a non-standard color scheme or doing the wooden bits in plastic.

Also it looks like you're wasting some tris on a symetry seam running up your front site.

I'm sure you're not going to be baking normals for this since you don't have a highpoly model, but if your classes aren't focusing on that you should really take the time to learn it on your own.

There is no reason to break it into two texture pages, as that just doubles the draw calls. If you wanted to unwrap it to a rectangular unwrap that's certainly doable - in Max I'll just unwrap between 0-2, 0-1, and then scale it down to the 0-1 coords - You should be able to do something similar in Maya. I'm not sure if Maya has support for easy unwrapping to rectangular coordinates, I know Max9 chokes on it.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

A Sober Irishman posted:


Also I don't know what you mean by tri wastage on a symmetry seam up my front side, I haven't used symmetry?

I will try to think of some extra story and background for it as well, to make it unique. Once again thanks for the advice.

Here is where it looks like there's a symmetry line running down the middle.

If you're not using symmetry modifiers, you might want to play around with them because they are useful as hell

The foregrip is still really boxy - the thing is supposed to be curved.

Also, looking at the ref pics I pulled really quickly, I'm not sure what is hanging underneath the barrel. Looking more closely at it, it looks like you've got a weird flat strip going back to the gun? What is that going to be used for? You could probably model that, opacity is expensive.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Steelcore-01 posted:

Honestly I don't care. I had a very bad experience with Softimage and that's why I gave up 3DCG.

As a completely unrelated topic, I am curious about one thing. What will make those Poser Porn 'artists' to ditch Poser and learn some real 3D software like Modo? Well, Silo is very cheap. Why don't they try things like Silo if they choose Poser out of financial strain?

Silo doesn't have a button that makes a human. It's not like they have any artistic skill.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005
I'm looking to bone up on my lighting and texturing skills - I know there are a couple of well-regarded books out there on lighting theory and was wondering what people suggest. I can't remember the name of the really good one that everyone recommends :( Any books on texturing/materials that focus more on theory and less on execution would be nice. I'm a game artist but game-related books are always a total piece of poo poo even when they're not 5 years out of date.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

GFBeach posted:

The lighting book I used for my class at SCAD was Digital Lighting and Rendering 2nd Edition. It's pretty good, and it's more about general technique and concepts rather than "press button, light bacon".

That book and this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Texturing-Painting-digital-Demers/dp/0735709181/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

Are the ones I believe I usually see people referencing. Thanks!

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Nothing Doing posted:

I'm a bit late in replying to this, but it's actually still available. It's just not hosted by Autodesk.

http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax

but isn't gmax based on version 5 or 6 of max? which is currently up to version 11(2009) with a beta of 2010 out at the moment?

gmax was aimed towards modding games but since it doesn't even handle normal map baking it's really not very useful anymore.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

GFBeach posted:

I'm working on some very low-res models for a handheld game prototype being developed in my AR class. For the game, I need to texture four different kinds of planets representing different states of life/vegetation. I'm running into a couple of glitches, though.

-I'm building procedural shaders in Maya and trying to convert them to 128x128 PNG file textures, but there's always a weird line going across the outputted texture. Before conversion, after conversion.

-I'm using a NURBS sphere to preview the texture, and then after converting the texture to PNG I convert the planet to a polygon sphere of 108 triangles (tessellation method: count). The poles of the planet always wind up looking pinched. Before tessellation, after tessellation. UVs post-tesselation.

Any ideas?

Why in god's name are you using that workflow? Wouldn't it be easier to just build a regular polygon sphere and unwrap it properly, and then create an actual texture for it?

I don't know enough about Maya to help debug the texture rendering issue or to know how it converts NURBS uvs to polygon uvs, but your workflow is pretty crap. made a poly sphere and unwrap it and paint a texture on it. This shouldn't take more than an hour or two for the first one and even less time for the others.

edit: looking at your uvs post-tesselation it's obvious that the poles are triangle fans and that in the UVs the triangles for the fan are not sharing any edges, which is why they're not blending seamlessly across the edge.

Sigma-X fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Nov 8, 2008

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Cornlight posted:

I tried using a modifier called "cap holes" but it didn't fill it properly. It only filled in the areas made by the two arched lines. Sorry if my explanations suck but I am really just getting into it and I don't really know what I am doing.



first off, you've got a lot to do before this becomes a soda can, it's just a cylinder right now :)

If you want to cut the hole by treating this as a boolean, you're going to need to convert your spline object into a solid mesh. The easiest way to do this is to convert it to an editable poly, and use the cap holes, bridge, and polygon creation tools.

I believe you can toss a face extrude modifier on that current mesh (without the cap holes) to cap it properly.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

ACanofPepsi posted:

I've got a similar question involving a pop can in 3Ds Max.

My can is already made, but I'm trying to animate it crushing. I've converted it to an editable mesh, or polygon (I'm at work and can't check right now) . I have auto key enabled, which perfectly keyframes the actual movements of the pop can (Lifting and rotating) My problem is I want to animate the mesh points because I'm moving them to crush the can.

The mesh points don't seem to be reacting to me setting keyframes for them though.

What can I do to animate the deformation of this shape? I want to push some parts in, pull others out, squish it's height, and basically go from a full pop can to one that looks as it if were crushed in someones hand.

Look into morph targets - you can blend between multiple targets and use them additively (IE, make one bulge in spot A, and another that crinkles in spot B, and blend to both of them by 100% to bulge and crinkle). Morph targets are a good thing to learn about for animating faces and such, too.

LiquidFusion posted:

So I modeled and textured my very first weapon.

the goal was to stay under 3000 tris and I have 2935. I could optimize a bit more actually.





Regarding the texture, I am getting good reactions from my fellow students, but I am not happy with it. What do you guys think?

Good for a student, but has tremendous room for improvement pretty much everywhere. Your noisy normal doesn't make sense and looks really bad - you didn't build any high poly geometry and you didn't make a proper heightmap etching features in - you really don't need a normal map. This thing shouldn't look pitted like that, it looks like its supposed to be metal.

You aren't defining your materials well. I can't tell what it's made out of - with pitting like that it seems more like concrete. The red stuff is just a color swap, it doesn't read as a different material. Everything overall is too dark. The spec is softly diffused like plastic, even though I doubt this is a plastic gun. The color scheme is kind of awkward - bright blue and too dark a red. You might want to shift the blue towards a purple a bit if you're sold on red and blue.

The color balance of the weapon is kind of wonky - move some blue to the front.

Post a wireframe because that looks really low-poly for 3k triangles. My guess is that the cable on the back has an 8-sided cross section, which is about half of what it should have. Posting the unwrap is not a bad idea, either, along with the texture size.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

BigKOfJustice posted:

So I went into work and a few of us got the below email in our inboxes:

*Sigh*

I suppose this can be applied for any industry, but folks, in this business keep business emails for business only and keep personal details out of them.

Some guy at a studio sent a private email to an alias by mistake and it got beamed to most of the tv networks and fx studios in Los Angeles.

No one responded for a few hours but man.. what a boner...

Names/companies removed to protect the idiotic...


That guy must be pulling his hair out now.

It's still pretty drat funny.

That's probably the easiest, though not the best way to get your name noticed and remembered in an industry.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Fool Circle posted:

I've been looking to get into 3D, after I took a Multimedia course at college a while ago. Specifically I'm looking at modeling for games. I grabbed Blender and the trial/demos of 3DS Max, Maya and C4D (Which is the 3D software I used during my last course) mainly to see which I could actually figure out.

I vastly prefer C4D to any of the others, in terms of user-friendliness, and it seems easier to model with Blender/C4D than in Max/Maya... Sicne nobody really seems to mention C4D, I'm kind of wondering whether it's worth struggling through the unintuitive (to me, at least) interfaces of either of the others, or whether it'll be fine just using C4D mainly.

I guess the actual capabilities of the programs don't seem too different from the reviews I've read, just the ways of going about it, so does this even matter at all?

I don't think many folks use C4D. Last I had seen it (years ago) it was perfectly fine for doing 3d for print media/advertising, but wasn't really useful for 3d for other applications (games, film, etc).

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

DefMech posted:

The interface hasn't really changed in well over a decade. When you think about what's happened in interface design since then, it's really unforgivable that they've gone so long without an overhaul. I've heard a rumor, though...

Haha Max will update their UI when they rewrite the core.

Which means they never will.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

wasabimilkshake posted:

I'm fairly new at this. I know my way around Max pretty well, but I don't have a lot of substantive experience modeling environments. As a way to dip my foot a little deeper in the water, I'm working on a tileset of sorts for the Oblivion/Fallout 3 engine (modeling separate chunks of level geometry, in this case 192x192x256, for use in the level editor). Since I'm not familiar with the workflow I'm keeping it fairly simple. It's very loosely inspired by Minoan and Mycenaean art, but that isn't really apparent without any textures....

My apologies if these answers are somewhere else in the thread. If anybody can recommend tutorials on optimization for games, I'd appreciate the help.

1) Leaving it like A is probably the best bet. In general, its best to leave triangulation to the exporter because your exporter can tri-strip things better than you can, usually. Long, thin triangles can cause problems with vertex lighting, but that shouldn't be a problem since Oblivion/Fallout3/most every modern game uses per-pixel lighting.

2) In general, holes in your object are OK, provided the engine you're building for does not require water-tight meshes. The only engine I know of that is popular-ish that requires sealed meshes is the Doom3 engine, as the stencil shadow algorithm requires that the mesh be sealed. You could still have intersecting geometry, like in 3b, but you would need to make sure the bottom cap of that cylinder is not open.

3) Intersecting geometry has pretty much always been allowed, but there are a number of caveats. In a vertex-lighting situation, it will light weird, as there is no vertex at the intersection to get lighting information. The intersecting geometry may cause z-fighting if the intersecting geometry is not very perpendicular. Neither of these are really problems you need to worry about, as they're not going to really show up much. Z-fighting is caused by floating point issues and isn't usually a problem unless things are very small.

Finally, intersecting geometry is a bitch to skin and rig, as the intersecting piece is not solidly anchored to the piece its stuck in. If you were making a character, it would be better to build the intersection into the mesh and keep it one contiguous piece.

4) I'm not sure what you're asking - I don't see any problem with the geo you're creating. It looks like you may not be welding the "align vertex" vertex, which you should be welding, but other than that, it looks like the mesh is fine? What were you thinking was incorrect?

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

le capitan posted:

not sure exactly if this belongs here, but it's for 3D so.

Some of my first textures for school. These are painted only; no photos.





have to have 15 of these done by tuesday. 5 painted, 5 using photos, and 5 with a combination of both.

You need to darken up the holes in the grating so they actually look like holes. In general you need to put some non-directional lighting into that just to make things pop a bit more. Your wall texture needs to have medium-level details that break up the two halves, because right now they're the same thing. Add some trim to where it meets the floor. Add wear, dirt, grime, etc. Most importantly, define your materials. You have color but no materials in any of these pictures. Are they metal? Wood? Paint? There is no material definition. If you are doing spec and normal maps to go along with this, those will help some, if you aren't, then you should paint some lighting into the textures to make the shapes pop and to define the materials.

Overall to be honest they're boring as hell. Go grab some textures from a game or whatever and look at them, or go to cgtextures.com and look at any of their photos. Look at the photo and pick out all the details - you need to paint all of those. Cracks, dents, scratches, scrapes, bricks, pores, etc. You have none of it right now.

check out this tutorial:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=46&t=373024

Notice how he adds wear, decals, etc to make the texture more interesting and come alive. You need to do that, and instead of using photos, you need to paint some base materials to work with for your painted ones.

Just out of curiosity, where do you go to school?

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Elfen Lied posted:

Everyones work is so good. I decided I show what I can do. My portfolio can be found here: https://rispoli3d.com

Here is some WIP:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v329/Nyuu/Untitled-1-4.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v329/Nyuu/Untitled-2-1.jpg

I did NOT do the concept art, I just found it.

Why are you posting quad counts on all of your models? Tricounts, not quads. In general your texture work really undersells the models. On the necrarch, for example, you left out the small colors that help break him up and keep him from looking like a grey blob (wheres the red and the blue bottles?) and his skin doesn't have the colors in it it should. Also, using a single 512x512 on a 15k tri model is a bit ridiculous. Thano's costume is just some color, very little going on. Try baking out an ambient occlusion mask to overlay on your diffuse and spec to help define small details.

Your demon queen with 15k quads is ridiculously unoptimized. I mean seriously, its hilarious in how dense the bra and snake-tail are.

I can't click your environment but the thumbnail looks good?

Overall I think you have an OK sense of modeling but you do not optimize your models (these are game models, right?) and your texture work kills otherwise OK models. When optimizing you'll need to keep edgeloops for deformation, etc, but you don't need a dozen horizontal edgeloops on the breasts, etc.

On Lynnith you talk about texturing with photoshop and zapplink and show a tiny thumbnail of a texture that looks completely unpaintable. I don't know what the process was there but I've never seen it used in production anywhere.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Elfen Lied posted:

Thanks for all the critique. I'm working on fixing that link issue with my website I can't seem to find the problem, but I'll get it. Once I get done with this model I'm currently working on, I'm going to overhaul my website anyways.

The demon queen was one of the first things I ever modeled. Would you suggest not to put it on my website since the topology is so bad?

Pretty much if something is a "first X I ever Yed" it shouldn't be on a professional portfolio that you're using to get a job.

If you really want to be a character artist, go to DominanceWar.com, go to the archives, look at all the entries. They have wireframes, texture sheets, etc. You'll have to register for game-artisans.org but its a good idea to do that anyways :) Also check out the polycount forums and game-artist.net.

You'll learn a ton just looking at people's WIPs and meshes - if they suck, you'll know what not to do, and if they're good, you'll be able to see how they constructed different bits.

If you're new to the industry and you really want to be a character artist you've got it stacked against you a bit - you're going to need to be really good. Your current portfolio does not demonstrate a professional level of character art yet. It's not bad and if that thing is your first character mesh you're doing better than a lot of people, but you need to ramp up your game.

Also, as a related note, The Dominance War is starting up the next contest in less than a month. Its a wonderful learning opportunity - if you're not already a member of a participating forum, join one.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Hackuma posted:

I have a bunch of animation cycles on different files and I want to put them all on the same character in one file. I'm using biped. Does anybody know if I can do this and how?
I tried saving the biped and then loading it into the file, but it deletes the animation that was already there.

Try putting them on different layers first?

I don't do much animation myself. If I can remember I can ask one of the animators at work today.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

le capitan posted:

modeling assignment for class. Had to model another classmate's concept of a metal fish that picks up underwater mail. Still working on ripping the UV's. Took about 8 hours give or take. I'm pretty happy with it. Some of the smoothing is kinda funky.





You have an incredible number of smoothing errors. Those come from the way you built your subd mesh and you really need to re-work that stuff. Its only going to look worse when you have a nice shader on it and the specular, reflection, etc, makes it look like a bent turd.

edit: if you post your wireframe (use isoline display so its actually readable) we may be able to help. The general rules are avoid n-gons and keep things in quads.

Sigma-X fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Feb 25, 2009

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005
they can be easier to work with and sometimes they cause things to smooth more nicely.

here's some examples:
http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=853368&postcount=40

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

le capitan posted:

thanks for the crit. Heres the wireframe:

Click here for the full 1126x738 image.


have to texture it due tuesday. so far still working on the diffuse:


Your shapes are awfully squishy. You'd have more control over the subd cage by breaking it into multiple pieces, in addition this would let you animate it.

your metal is just grey, you need to darken the diffuse significantly and add a spec map to it. Also consider adding some tarnish, possibly scratches, and oil or wear in between the plates.

And le capitan, Synth is ripping on it because its a really crap model. Everyone makes really crap models when they're learning - I'm assuming this is your first attempt at a sub-d model?

They really ought to have you working on human faces for organic practice rather than freeform stuff like this.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Click here for the full 1167x850 image.


not my image but its pretty good facial topo

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Heintje posted:

Ahh poo poo I saw this on CGsociety the other day when I was browsing. You are mad, MAD to do this in max, doesn't that amount of detail in the viewport make you want to kill yourself?

ninja: I'm working on cloth stuff at SideFX, I can't say much about it but I'll put up some demos in about a month.

What would he do it in that handles that amount of detail better?

Max with 4 gigs of ram and a 2 year old processor and 2 year old video card handles 8 million tris in the viewport just fine, and it'll render more than that.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005
I get great performance using turbosmooth. If I was working on models that were raw 1 million tri objects it might be different?

I got a massive performance boost going to Max 2k9 and a bigger boost going to vista, upping me to 4 gigs of ram.

Any you really shouldn't have millions of polies visible in the viewport while building a mesh like that spaceship anyways, since you're building it in parts and you're using subds for it.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Unexpected EOF posted:

You know what? As dangerously under-qualified and as terrible as I am? I'm going to enter Dominance War. It looks like fun.

I'm going to do it too if work doesn't kick my rear end too badly.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

ErIog posted:

I have a question for anyone using Blender, I'm getting banding on subtle shadows. I've tried futzing with every single light setting I can find, but they always show up the same way. I've also futzed with the shading settings on the material, and they never go away. It's a very small project, just 5 and 10 second logo stingers for a "client" that has lots of strict rules about what can be done with their logo imagery. It's only one scene, and I think I have a workaround.

There is some text in front of a plane, and there's no banding in the shadows from the text. There's only banding from the larger shadow created by the light.

What I might do is get the rest of the light on the plane as even as possible outside the text shadow, and then create a texture for the plane in photoshop that simulates the effect I want. I believe that should get rid of the banding.

If there's some other fix using composite nodes or something, I'd like to know. I tried futzing with those too, but I could never get the shadow pass composite to look right.

Did you get this fixed? I don't know poo poo about blender but in general banding can be fixed by adding some slight noise. If you can render out a light/shadow pass (might need to blur it slightly) to use as a mask for an overlaid noise pattern (which should be a static image so you don't get animated noise from frame to frame) it should help smooth that out.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

cubicle gangster posted:

day 3:

Did some groundworks, still not much detail in the fg. Massed out the city a little.
Needs some seriously heavy overhead lines modeling... and some random objects around the tracks.



This is looking pretty dope this early on, although one thing is bugging me - it looks like you used a FFD to skew the straight section of railing to make the angled section of railing - this is distorting your curls so they are no longer round and it looks rather naff - could you remove the curled portion of the railing from the FFD version and re-attach the uncurled versions to each railing? I think it would look a lot better.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005
crazybump is loving amazing and gives you great results almost always, provided you have a good source image. I do'nt recall giving a poo poo about the specular map functionality, but all the other maps it generates were usually pretty awesome. The important ones are the cavity map and the normal map, obviously.

The important thing is to feed it raw texture photos, don't feed it a finished/half finished, unwrapped texture map and expect good results. Its best if you feed it all of your source photos and then edit the normal map that way. If you have a lot of textures on a single unwrap it will typically try to bump out each UV island because it doesn't understand that its not a full texture.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005
The only cool thing in 2010 I'm aware of is they integrated polyboost (now called Graphite Modeling Tools) so you don't have to spend $150 on it anymore. And they added the ribbon...mostly for polyboost?

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

EoinCannon posted:

Heintje, those are some cool demo scenes
I've had a look at houdini and.... whoosh, straight over my head.
I can only just work out simple PFlows in MAX :)
As I'm trying to be a modeler, I assume I won't have to use it too much, but it's cool seing what it can do.


An anatomy study
4-5 hours spent so far


When you say 4-5 hours spent so far, does that include time making the basemesh?

I need to start sculpting :(

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Hinchu posted:

Sure, quick and dirty. Man... my hands are so jittery from caffeine right now it's not even funny....


And use this to refer to below


By "in" lights, look at 2. I put a "fluorescent" light up top, with some tungsten yellow ones on the wall. Interiors are for the most part lit from actual fixtures. Using points of reference for that helps a ton.

7: you can see how the lights on the walls are reflected in the water, this is a very powerful effect that you can use. There are some painters who use it to make really ethereal scenes.

6: This is where I lightened everything up to reflect the use of the overhead fluorescent. It's a general room lighting.

5: Then if you look in various corners they are darker. I generally use occlusion to help with this. It's a softer type of lighting that I prefer...

3: Now if you see what I did with 3 it's the primary basis for 90% of the lighting I do, because it tends to look dramatic. As bizarre as this sounds... darks look closer to the viewer, while bright recede in the distance. Think of how atmospheric perspective works. Here again I say look at Gustave Dore to see how he does it. You have a cavity here that you want to recede back and give the sense of space, lighting that separately can really pop it out.

4: Of course if you look at 4 I've done the same thing just much more subtly. The darks at the bottom create an empty space, while the light at the top pulls the viewer up and opens up that space and defines it from the rest of it.

1: Now another really important and powerful, yet subtle thing I use a lot is rim lighting. The edges of objects, once brightened can create a great sense of depth. It really helps define the geometry and shape of the scene. Also notice by the fluorescent light up top, around where I put the fixture the rim of that is lit.

Oh and also I use a lot of blue and yellow lights offset. It's my personal stylistic choice b/c I think that the cool and warm colors help define areas and make geometry pop. My general rule that I like to use (again, purely stylistic on my part) is that I like a warm yellow/red spot light defining something, with a much more broad and soft light filling in the darker areas.

Remember with light you are painting shapes. Get some bright defining light sources, and then fill in the dark places with subtle use of color and light.

Anyway, that's the way I approach lighting, it's pretty much the same way that I approach digital painting.

Goddamn that is nice! I would agree with you on number 3 but for a different reason - it isn't that lights fade into the distance and darks come forward, its that the light back there indicates there is more back there, just out of sight, whereas if it was pure dark there wouldn't be anything to indicate a large space back there, and as a result the back room collapses and feels shallow.

Unrelated, isn't there a goon who works for Westwood (graphics tightening) College? Because they are getting sued for being an obvious scam :v:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Westwood-College-Sued-For-Fraud

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Odddzy posted:

does anyone think this scene (if relighted) could be put in a reel and I wouldn't have to be too shy about it? I'm still thinking about how I compare to others in the CG world.

In addition to the lighting I would take another shot at your material definition and I'd grunge up the scene, too. Your water is by your admission weak, the whole scene is very uniformly clean, you need to grunge out the corners and stuff and really tie the scene together with the wear. Your metal has a fairly diffused specular it looks like, you'll want to play with that some to get it looking better, but your lighting will have a lot of play with that, as well.

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

kholdstayr posted:

Yeah I was playing around with the fluid sim for that. I am not really sure how to make an orange juice object that fills the cup nicely enough.

Take the interior of your juice glass, duplicate it, flip the normals, and work from there :)

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

cubicle gangster posted:

Update on ICL!

I was ill, then I was working a lot. So it slowed down. But now i'm full speed ahead again.
Still loads of temp objects and variation/detailing needed in the building, but it's starting to take shape.



Either the bench/chairs thing is really small, or the rest of the scale is kinda off. The stone wall looks to be about 2x the size it should be, and same with the lamp on the wall. I didn't notice it before but it definitely stands out now with the bench.

The falloff on the tunnel lights is really sharp and it goes to almost black - consider adding more bounce light in there to up the overall ambient, with that many lightbulbs its going to be a little brighter than that. It also looks like the lights stop being placed on the wall before you get around the corner.

Finally, I can't make it out in the small shot but I'm not sure how you're terminating the stone texture at the tunnel entrance. It seems like the tunnel entrance would be a good opportunity to add some decoration to the wall with an interesting arch or something - this would also hide odd spots on the stones going into the edge of the tunnel archway.

edit: Add some staining and dirty spray along the tracks, etc. Right now it looks like there hasn't been an actual train zipping down the tracks before.

Sigma-X fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Apr 27, 2009

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

v1nce posted:

Emergency file/rendering question:

I'm using 3d Studio 9 and rendering an uncompressed AVI file.
The clip is using some very large images which are slowing down the render process significantly, so what I want to do is stop the render (currently at 80%) and downsize these textures, then finish rendering the last 20% as a separate clip.

Before cancelling the render I made a copy of the output AVI to preview, but I can't seem to play that video back on any machine - they all say a variation of "file unrecognised". It looks about the right size and MPC recognises the image size but not the frame rate.

My question is if I press that big ol' Cancel button is it going to finish writing the AVI and make it usabe, or is it just going to drop everything and leave me high and dry, in which case I'd be better off waiting 9 hours for this thing to finish?

Alternatively, any thoughts on recovering the uncompressed AVI? MPC, Vegas 8 and Zoom Player all said no.

I know there is some free-ware program I've used to repair AVIs and I think divx encoded .mpgs years ago (it basically goes through the physical file to correct that botched header information that keeps it from playing back) but I can't recall what it is. I want to say it had some name that sounded vaguely naughty.

I want to say Max will fix the .avi if you hit cancel as part of the end-render cleanup step but I can't say for sure.

In retrospect this isn't a helpful post at all :(

Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Hinchu posted:

G-Spot?

That's it!

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Sigma-X
Jun 17, 2005

Handiklap posted:

Yeah we're still building environments, although they do get alpha cropped and put on a standard layout.

also, success:



How? Was this simply a matter of putting an edit UV modifier on the mod stack before the bend, or is there some secret tomfoolery going on?

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