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Hey CG thread! A few months ago I started making a game (my first solid attempt, using UE4), and as a result got back into 3D modeling. It's been over 10 years since I last did it seriously, so I've had to relearn a huge amount of stuff (and learn a bunch of new things). Luckily the tools have advanced a huge amount, and for the first time I feel really comfortable with the workflow. I'm currently using Blender and the Substance Live suite. TBH I never expected to love Blender as much as I do; I started on MAX 1.2 and stayed in the Kinetix/Discreet/Autodesk ecosystem for a long time so I kinda assumed I'd try Blender then go for MayaLT (and eventually back to MAX), but after trying the trials of the latest versions of the Autodesk stuff I realized there's no reason for me to spend the cash when Blender can do everything I need. Here's some stuff I've done over the past week; it's pretty "meh" compared to a lot of the stuff here, but each finished piece has taught me a little more about what works and what doesn't. I'm hoping that with enough practice I'll be able to start making models I'm really proud of! It's all rendered in Substance Painter 2 using iRay since I haven't worked out the best way to get the PBR stuff back into Blender (as it usually just goes straight to UE4 from Painter) Note: I'm pretty drat colorblind - I've let it hold me back quite a bit, but I came to the conclusion that keeping my work private just because the colors might not be accurate is stupid. First creature for Earth Day 2016:  Second creature for Earth Day 2016:  Game assets (everything but the gun is modeled by me, gun is default UE4 FPS gun with new textures): 
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Apr 23, 2016 18:25
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Mutata, your stuff is goddamn amazing! I have no idea how you do it. That potion glass is very impressive, the shapes in it don't have the weird refraction artifacts I'm used to seeing in rendered glass. I'd never heard of Keyshot, looking at their website gallery the stuff people are doing with it is great. I think I'm gonna give the trial a go - the price is pretty out of my league and I don't really have too much use for a high-quality renderer (I'm not even good enough to push Cycles or iRay hard), but I still want to try it! This thread inspired me to spend a little more time figuring out how to match more aspects of the reference photos I've been using; up until now I had no idea how to do bent pipes and such easily in Blender, I'd been working with cubes and extruding, rotating, and eventually subdividing. Thanks to a few minutes with some tutorials I discovered the bezier curves could be made solid with great control over the thickness and resolution. Also discovered the power of using the array modifier for stuff like ladder steps, and the wireframe modifier for scaffolding stands! Also can't get enough of Substance Painter. Every time I boot it up I learn something new, and the results destroy practically everything I've done in the past. Even something as simple as being able to paint normals directly is so so useful. I never want to go back to faffing around in Photoshop, spending forever tweaking masks and dealing with dozens of layers, only to discover it looks bad when applied to the model. Each of these is ~5,000 tris... probably a bit more than necessary, but considering most of the props I've done so far are in the 400-1500 range (and I'm aiming strictly at modern PCs) I don't think it's going to be an issue.   E: Just noticed the spacing on the oil tank ladder steps is off on the upper three; dammit! Didn't know how to get the array to follow the shape of the ladder so I manually placed the last few and it looks like I didn't do the best job. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Apr 25, 2016 |
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Apr 25, 2016 18:13
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keyframe posted:Hey games people, what is a good way to get surface detail in models for VR since you can't use normal maps in VR. I saw mentions of parallax mapping but never heard of it before and would appreciate some pointers on how to properly use it. Huh, that's a kinda weird limitation, but reading into it the concept makes sense: normal mapping doesn't take into account the spacing between eyes, so on low poly models where detail is baked in it apparently looks very fake. A quick search shows up with a couple of threads about it: https://forums.oculus.com/vip/discussion/8518/bump-mapping https://forums.oculus.com/vip/discussion/19947/lod-vs-tessellation I'm finding some conflicting information about if parallax even looks good, some people are saying it's got some of the same issues as regular normal mapping. Lots of people suggest using tessellation as the go-to for detail, but honestly that seems like it would be too taxing for complex stuff with all the other VR requirements. Since I'm hoping to do some VR stuff eventually I'll keep on looking into this as it's definitely going to affect me as well.
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Apr 27, 2016 14:59
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cubicle gangster posted:That's a pdf from 2014 with one guy saying 'normal maps dont look good', with no other explanation. Even the Unreal Engine VR guide says it's probably better to do detail with geometry/parallax - not that normal mapping should be avoided, but that because there's no accounting for eye differences, they generally come out looking flat. Like I said, I have no experience with VR, but the info I can find on it seems to confirm that it's better to do parallax or geometry. Unfortunately, the UE guide just links to the Wikipedia page for parallax, but it looks like you just use a height map and choose a parallax shader. I know Substance B2M (and probably designer) have the option for parallax when doing textures, so that might be one area to explore. E: it's probably down to the fact that people will bake practically all detail into normal maps instead of using them mainly for fine detail, and tbh that's gonna look off no matter if it's VR or not. I was under the impression that they should be used for stuff like fabric detail, screws, skin pores, etc, not as a straight up replacement for 90% of the geometry of a model. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Apr 27, 2016 |
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Apr 27, 2016 21:56
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In terms of making large (150m+) buildings for my game, what's a good source for references? I'm aiming for very modern to future, and so far my best luck has been finding similar models on turbosquid and just basing my models around that... Which I'm not really a fan of, since I feel like some of my output looks too similar to the existing models. I'm just not good enough at arch to be able to go off on my own, so to speak, and keeping a consistent style has been pretty hard. I've been using Google images and Pinterest, but there's gotta be a better source for the futuristic side of things. Materials for future buildings is another area I'm struggling with, but that's one I can probably solve just by examining what other people do - traditional concrete and brick just doesn't fit visually, so I've been kinda aping scifi ship hulls as reference, which I guess is turning out okay. E: I'm only modeling the outer shell of the buildings, nothing inside, since the game is an arcade-style grappling hook FPS thing where you swing around a large area.
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May 4, 2016 15:40
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Oh snap! That's really awesome of you guys, I'll have to give it a shot at some point.
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May 11, 2016 02:18
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This is probably common knowledge now, but it's something I learned a few months ago and made a gigantic difference in the lighting quality of my renders: instead of using point/spot/sun lights, I use a plane or a cylinder or a sphere with an emissive material. When using a path tracing renderer like cycles, the penumbra is controllable by the size of the mesh (so a tiny plane will have sharper shadows than a large plane). I'm sure there are all sorts of techniques for expanding this and controlling where the light bounces to match how a photographer would stage a photo, but even as a simple replacement for standard modeler lights it looks great.
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May 23, 2016 19:04
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I'm trying to model a potbelly stove, and the base/legs of the one I'm using for reference is a metal scrollwork(? Don't know the actual term) thing. It's not a solid base, but made up of bent metal sheets or something all curled around to create the legs. Here's a link to the image I'm using for reference: http://cdn3.bigcommerce.com/s-n19inxpw/products/246/images/1122/pot_belly_stove_2__34047.1410221690.1280.1280.jpg?c=2 What is that called, and any modeling tips for it? I was trying using a Bézier curve at first but Blender's spline tools aren't where I'd like (why can't I just click and draw a line instead of extruding points or having to do the grease pencil>line>mesh nonsense?). I recall seeing someone grab reference images of that style and making texture masks for it, but since it's going to be in a lightmapped scene in UE4 I'd like to have it modeled if possible. I don't care if I match it perfectly, but I'd at least like to retain some of the flairs and depth it has.
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May 24, 2016 18:16
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Thanks for the advice guys! Drawing it flat then extruding from there didn't even cross my mind, and it's a technique I've been using for other things recently so I don't know what's going on, probably a dense moment... Also the first time since moving to Blender that I've really missed the way the spline tools were in MAX - I'm sure it can do things similar, but the process for working with splines just seems so different and confusing at first. I got the rest of it modeled and textured, so this should be nice and quick. E: Done! It's not really super close to the reference, but it's good enough for what I'm doing (and I feel like I learned something in the process of making it!) 
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May 24, 2016 22:36
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ceebee posted:I wish more companies were like Allegorithmic. I'll always gladly drop money on software I believe is reasonably priced. The monthly payments adding up to a full buyout of the software is awesome, plus they're pushing updates fairly frequently. If it keeps up this will definitely be a standard in my workflow. It's already replaced 3D-Coat, xNormal, and Photoshop for me which is a godsend because going between all those programs blows. I don't have answers for your questions, but I'm 100% in agreement with this. The substance suite has really done wonders for my hobbyist workflow, and knowing my monthly payments are working towards ownership is a weight off my shoulders. If this was a full time job I probably wouldn't care as much about payments, but as is there can be long stretches of not using whatever software when I'm focusing on a different area, and paying monthly with no end goal adds an extra layer of stress, a feeling that I'm wasting my money if I'm not using it constantly. I have to say though, the one huge goddamn benefit of all this modern subscription stuff is no more dongles. I have a drawer with a handful of various audio and gfx software dongles from over the years, and I don't miss playing switcheroo whenever I needed to switch workflows.
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Jun 1, 2016 18:47
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The newest substance painter update seems to have brought UDIM support to some degree. Waiting to see what the changelog says, but after updating today I now have some options relating to it when importing a mesh. I know lack of UDIM support has been a sticking point for some and it's been on the books for a while, so it's nice to see some progress there. E: UDIM, 4K monitor support, 8k texture support (!!), Linux support, and substance in Houdini (not sure the details but the blurb said it was integrated somehow). That's a sweet bunch of updates that should make people happy! E2: omg, it can now bake maps for all materials at once! No more having to click bake for each material on a mesh. https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/substance-painter-21-here The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 18:15
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Eastdrom posted:Im glad theyre removing the checkers on the quick mmask. Its hard trying to use it when you cant see through the overlay. While I don't think there's a "collapse layer" function, what I've done when hitting slowdown from too much crap is export textures, make a new file, and import those textures to it. It's not super ideal, but as long as I keep multiple .spp's for each "bounce" I can go back and change things, re-export/import, and eventually have a rather complex material that would've killed my machine otherwise. E: you prob understood this, but just for some clarification for anyone else who wants to try, what you're doing is exporting a flattened texture set (so base color, roughness, metallic, normal if you're using the met/rough PBR workflow) of whatever point you're at, then making a new painter file with the mesh and dragging and dropping those exported textures to whatever (now blank) material they were on the original. You probably need to do some massaging of settings to make sure the right textures get assigned to the right layers, but once those are good you'll have a simple image texture representing the complex multi-layer material you built originally, and you can go and start doing the painter thing on top. The reason you want to save the original (and each subsequent bounce) is for later changes. It's as easy as opening up the original, making changes, exporting it, then opening up the second file and replacing the base textures with the new ones. I haven't tried doing multiple bounces and having them set as separate layers, but I think that could work for extremely complex materials where you might want some added control in how the multiple bounces are blended. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 21:29
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Manually joining works fine for most situations, you might need to add some edges on the body where the buttons are going to join and manually merge (alt+m) the vertices of the buttons and body after joining to avoid overlapping geometry - then again that might not matter in 3D printing? I know nothing about that. Blender's Boolean tools seem rather janky, I almost always have better results doing it manually even if it takes more time.
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Jun 4, 2016 15:23
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I made a lantern! The reference I modeled it off of was significantly dirtier, and it was sort of weird having to tone back the grunge for once.
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Jun 5, 2016 20:27
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So Allegorithmic popped up with a surprise contest, with some good prizes: https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/contest-road-trip-2116 Contest is make a vehicle you'd use in a road trip in 2116 (really no limits - any programs, any poly count/materials/texture res, only solo, no teams). It's running from now until July 17th, winners picked on July 23rd. Judges are Scott Robertson (concept artist), Charlotte Francis (technical artist at Naughty Dog), Victor Kam (vehicle artist at Blackbird Interactive), Ruairí Robinson (film director of the Leviathan), and Sebastien Deguy (founder and CEO of Allegorithmic) For those who don't want to read, grand prize is: a Vive, a drone, a year of Houdini Indie, $500 rendering credits on GarageFarm, and a canvas print of your submission, second: a GTX1070, the drone, Houdini, $250 credits, and print, 3rd: GTX1070, Houdini, $250 credits, print, and 4-10: Substance Live Indie. They're even offering a trial of Substance Painter 2 for people to use for it, and I imagine even if you've already done the trial they can reset it for you. I'm doing an RZ: Recreational Zeppelin, pretty much an RV stuck to a Zeppelin. So far there's some really talented people joining up with some interesting ideas so I don't have the highest of hopes, but it's fun and I'm learning a ton as I go!
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Jun 9, 2016 20:32
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 After like a week of trying to figure out why I couldn't get my high to low poly baking process to work in painter (it would bake the high poly normal but not seem to apply it to the mesh), and after practically giving up on that technique, I just so happened to make one last attempt, and this time changed the normal map blending from "replace" to "blend"... Of course it worked, and all those attempts I'd done before were fine, just had the blend settings wrong. At least now I've got a high to low workflow down, and I have tons of cages and variations from all the "failed" attempts.
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Jun 10, 2016 02:55
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This Allegorithmic contest is both kicking my rear end and teaching me an ungodly amount about modeling in blender in such a short amount of time. There's also a decent number of pretty drat good artists contributing, and it's sort of discouraging comparing my stuff to theirs... I know the areas I need tons of work in though (everything?!), so as I progress I've been modifying/replacing the parts I'm unhappy with. But, I've joined a weekly Blender meetup (had my first one last week), run by some compositing vet and a 3D artist, and I learned how to utilize multiple workspaces, layers, and got some tips on mouse configuration for speed - switch 3D cursor placement to thumb mouse 1, snap type to thumb mouse 2, and zoom to object thumb mouse 3, while mouse scroll left and right are previous and next workspace. This clears up left mouse to only be for moving things, no more accidentally shifting the 3D cursor, and I can very quickly move to a UV or node workspace with one click when I need to. Here's some quick views of the WIP. Just restarted the RV part last night, (from a direct copy of an airstream 350le to this) and I'm learning more about subdiv modeling, so that part is extremely rough/simple atm.   E: Just had a super productive learning day, where I finally spent the time to learn how to use the compositor and use HDRIs. Compositor was relatively easy to pick up, but using HDRIs in Blender, especially with needing to rotate them and avoid fireflies took some google searching. Got it though, so I've switched out the first image with a new one (leaving the second for a little comparison). The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jun 16, 2016 |
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Jun 15, 2016 14:49
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Gonna double post here, because I've been messing around with Renderman for Blender over the past day and minus some annoying crashes when closing the IT window when using IPR, I'm pretty impressed. It's integrated really well, can do lots of neat stuff Cycles can't (the subdivision mesh feature is pretty incredible, no more manually setting it in the modifier stack! And bidirectional path tracing!), and so far I've found render times to be better than expected from what people were saying online. The Disney BXDF shader also handles the metal/rough workflow from painter super well, and the other Pixar shaders are great in their own right. Oh, and their Denoise feature is amazing too (When it works... have had some serious trouble getting it to work consistently inside of Blender). Obviously GPU rendering is faster/preferable for lots of things (in fact I'd say most things for the hobbyist like me), but the fact that anyone can grab Blender, the plugin, and the non-commercial version of Renderman and go hog wild is so cool! E: Here's a very very simple camera animation test done in Renderman. Couldn't get the denoiser to work properly so I used relatively limited settings with the unidirectional path tracer to avoid fireflies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFZjwLnBg1A The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 16, 2016 16:32
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ExtraNoise posted:What's a good way to hide seams between meshes? Just make sure your math is exact? You can snap them to each other using the object or vertex snap features - I haven't done much with that, but it seems to work fine. One thing to watch out for is light bleeding if you're baking lighting at all; if a wall is too thin and an adjoining wall doesn't overlap a little, light can bleed in at points at the joint. If you have something like three windows in a row, it might be worth overlapping part of the window "body" and having the frames go on top to cover the potential weirdness you'd get from overlapping meshes.
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Jun 18, 2016 15:09
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Yeah, the 3D cursor, while being a useful little thing for using as a pivot/object add point/etc, really doesn't need to be left click. If you have a mouse with thumb buttons try setting it to one of those, it's way more comfortable as you won't be accidentally moving the thing around when you don't want to. Or just disable it if you don't use it. The behavior of separating select and action buttons is pretty useful though; in other packages I'd often be trying to select a specific vertex on a tight mesh, and it would interpret me as clicking on a different mesh and bring me out of edit mode. Or, I'd go to select something and accidentally move something else. Not having to worry about that makes navigating a scene just a little bit easier. E: actually here's a little tip for 3D cursor - in the options menu you can set it to stick to the surface of a mesh instead of going off in the background somewhere. Makes it a bit easier to put it where you want The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Jun 19, 2016 15:51
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Wow, it's eye-opening to see how pbr is affecting existing workflows; being a solo hobbyist I found it only slightly complicated, but I also only recently got back into cgi so I pretty much started with a physically based workflow and I have lots of time to read the papers and study the various GI techniques in depth/do trial and error. If I didn't have that benefit I doubt the understanding of the concepts would've come easy - I just think at how hard it was to adapt to a node-based material setup after so long using the old MAX-style list based one, except this goes well beyond just learning where the connections go. Along the PBR/GI lines, this past week I went crazy studying up on the technical differences between all the different path tracing algorithms, and the pros and cons of bidir, bidir vcm, unidirectional path tracing, when to use sobol/multi jitter/random/MLT, when to use a spectral renderer vs RGB, what techniques resolve caustics faster, etc. It was confusing, but I finally understand better which renderer to pick for what scenario (and I realize now my excitement about bidir vcm in Renderman was slightly misguided, as it's not some amazing make-real tech though it is good for very specific situations). Here's a turntable animation I did of a truck in Renderman utilizing a wide range of techniques - emissive materials, SSS, displacement, render time subdivision, a high specular depth, deep-image denoising, and more. It's also only using the Pixar and Disney materials, no external textures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwpbvCRZeSw I'm pleased as punch at the results. While there are like 3 fireflies the denoiser couldn't fix near the headlights and the emissive material caused some jagged edges, it was very easy to get the results I wanted. Render time was high for sure, mostly due to running the denoiser as part of the render - it would sit for at least two minutes (sometimes 3) after a frame would finish, not doing anything, and then it would start up the denoiser and take about a minute to do it. I have to test running that separately, because that's a significant amount of time wasted per-frame. Still, to get equivalent noiseless results without it would've taken at least twice as long and likely even more.
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Jun 22, 2016 16:29
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RizieN posted:drat dude... awesome! And I'm color blind too! I also have my wife pick my colors! I swear I think she has an extra rod or cone in her eye, I swear she sees colors outside of the normal spectrum (or I just don't see many at all) From what I understand, there are actually some women which can likely see more colors, called tetrachromats. And I'm colorblind as well, ain't it fun?!
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Jun 23, 2016 03:07
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Hazed_blue posted:I have a guy here at work, really talented character lead who has Protanopia, and always dealt with it by asking his reports for insights. I tend to be very picky about color choices, so I found out about his condition when I was asking him to include some more pinks and other reds in some of the assets: it was a spectrum he literally couldn't see. So when I got everyone to switch over to Substance Painter, I made a filter for him to place at the top of his layer stack that would convert the pink spectrum he struggled with into blue, live as he was painting, so that he could better perceive the subtleties when painting in a specific gamut. He doesn't use it all the time, but it was a fun little experiment. Technology! Holy poo poo, I'm going to do this ASAP!
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Jun 23, 2016 17:31
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HardCoil posted:I didn't know you could do that, I seem to be stuck with assigning it to left or right mouse button. I'll need to check, but since you can actually assign the key/button for it in the list to the right in the "input" options menu you should be able to just set it blank, so the 3D cursor is using nothing. You'll have to use the little search bar above the list to find it, type in 3D cursor, and it should show up. There may be multiple ones, the keybinds let you assign keys for every mode independently (which is actually kind of cool), so just look at the parent list name. Worse comes to worse assign it to something like alt+f4 (lol) or some other combo you'll never use in blender. While I understand BF's desire to keep things from being context sensitive so keybinds generally work the same throughout the entire program, in practice there are places where keys don't do the same thing already, and for ease of use context-sensitive behavior could really clean up some of the mess of trying to figure out how to, for example, edge crease (shift-e) or join selected meshes (uhhh ctrl-p I think? Maybe ctrl-j?) or change pivot (ctrl-shift-alt-c, which I only know because I had to look it up earlier today and it's seriously uncomfortable to press). Workflow customization is a huge part of working quickly in Blender, and it took me far too long to even start. The default program arrangement is rather unintuitive and even after a number of months of daily use I still have to constantly look up lesser used key combos. The spacebar search menu is a huge help, but not so much when the tool is named something different than what every other 3D program uses. E: forgot, cursor depth is the option to set the cursor to "stick" to the face of an object. It's not that intuitively named, and I had to look that up again today because it wasn't set on my laptop and I couldn't remember what it was called. Totally unrelated, but while looking for stuff about people's longest render times, I found a guy that was so aggressively wrong about rendering concepts that I felt bad for the guy arguing with him (and the potential guys that took his claim of 12 years in the vfx industry as gospel). Some nonsense about how redshift was the only unbiased renderer because it uses path tracing, while Arnold and octane and all the others are biased because they use Monte Carlo, not path tracing. I'm a dumb hobbyist, and even I understand that the whole point of Monte Carlo is to use a random uniform sampling distribution to converge on the correct answer after X number of samples per pixel, which is the definition of unbiased, and that path tracing just means that it calculates the paths of light as they bounce around. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jun 23, 2016 |
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Jun 23, 2016 22:00
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mutata posted:There's lots of videos on YouTube of people trying on color corrective glasses and freaking the gently caress out. A part of me wants to think they're staged, but I'd probably have the same reaction if I tried them and they worked. Not sure I'd cry like some of the people, but I'd definitely be annoying the hell out of everyone saying "OH MY GOD THAT'S PURPLE! AND THAT'S RED! I NEVER KNEW TREES HAD MORE COLORS THAN GREEN!" Here's the Enchroma test, which can help determine if the glasses would be worth it for you: http://enchroma.com/test/ I got 30%, because I'm a severe protan and apparently the effect of the glasses would be very subtle and I'd have to wear them for a few weeks to notice anything, if at all  Also, that image of the autumn scene on the page looks nearly exactly the same on both sides, I can only see a slight difference in the color of the sky. I'm curious as to if it's actually dramatic or not to you non-colorblind people. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jun 24, 2016 |
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Jun 24, 2016 00:28
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Those two gifs look pretty different in how the colors shift, it's not entirely surprising but still pretty crazy at how the original images look virtually the same but when broken down differences become apparent. The concept of nullifying/shifting colors around to create a wider gap is something I need to explore with software color filters - I tried to calibrate my PC monitor last night because it looks significantly different than my laptop's, but that was pretty futile as all I did was reduce the red and green in varying amounts to make the grey look more grey to me. While conceptually I don't want to make the colors off because "accuracy!", since I can't tell to begin with doing something like the substance painter filter posted earlier might actually give useable results. One day, gene therapy will be commonplace and hopefully I'll be alive to "see" it. The fact that some scientists have already seemingly cured colorblindness in primates is hopeful.
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Jun 24, 2016 01:46
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I just got back from a meetup thing where a guy that works for Scanline VFX stopped by to chat! Wasn't expecting that at all, and it was really drat cool to hear about his industry experience and get an explanation for how some of the fluid/smoke/fire sim stuff is handled in big movies nowadays. It was even crazier timing considering yesterday I was reading an interview with someone from there about their use of VRay that went into detail about some of their projects, so I was semi-prepared and didn't just say "ooh isn't scanline a kind of rendering?  "
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Jun 26, 2016 22:39
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I'm curious to know what people here prefer for retopoing. I've just started to need it, and I've primarily been using Blender and just extruding out the edges as needed. It offers me good control, but takes forever even with smaller meshes. I've also tried the retopoflow addon, but it's really buggy and seems to be somewhat limited in that you can't connect certain kinds of corners. It's faster, that's for sure, but not quite stable enough to make it worthwhile. I have max, Maya and Mudbox, so if there's an easy process/plugins with any of those I'll check it out. While an automatic remeshing would be nice, I can't imagine there's anything out there that gets good results without a bunch of setup/tweaking.
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Jul 11, 2016 19:41
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Keket posted:I've been cheating a bit in blender with retopo and using the shrinkwrap modifier for the most part. Haven't really done much with shrinkwrap, though I've heard people swear by it. I always see the topology it produces and immediately say "ahh gently caress it I can get better results", but using it as a starting point might actually work better. Then I get three hours into retopo and think "dammit, I don't have the patience for this anymore!"
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Jul 12, 2016 15:35
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Taffer posted:Shrinkwrap doesn't produce topology, it just deforms a mesh to shrink on top of another one, like a piece of clothing on a body. It's very useful for retopo. Ahhh I was thinking of the remesh modifier for some reason (which is the one that makes some nasty looking meshes)... I have used shrinkwrap, but only for things like getting a potbelly stove door to follow the curve of the stove body, not for this. This seems like what I was looking for, cos I can shrinkwrap a couple of planes to a head and stitch them together/add extra faces as needed. Thanks!
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Jul 12, 2016 21:43
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Jo posted:Sounds like a plan. I like the gradual buildup aspect of it. Thanks. It can be a hard process at the beginning, that's for sure. I'm still in that stage where I can't reliably make a nice looking, well proportioned head, so it comes down to doing ones from scratch over and over, scrapping them when I realize things don't look right. One thing that gets me is perspective - I find it far too easy to make a head too fat because ortho looks one way and perspective looks another, and balancing those to "feel" real is almost an art in itself. I'm always amazed when I see a 3D head that looks good no matter what FOV is used, cos that's tough!
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Jul 20, 2016 14:59
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Keket posted:Heads up, the Substance suite is going to be free for students soon! Man, it's a great time to be texturing! Cheap substance live, free substance for students, free Mari for NC use... Anyone that hasn't converted to a 3D texturing program workflow owes it to themselves to at least give it a shot - I used to loathe painting a stack of individual maps, going back and forth between the modeler and photoshop, tweaking UVs over and over. Now I can't wait to boot up Painter and make my model look awesome, and even if I add a bunch to the model and change the UVs I can just reload it and Painter will keep all the work I've done (since it saves individual brush strokes), with maybe some minor tweaking on my part if I happened to mess with the existing UVs a little too much. Things that took me literally hours can take 5 minutes now, it's incredible! E: sort of off topic, but I so wish I could go back and talk to 10 year old me and say "future you gets to use top notch 3D modelers, has tons of fun texturing, and then gets to output to RENDERMAN, all for the cost of like one dumb MtG booster pack" (then I'd fade away). Kid me would've probably thrown a tantrum that he couldn't do it then, and likely given up magic out of spite. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Jul 24, 2016 |
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Jul 23, 2016 23:13
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I've got no love for Autodesk myself, even with their "saturate the beginners market with cracked/edu copies", because the company as a whole has some serious issues. I've only been involved with them through AutoCAD at my old surveying firm, and both the cost of the seats we needed, their continual massive changes to the interface (pro tip: surveyors are progressively an older bunch and hate change), and wanting like 10k to send a dude over for training for like 2 days was pretty poo poo. And the fact that whenever an architect or engineer would upgrade to the newest version that we didn't have would mean we couldn't open their files... Sure, there's ways around that (and I guess from 2013 on they use a consistent Dwg format), but getting them to modify their export workflow was often more trouble than just upgrading. It's down to them being the monopoly of the industry and eating up any competitors, then often absorbing that tech into their flagship and shutting down the existing program, along with practically forcing people to learn their software if they want a job that annoys people the most I think. Because there's no real competition, they have no incentive to help out the little guy - whereas when me, a dumb individual, had problems with Substance Painter and later Pixar's Renderman, was able to contact directly the people working on them and have a response within a day, and in the case of Renderman a fix like an hour after that. I couldn't believe it at first, because I'm not a moneymaker for these companies so they don't need to waste time trying to figure out if it's just me being an idiot, but they do it anyways and get huge amounts of goodwill in my book.
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Jul 24, 2016 17:18
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Have a question: is Maya (2016.5 in my situation) just not amazing at modeling, like I seem to be experiencing? Coming from a pretty decent understanding of Blender, now that I've started to get over my initial UI confusion with Maya I'm finding it takes me way longer to do things even with the right click and space bar menus. Also, tools seem to be spread out somewhat arbitrarily, but if the interface is customizable (I genuinely have no idea how easy it is to do) I should be able to arrange it more naturally for me. I know 2017 finally has workspaces, I've got it installed to mess with, but I'm stuck on 2016 until Pixar releases a new version of the PRMan plugin. Just want to give Maya a fair shake, been trying to learn it off and on for a long time now and this is the first time I've made this much progress, but if I'm not going to be gaining much in the way of ease-of-modeling/useful unique features it would make more sense to just stick with Blender. I prefer a shortcut-heavy workflow with minimal menu searching, so I can use the mouse mainly for modifying meshes and values, and I'm not sure if this is the right approach for Maya. Also, forgot to follow up on my retopo question from before: turns out I just needed to watch some in-depth tutorials on retopoflow. I was expecting a bit too much out of it and looking for an easier solution, but now that I understand it's limitations and ideal workflow better I think this is the best I'll find for control vs speed. At least, not without moving to Zbrush, another program with a bizarre UI and workflow I just can't seem to wrap my head around. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 07:14
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Holy crap, just found my ancient Softimage 3.8 Extreme disc, along with my Creature Creator 1.5 by FXRealm plugin disc. They both read fine even though last time I used either was in like 1999 and they've been in a drawer since then. I'm still not sure if CC is legit because the company I bought it from mailed it to me on a burned CD with printer paper insets, and a handwritten serial # - considering it was one of those big name resellers I figured it was fine, but now I wonder if they were duping the stuff they bought from the developers and selling multiple copies of each license.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:38
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Jewel posted:Turns out "Sausage Party" was hugely scummy to their crew and was rife with unpaid work, leaving credits out for over half the crew, forced overtime under threat of being fired, etc Jesus, it's like everything I read about the games and Vfx industry has to do with awful working conditions; how do you guys deal with that plus having to move wherever the tax credits lead the studios? Is that satisfaction of being a part of a collaborative effort/seeing your work on screen enough to keep you doing it? The few people I've personally talked to in VFX seem to be happy, but one of them was so critical to his studio he was able to move across the country and work remotely, and I don't think that's normal. Off topic a hair, I've been teaching myself a little Python and made some tweaks to Renderman for Blender, which the Pixar dev in charge of the plugin was nice enough to merge into master+get me communicating with the other contributors! It wasn't anything special, just some small tweaks to make the plugin work better for my own renderfarm, but I really never thought I'd be able to contribute to something Pixar makes, much less end up getting involved with the development side of things. I'm a dev newbie too, so just being able to see how legit devs do their thing has been so drat helpful. The plugin is still in beta, so they're always looking for people to try their workflow with it and find bugs, and if you know Python there's work to be done (it's open source, so even if you don't you can look at the code and try to figure it out). It also handles both commercial and non-commercial Renderman fine, and the free NC version of Renderman gets you 5 node-locked licenses per registration (and you can email them for more), making building a renderfarm really easy.
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Aug 15, 2016 18:07
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I didn't mean to come off as "oh people in the industry should just do something else if they're not treated well", life doesn't work that way. Hell, my last job was six years of working for super rich clients helping them waste their money in absurd ways, often watching them screw over poor people - and if it hadn't physically messed me up I'd still be doing it. Guess I'm just amazed at the passion and resolve people can have - some of those quotes were along the lines of "Nitrogen was terrible and I was treated awful, but the project itself was amazing and I worked with great people". I've never been in that situation so it's hard for me to understand how much is venting and how much is people being pushed to their breaking point. mutata posted:Games is not even close to as bad as film/fx and hasn't been for years. There's plenty of capacity for drama in games too, but there are a ton of relatively healthy studios too. It's probably down to only hearing about when things go bad - unfortunately, that's news that gets reported, so it paints a picture of an industry rife with exploitation which makes me feel terrible for the employees that have to deal with it and have no easy way out. It's good to hear games has improved a ton, and I guess I shouldn't assign much weight to the stories I hear about Kickstarter companies not paying their employees/studios closing out of the blue, because sure it happens but it isn't representative of the industry as a whole.
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Aug 15, 2016 19:12
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ImplicitAssembler posted:As above, I accept that overtime is part of the job. We're always pushing the limits, finding new & better ways of doing things and while that also means that we often have to work late, it's also a major part of the attraction working in the industry. I could not imagine doing a regular 9-5 job, repeating the same task every day. I would die inside. This is the perspective I wanted to get - personally I don't mind occasional overtime, but I'm very much set in the 9-5 thing (unless I'm running my own recording studio or whatever) because that's what I've always done and I feel I do worse work if I'm putting in 12-14 hour days every day. Which is probably why I've shied away from non-music creative work, whether or not it's a true fact of the industry. Like workers said in the Nitrogen drama, I've been assuming that tons of overtime often goes hand in hand with being pressured into it and not getting paid properly for that overtime... but it's likely selection bias, because people who get treated well and want to be on the forefront putting in extra hours aren't going to shout that from the rooftops. From an outsider's perspective it's easy to extrapolate drama where there might not be any, so it's refreshing to hear that it's not all doom and gloom in VFX. Regardless, I think I'll always be utterly amazed at what you guys can do in the short timeframes you have. Even just getting a dozen artists to work together and keep a consistent style seems like magic. E: and thanks Mutata for your views on this too! You bring up some really really good points, and I can agree that it's not all flowers and puppies in other industries. In surveying it was expected that the licensed guys would do nighttime zoning meetings, participate in the statewide surveying groups, often work on maps at home, etc, and it's really struggling right now with the average licensed surveyor being over 55 IIRC, so guys that have been doing it for 30-50 years are stuck not being able to retire since there's no one to take the reins. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Aug 15, 2016 |
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Aug 15, 2016 23:51
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Yeah, that's the thing I don't like hearing  I imagine that played a part in the rise of indie studios, especially from established devs. That hasn't happened in VFX (the indie studio thing) has it? E: vvvv I remember reading a few interviews with some game devs that mentioned they started their own studios to get away from the mandated crunch (among other reasons of course), and I was wondering if the same thing (a rise of indie studios) has happened in the VFX world. In terms of salaried workers, afaik there are some checks in place to prevent that from being exploited, but I'll have to look up how it works in tech in general. I know there was some craziness a while back with companies misclassifying workers to not have to pay them overtime, no clue if some companies are still trying to exploit that though. Thanks for all this info anyways (and sorry for the derail), I was definitely misinformed about some stuff so it's been really helpful to hear various insider perspectives. The Gasmask fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 17:36
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Had my first chat with an animation studio about being a texture artist! Have a little test to do, almost finished with it, then I get to see if I get beaten out by the other couple of people going for it. The program workflow is a bit unique I guess, and since it's what I already use that works in my favor. No clue if I'm the right fit, but the place seems pretty cool and there's a bit in the pipeline so I'll be able to jump right in if I get it. I had a pretty great character modeler recommend me so it was a bit surprising to have the studio head contact me practically out of the blue, but it was perfect timing since I'm trying to move beyond doing this as a hobby.
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Aug 27, 2016 04:46
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