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

Suit em up – building sprite sheets

Hello!

This week I have been really productive. First of I did finish the last touches on our Bugger, the pink flying bug from last week. The glowing’s looks way better now and he doesn’t look like a flying and buzzing Christmas three anymore (lulz).

Then I did our basic map. To this week we have used a placeholder from our mock-ups so we could have one before the finished graphics were done.

This is how it looked then…

…And this is how it look now!

I think it’s a great improvement. It’s much more different from our customization menu that then was the same suit as the first map but only it’s outlines (two so similar screens in the menu-system should be avoided to not confuse the player. A menu system that is hard to navigate is a bad one, flicking through a game-menu isn’t a gameplay ;)).

Later on I will add how the real world is fitted in this suit to give the exact place and a better view over how the world is built up. As you explore the world in the game more of it will show in the map and finally when you have been everywhere the whole map should give you a completed image over the world making it easy for you to navigate you to wherever you want. But this is a lower priority than animating the two bosses that are left.  Hopefully this feature will be added if time allows it, would be really nice!

I have also finished the green Grubling, the grub with a cannon on its back. Now we have animation for movement up and down and not only right and left making it not look so stiff. So right now I’ve made and (by Tomas) implanted three characters in fully four-way animations and directions. This is a really big mile-stone in graphics for our game. If you don’t count with the bosses all character’s to our game is now done.

This is how the sprite-sheet’s turned out and look now…

… the grubling

… the bugger

… Barney’s legs (I know, they seem pretty random running there on their own and it’s just looking ridiculous without the rest of him but this is what you get for now. we have implanted the rest of Barney in the game so don’t worry, it’s only out here it looks this random. he actually looks fine in the game. 5 out of 5 when we asked people who have played it, top ratings Wuu-Huuu!)

 

The rest of Barney is on another sprite sheet (I’m going to post him in one peace later for you guys to see, don’t worry!). He is built up in parts where his legs are one part, his torso in another, his arms in a third and his head in a last one. We have done it this way so he will look and behave more like a robot in his appearance being able to run, shoot and look in different directions at the same time all according to the players input. It looks and feels way more fun controlling him this way.

Last of work I’ve done this week is that I just started on one of the last bosses, Ben Bugger. He will get a presentation here in my blog next week and you will get an image of how he looks as well. (OMG, it’s almost like a cliff-hanger of my work, lol! and now you have to come back to see how it ends, mohuehuehue!!x))

Well, that’s all! Sorry for not going in to much of details in this blog post and almost just rush through everything so fast even I don’t get what I’ve done, but I’m already like 150 words more than we should write, so have to end it here! CYA!!

-Ludwig Lindstål 

Suit Em’ Up – The random week

Hello World!

This week I was supposed to help Andreas (which are designer of our game-world) with the graphical parts of our “rooms”. Our game-world/suit is cut into smaller “rooms” so the computer doesn’t need to have the entire world in its memory at once but only loads the room the player is in and the surrounding ones. So, as said, I was supposed to help Andreas with our rooms. But he wanted to go for graphics for our menu system instead so we are going to do the rooms later, this resulted in me not working on one specific artifact this week but several and smaller ones.

Kind of what texture we’re looking for to use in our game. the search will be continued!

Instead for fixing our rooms I did some research after texture for our suit. There are two layers of our world. One inner layer which is the one you will walk around on, and one outer that is the suit’s outside which sets the paths for the labyrinth of our game. I’ve started on some of the textures myself, and will together with Andreas put them in to our rooms, but that will wait for maybe next week or so, simply when we have time for it.

the two enemy’s and all the Barney’s are my work, the rest is concept-art done by Måns from my group

I have also done some improvements on my animations. They are much smoother now and have a more biological appearance. Not as stiff as my first attempt at doing some animation. There are now 4 frames for each leg instead of only two and there is also a lot more details added to the enemy’s. One other thing on our animation-front is that finally we have some added in the real game, we have animation for one of the enemy’s (the green one) and a walking animation for Barney, our main character. So now the game doesn’t look as boring when there is a lot of movement going on, on the screen. We-ho!

This is a mock-up of what we wanted the map to look like, the red dot is where the player is. The map is just a suit due to our aesthetic goal; Exploring. the player  will not be given a full map of the suit because it reveals too much and lower the exploring game-play for the player.

Last of random work I did this week was a map for our menu-system. As the programmers was already finished with the code for it and we only needed the map-sprite I thought I could do it as well, since this week already is messed up with random tasks. Since the programmers already are done with the code of the map, I had some very strict rules to follow when making it. I had to draw it over our map, but not lose the proportions of it, nor make it too much offset from the map, which made the map look a bit weird.

This is how i had to do the map. it’s not finished jet but you’ll get the idea.

well. I think that’s all folk, sorry for a very diffuse post…will be better next week!

-Ludwig Lindstål