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 04 – Assignment 1: part 3

Hello. It’s time for an update on my sci-fi crate, so here we go!

The inspiration for my crate is all from the Halo and Portal games. Well for shape and model I was looking more at the Portal’s “companion cube” as I hope you can tell from the rough and hard edges I have in my crate. When it comes to texture mostly of what I aimed for is from Halo I would say, as the crate I am trying to create is a bit more serious than those from the Portal’s series.

So for the diffuse map (the map that holds all colours, icons and so on. think of it as a textured piece of paper that is wrapped around your model.) I chose the materials metal, rubber and carbon fibre as they are rough and almost industrial, just like the Spartan suit from halo is. For getting the right appearance of the materials I will have to use a specular map to get the reflection and normal map for the texture of it but that’s for next week. As the Spartan suit’s is themed with one high saturated colours of either green, red or blue I thought my crate would have one of these as colour theme. I chose red simply because I think it looks better than the others. (And maybe a little because I didn’t wanted to do blue just because “sci-fi” is supposed to be “blue”, wanted to try if I could make it work with red.)

The colours I used (well, it was only red) I made pretty hard saturated. The colour is distinct and even darkened a bit to compensate for the brighter metal scratches and polished parts inside the spheres. The rubber I made with zero saturation as to make contrast with the redness so they are basically all dark grey. To give them a little bit of wear and tear to fit the rest of the texture I highlighted the edges as when rubber or plastic gets damage they tend to brighten a bit. It also adds a bit to contrast so the grey parts aren’t all grey and boring.

The colour I use is warm. As sci-fi tend to have a bluish tone to it, it is often a cold felling in a sci-fi image overall and as I stated before I wanted to see if I could do the opposite of the “stereotypes” of sci-fi. My crate also have a dirty look to it, it looks like it have been out in the sun and hot weather for ages, maybe in a dessert. At least it doesn’t look like a new, directly from factory crate for sure.

This is my crate with an “UV-checker” I got from Nataska, our 3D teacher. It is used when doing the UV map. By using this it is much easier to see how large or small the resolutions on the different parts of the UV map are. This is all so that your crate won’t look blurry on some spots as they have too few pixels, while some will have “too many”. You would want a diffuse that is as even as possible. You can also use it to see so that there aren’t any big distortions on your texture and if there are you might need to re-cut your UV-map and relax the tensions creating those distortions and warps.

For my crate I chose to use the same area of the UV map several times so that my result would be of higher resolution in the texture as we were limited to 512px X 512px for this assignment. For my crate that is symmetrical in all dimensions this isn’t a big of a problem as the symmetry already is obvious and the details are so small they are hard to see if being repeated compared to an unsymmetrical crate of a different material (like if you see the same planks of a wooden box being repeated they are much easier to spot). Also, this crate has six sides, and no matter how you try to look at it you will only see a maximum of three sides at the same time, so why don’t repeat the texture on those sides that you can’t see at the same time? This saves both time in creating all of the maps, but the crate also gets a higher resolution by reusing the space on the UV-map.

This is how my final diffuse map turned out. As you can see I reused a lot of space. If I haven’t done this the resolution would have been around 6 times smaller than what I managed to do now. But as I said before, this only works for a few types of situations such as mine.

This is how my crate looks in the Unreal Engine (using UDK). Note that this is only with a diffuse map. The specular map and the normal map will be made next week, and hopefully this crate will look much nicer than it does right now.

That’s it for now!

Hare gött!

-Lui

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