3D Week 09 – Assignment 3: part 4

Hello!

This is the final update on the final assignment of the 3D1 course. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, and by comparing this with my first assignment (the sci-fi crate) I can tell that I have really learnt a few tricks. The modelling is so much faster and the final mesh is much more optimized. The texture is more appealing (and more fun to create) as it is hand drawn instead of using photos from the internet.

Well, here is how the final character turned out in UDK:

  

Here is how the diffuse look like:

And the specular:

And the Normal:

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And that’s it for the first 3D course. This course has been the most interesting and fun so far form me. Everything has been new, and the learning curve has been going straight up. It feels like every week a hundred of new things was though out and that’s really cool.

Until next time; Take care!

-Lui

3D Week 06 – Assignment 2: part 3

Hi everybody!

This is the final update on the Assignment 2, just to show everyone how it turned out.

Tris count: 993

Texture size: 1024 * 1024

 

Hey ho, let’s go!

These are screenshots of the dagger/knife in UDK:

This is how it looks in 3DS max:

This is how the diffuse map looks like:

And this is how the specular map turned out:

And this is the normal map:

That’s it! Moving on to the assignment 3. See ya’ there!

-Lui

3D week 05 – Assignment 1: part 4

Hello!

This is the final post about my crate and my first assignment in 3D graphics 1.

A 3D model often consists of at least four parts. The mesh which is the actual 3D model, the diffuse map which is the texture that holds all the colours, the specular map which tells the secularity of  different parts of the object, and last the normal map which contains information making details look realistic and not like “stickers”.

A diffuse map is basically a 2D image that gets wrapped around the mesh to give it the basic pixel colour from the bitmap used. A good diffuse map is made without a directional light as those are made whit the specular and normal maps. It should only have the basic ambient occlusion by getting darker in cracks and deeper areas. When working on your diffuse map you mostly work with the saturation levels and “raw” colours.

The Specular map is like the diffuse map a 2D image wrapped around the mesh, but instead of containing the colours for your object the specular map is a grey scale of how shiny your object is. The brighter the value, the higher specular the surface gets. In real life, one of the first thing the human eye notice is the secularity of a material, sometimes even before the colour of it. So to get the secular map right is really important to make a legit model. For example if you’re making smooth metal that is shiny you want to use a bright value to simulate that glossy surface, but if you’re making a dull surface like textile you will make it much darker as textile reflect almost no light at all. Take a look at your clothes and you will see that almost no light from other objects gets reflected from them, but for a mirror (a very smooth metal surface) almost all you can see is light already reflected from other materials.

The normal map is used to give your mesh a much higher resolution look than it actual has. A normal map replace what otherwise would have used a lot of more polygons. You should use the normal map whenever you want details on your model that is not interfering with the silhouette too much. What the normal map actually does is faking light and shadows on your mesh creating an illusion of that higher poly mesh for a much lower performance cost. Interactive normal maps can be used for creating effects when interacting with them, for example if you shoot at a wall the normal map will change so that the hole doesn’t look flat by getting proper shadows.

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This is how my final crate turned out. I’m pretty satisfied with it as it’s my first model ever, and it even got a diffuse map on it. I have only played around with 3D modelling a very few times before and most of the time I had no clue of what I was doing. So this is my first finished 3D asset and I think it turned OK. (the image is rendered in UDK)

 

And this is how my Diffuse turned out (you can check my latest post about how I did this):

 

This is my normal map:

And this is how my specular map turned out:

Hope you enjoyed reading!

-Lui