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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
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# ¿ Jun 19, 2008 16:02 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 10:54 |
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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:
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.
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# ¿ Jun 27, 2008 16:58 |
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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: 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?
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# ¿ Jul 22, 2008 16:58 |
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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.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2008 00:57 |
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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. 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.
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# ¿ Sep 2, 2008 19:06 |
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A Sober Irishman posted:
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.
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# ¿ Sep 3, 2008 01:49 |
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Steelcore-01 posted:Honestly I don't care. I had a very bad experience with Softimage and that's why I gave up 3DCG. Silo doesn't have a button that makes a human. It's not like they have any artistic skill.
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# ¿ Oct 25, 2008 07:54 |
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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.
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# ¿ Oct 26, 2008 04:14 |
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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!
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# ¿ Oct 26, 2008 07:48 |
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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. 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.
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# ¿ Oct 27, 2008 02:58 |
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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. 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 |
# ¿ Nov 8, 2008 00:53 |
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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.
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# ¿ Nov 13, 2008 17:15 |
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ACanofPepsi posted:I've got a similar question involving a pop can in 3Ds Max. 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. 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.
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# ¿ Nov 14, 2008 17:36 |
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BigKOfJustice posted:So I went into work and a few of us got the below email in our inboxes: That's probably the easiest, though not the best way to get your name noticed and remembered in an industry.
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# ¿ Dec 6, 2008 00:14 |
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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 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).
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2009 15:47 |
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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.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2009 23:21 |
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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.... 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?
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# ¿ Jan 23, 2009 07:34 |
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le capitan posted:not sure exactly if this belongs here, but it's for 3D so. 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?
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# ¿ Jan 25, 2009 19:25 |
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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 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.
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# ¿ Jan 27, 2009 15:37 |
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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. 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.
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# ¿ Jan 28, 2009 04:30 |
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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? 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.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2009 16:06 |
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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 |
# ¿ Feb 25, 2009 18:29 |
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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
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2009 23:20 |
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le capitan posted:thanks for the crit. Heres the wireframe: 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.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2009 03:15 |
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Click here for the full 1167x850 image. not my image but its pretty good facial topo
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2009 18:34 |
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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? 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.
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2009 03:19 |
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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.
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2009 05:59 |
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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.
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# ¿ Mar 17, 2009 00:36 |
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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. 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.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2009 03:11 |
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cubicle gangster posted:day 3: 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.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2009 18:37 |
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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.
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# ¿ Apr 6, 2009 13:56 |
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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?
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# ¿ Apr 15, 2009 16:27 |
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EoinCannon posted:Heintje, those are some cool demo scenes When you say 4-5 hours spent so far, does that include time making the basemesh? I need to start sculpting
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2009 14:39 |
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Hinchu posted:Sure, quick and dirty. Man... my hands are so jittery from caffeine right now it's not even funny.... 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 http://www.videosift.com/video/Westwood-College-Sued-For-Fraud
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2009 19:32 |
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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.
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2009 21:28 |
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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
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# ¿ Apr 20, 2009 18:00 |
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cubicle gangster posted:Update on ICL! 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 |
# ¿ Apr 27, 2009 20:25 |
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v1nce posted:Emergency file/rendering question: 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
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2009 20:11 |
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Hinchu posted:G-Spot? That's it!
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2009 20:24 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 10:54 |
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Handiklap posted:Yeah we're still building environments, although they do get alpha cropped and put on a standard layout. 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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# ¿ Jun 19, 2009 16:17 |