Work in Progress: Well Scene Take 2 (Part II)

Well, I did do a little bit on the well scene.  The wall is not not completely right, though the curves in it are a little better than they were.  What really needs work is the top of the center piece, which would add a great deal since it is the focal item.  Besides that, some beveling could help the overall look of the wall, but that is more of a detail thing while I am still more blocking the scene out.  I also need to work on my rock texture which is going to replace they gray on the wall, but that again can wait.  While I could go over what is still missing, I am just going to go over what was just added, the stepping stones.  I tried to amake them look like a path which has fallen into disrepair by making a series of stones about the same width that look like they could interlock.  I am not sure what I am going to use for these stones as a texture, but for now they hold my green marble.

Most of the weekend was spent playing my newly released game.  While that does not sound like progress, I have been using it to see what kind of detail is used in textures and what is used in models.  I have also been taking a ton of screenshots so I can look at their work later.  That about sums up my weekend, until next time,
~gunnah

Work in Progress: Well Scene Take 2 (Part I)

Since I have decided to see how quickly I can learn a new 3D modeling program a few months ago, I decided to pick up a recent project I was working on with the last program and see how easy I can port it into the new 3D modeler.  Right now I just have the basic wall added, there are still a few details needed to recreate it like I had it, but for a night I feel it is good progress.  The wall had a top area with varying extrusions, as well as curved areas going into the lower walls if I remember correctly.  If I can get myself together this weekend, I will try to get those added, as well as trying to increase the curve in the wall itself, looking at it now, it seems a little tight.  I apologize if it is a little hard to see some of the details, but I was playing with the procedural materials and trying to make a green marble.  I think it came out decent, not for a focal item, but more something to give the impression of marble.  It is hard to see the swirls without looking closely at the image, but with a little work on the coloration, I think I can get it a little better.  The colors and the scaling of the texture itself, but that is a worry for another time as I am likely to change it to more of a stone base soon.

Unfortunately the game I was beta testing a month or so ago is being released this weekend.  That means I am unlikely to spend much time on anything besides that if I do not need to, though I may take a break once I feel I made it far enough into the game.  I will again be looking to take an extreme number of screenshots so I can dissect how a professional game assets are created.

Well that about wraps up post number 100.  I know I did a big thing for 50, but I do not feel I have done much with the game at the moment, but hopefully by 150 I will b back on track.  Hope everyone has a good weekend,
~gunnah

Doughnuts

So I figured out the new 3D modeling program I have been playing with has a secondary and much better rendering system than the default one I had been using.  Just fooling around with it I decided to make some doughnuts.  Now I have a few complaints about the scene, but overall I am fairly happy with the way it turned out.  The biggest thing for me is I forgot to make a plate, though this was a little intentional since I wanted to see how the glass would reflect.  Other than that, the scene needs a little better lighting, this is purely with the environmental color; the glaze needs its reflectivity turned down, I did not notice it actually reflected the table - I thought it was a shadow before realizing with environmental lighting on a glass table would make no shadows; and the table glass needs a bit of work, as I was hoping to add a slight tint and instead got a color much deeper than I had selected.  But these are all more refinements I will pick up on as I play more with the rendering system.  What I do feel was highly successful was the use of fluids - being the first time I had a fluid system work successfully for me - to make the glaze itself.  Initially, I had the glaze a lot further down, but I felt the cake part of the doughnut was too lost adn it really did look better covered only half to three-quarters with icing.  Though sprinkles would have been nice, I felt learning the particle system on top of the fluid system would have been too much, though if I revisit the doughnuts, I may try to add sprinkles.

Now, I did do a bit of work on the sword I was working on, but I felt it was not coming out the way I wanted it to.  The big problem is in modeling the grip, which involves a series of twists in the model.  I have a feeling that while the model itself goes together fairly easily, the calculated normals are unsure which direction to ppoint leading to black patches.  Additionally, I was trying to figure out how to make use of the new rendering system I was trying to procedurally texture the model.  I think I solved the texture problem, but the model itself requires a bit more work to get right.  Note that the older render system is more like what I would use in a game engine while the newer render system is more focused on high quality rendering like in animation.  Hope everyone has a good week,
~gunnah

Scimitar: Day 1 (Metal Piece)

To the left is what I did over the week.  The overall model is not even 90 polygons, though I have not figured out how to make the grip which is much more intricate than the metal piece.  I will probably not texture it (though I may use a procedural texture it f I get bored) until I straighten out my computer issues.  Hopefully by the end of the weekend everything will be running smoothly and I will have more to show.  This just happened to be a fairly easy model to work on to get some of the techniques I have seen in tutorials into practice.  Who knows, may Sunday I will have something game related finished.  Until then,
~gunnah

I really need to find where my weekends go

So another weekend passed and I am left trying t figure out what I did during it.  I suppose I should be use to very short weekends by now, but it never ceases to amaze me just how fast they fly by when the week seems to drag on forever.  But I always have been bad at judging time and that is not what this post is about despite the title.

I have begun work on a little distraction, nothing big just something to have a bit of fun with, though I am leaving it at that until I have something to show in case that project goes nowhere.  I have also began a game-relevant tutorial which I am hoping will make one or more of my meshes when all is said and done.  Again, I will have more when the project is further along, but that should be within the next week.

And finally, I am looking at engines again.  I found one that has a royalty-free license until distribution, so I will write more about that once I get it installed and running.  Hope every had a good weekend,
~gunnah

Learning more

While I am hoping to make a piece or two for the base level, I am not sure ho well that is going to work.  Not for lack of will, but my weekends seem to pass real quick.  Another aspect which may hold up making these little models is the need to do tutorials.  While I do not mean tutorials are a requirement for everything, Completing a handful would make me more comfortable with the overall layout. Additionally, do a few tutorials may point out ways which I did not even think of to do these models.

Have a good weekend,
~gunnah

Hidden Progress

Just as the post name states, I have nothing to actually show for this post.  Perhaps later in the week I will have more pretty pictures of tutorials I completed.  Well, I suppose the place to start is where I left off last post: the high-detail, low-poly plane.  One of the biggest problems I am having with the second part, I finished the first already, is I want to use a completely different set of software than the tutorial.  Though I have tried the image editing software the tutorial uses, the price tag is very high, so I found a free alternative.  However, not everything lines up perfectly, and I can say you do get what you pay for in this circumstance.  That being said, I am going to continue with the free image editing software for the time being until I can actually afford the pricey alternative   Another problem I found was the tutorial does not use UDK like I though but rather Unity, something I hope never to have to touch.  So when I get to it, I will try to export it to UDK.

Now that looks like I did not do much, and that would be fairly truthful, at least for that tutorial.  What I did do was get familiar with the new 3D modeling software, which is much like the debate I am having over which image editing software to use.  Though in this debate the new, free software actually has a few advantages over the old software.  One of the big ones is that the software will generate a UV map and while this does not sound like much, that is actually quite nice compared to making one in the old software.  Note that while I have not actually unwrapped a UV on one of my models, I watched two tutorials on how to do so and practiced on a cube.  One little annoyance I have is that scaled geometry keeps the UV points relative to their position before scaling.  That may sound weird but here is what I mean: Say you have a cube and unwrap it, you would get the normal t shape.  But let us say you did not unwrap it and instead scaled the Y and Z dimensions by one quarter and the X by three, leading to something that would be like a 6" by 6" by 6' piece of lumber (I was trying to make a pallet and that was to be the middle beams).  I was expecting the unwrap to produce four rectangles and two square, but what ended up happening is the UV map for the cube was generated.  With a bit of work, I manage to determine it was the scaling that did that, since moving the vertices to the same locations unwrapped in the proper form.

One of the bug advantages, since the new 3D modeling software is open source, the interface to export to other software is very open.  So exporting to UDK only required a small python script.  I watched several tutorials on how to move models from the 3D modeler to UDK so they would have the proper material, collision boxes and light maps.  This just means that if I do decide on UDK, moving the models to it would be very easy, at least that is what it looked like.  I will probably make my final decision about what software I am using at the same time, buying whatever licenses at that time.  Currently I am looking into several engines, though I only have two installed at the moment, a few image editing software since I am not sure I completely like the free one I just started using, and a few 3D modeling programs, but mostly the two I have been suing, trying to decide if it is worth putting that much into the project or to just use the free alternative.  Well, probably nothing definitive on those choices any time soon, so until the end of the week,
~gunnah

Some Good and Some Bad

And t start off, lets go with bad.  Last weekend powerful thunderstorms rolled through my area and caused a few power outages.  One of these outages caused my computer to forget where it put its boot manager.  After two days of looking online for how to fix it and trying all kinds of ideas from system restore to rewriting the boot manager through command line, nothing worked.  As a last ditch effort to save some of what I was loosing, I used the command line and tried to move my well project amongst other files to the secondary partition of my main hard dive.  Unfortunately, Windows relabeled all of my drive letters and command line never told me that it copied them nowhere, in fact it told me the process succeeded.  So while I may have a copy floating in some ethereal space, I am considering that the only backups I have are from the previous reformat about a month or so ago.  Luckily all I have really worked on was the hand in the well project.  Unfortunately, I do not feel like doing that a third time at the moment.

In fact I have decided the focus on the new 3D modeling program, trying to learn that.  I decided that have both 3D modeling programs on my computer, I was using the first one I learned as a crutch so I did not need to focus on the second program.  With only one program, if I want to play, I need to learn the new program. This mean I will probably do a few tutorials then get back to asset design for the main project again.

Now the first tutorial I found happens to be a very good one for game design.  The object manipulation is limited, as only extrude, scale and translate are really used; but for me this was enough to get the basic hot-keys down as well as a couple of tricks.  Where this tutorial is handy is it teaches how to bake high poly looks into a low poly mesh.  Additionally, the next section of the two sections of the tutorial is going over how to create a color and specular map.  Now, the tutorial would have been very good if it stopped there, but it goes on to show how to import the mesh and maps into UDK and link everything to display properly.

So, sorry this was late, though I did not really have much choice as I needed to decide what to do before moving ahead,
~gunnah