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wasabimilkshake
Aug 21, 2007

North Carolina votes yes.
It's my secret childhood dream to be a 3D Environment artist in the gaming industry. I'm majoring in (questionably) Game Design at SCAD, and having just finished my first year I haven't gotten out of a studio full of naked fat people and into a computer lab yet, but I'm trying to learn the ropes of 3D modeling so when I do get into my major courses I don't waste any time fumbling around in the dark.

I've watched a few training videos and followed along with a few tutorials to get my feet wet. However, it's really maddening to sit through tutorials that take time to explain how to press Alt in combination with another key, or the difference between left clicking and right clicking (oh hi I wasn't aware that Lynda.com was actually John Scherer's Video Professor teaches 3ds Max 9 for Grandmas), so I decided to just start making something and see where I got.

These are the first couple of (decent) models I've made without any kind of instruction. Please don't be gentle -- I'm a hooker for your feedback.


I made this Victrola last night, based mainly on this reference photo. I can't say much about it other than that it took me several hours and was a hell of a learning experience. Also, the panel on the front looks kinda weird, there's a lack of detail on the sides, and the molding looks off, but practice is practice.

Tonight I decided to make something low-poly, so I modeled the axe seen in this excellent Blizzard concept drawn by Mark Gibbons. I hope I'm not breaking any unwritten rules or being ungentlemanly by using someone else's work for practice, but I obviously take absolutely no credit for the design.



Tonight was the point at which this stuff just sort of clicked for me, and it ceased to be frustrating and just became fun. So I'm happy about that, although organic modeling is still an agonizing enigma to me.

After getting where I am now and taking a look at what I have, I notice a few things that bug me. I know I'm rambling to myself and answering my own questions, but if you could either vindicate me or tell me I'm wrong, I'd really appreciate what feedback you can offer.

1. The GeoSphere on the tail end looks a little too... non-uniform. That's why I used it instead of a regular Sphere, but looking at the silhouette turnaround it seems like the shape isn't very well-defined. I'm considering changing it to a regular sphere, but maybe roughing it up a bit to make it not so perfect.

2. The big spike is supposed to be the pointy, gnarled horn of a whale, but I think it reads too much like a flat blade or spike, partially because the base is indeed wider on one side. I'm considering a) adding in a loop or two and making the shape a bit more parabolic and/or b) making the spike truly round/square, which would entail doing the same to the base it's sitting on.

3. I don't like the way the blade pretty much forms a 90-degree angle. I'm considering a) adding some more detail to the inner part of the blade to make it curve into the outer part more, and/or b) slanting the top edges of the inner part of the blade downward some.

4. That weird middle triangle/spike on the inner part of the blade bugs me. I feel like it's awkwardly subdivided and that I haven't really executed the detailing that well for the amount of polys it cost. Since this is low-poly (I'm aiming for WoW spec, more or less), do I need that division at all, or can I get along fine making it flat and letting the texture do the talking?

5. The extruded band near the back of the pole seems a little simple to me, even for low-poly. I'm thinking of just adding one more loop in the center and kind of bowing it inward. In addition, in the concept it has four spikes that I overlooked, so I'll have to go back and add those, and probably rotate that piece 45 degrees so they can rest flat on those faces.

Am I on the right track?

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wasabimilkshake
Aug 21, 2007

North Carolina votes yes.
I'm taking a class that includes a Maya project, and being accustomed only to Max, I'm having to go back and forth a lot between the two. I can't stand polygon modeling in Maya, and I don't know how to UV map in Maya, so I've been doing those things in Max and importing each asset as an OBJ file into my Maya scene. It's worked just fine so far on the technical side, but I've just imported my first UV mapped/textured prop and I'm having some display issues in Maya.

It's not a very glamorous model, but this is what it looks like in both:


To reiterate, I modeled and unwrapped it in Max, and the texture worked fine. After exporting it as an OBJ (default settings, quads) and bringing it into Maya, the geometry, normals, and UVs seem to be preserved. But when I create a new material with my texture map and apply it to the object, it starts looking all wonky as you can see above.

I know next to nothing about materials in Maya, so it could be some mundane detail related to that. I hate to pollute the thread with my noobish Max->Maya transition questions, but if anybody knows how to fix this problem I'd appreciate the advice.

edit: I saved the texture again without transparency and that solved the transparency issues. A few of the faces were still showing up half-black and the normals were set the right way, so I think it's just a weird geometry issue resulting from exporting and importing OBJ multiple times. I think I'll try using FBX from now on.

wasabimilkshake fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Oct 15, 2008

wasabimilkshake
Aug 21, 2007

North Carolina votes yes.
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.







I don't know a whole lot about optimization, and so I have a few basic questions about modeling.

1. Is it okay to leave my geometry like it is in A and let the exporter handle making everything into triangles, or should I do it myself as in B? Or, is there something unclean about long, skinny triangles that would compel me to do something crazy like C?


2. These things aren't attached to the wall at the back because that would require a lot of cuts and extra geometry. Is that acceptable, or do I need to connect everything as one continuous object?


3. Furthermore, is one of these preferable to the other? Could something like B, with multiple objects attached as elements but not technically welded together, be exported into most game engines as a single object?


4. Am I doing this right?


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.

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