Sunday, February 27, 2011

Game Texturing - Project 2

Project 2 was all about unified texturing and taking advantage of more than one quadrant of the UV space to capture as much tilable resolution within a scene as possible.  Whether this method is actually used in a game is questionable, but it was still a learning proccess for me.  I learned how to bake normal maps and ambient occlusion and for the first time, I began creating specular, gloss, emissive, alpha and diffuse maps on top of my color maps.

My textures are way too clean, but the challenge was to capture as much detail using textures rather than modeling.








Lo-res scene with details using texture:


Friday, February 25, 2011

Game Modeling - 36 hour Art Test

On Wednesday morning, our class received instructions and specifications on a practice art test.  We were to choose one of two provided concepts to model.  Our limit was 5000 tris, our maps 1024 x 1024, and we were to generate both Normal and Ambient Occlusion.

I learned a lot about normal mapping and baking maps in this assignment as well as beveling edges.  I still have a lot to learn, but I definitely want to get up to speed on baking Ambient Occlusion.  For some reason all my floating geometry generated black in the map as seen in the bottom left of the picture above.  Hopefully Mr. Gardener will have some insight to this problem as well as feedback on this piece.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Game Modeling Project 4 - High Poly

Here is my high poly object.  I have learned a lot from this project.  Hopefully the normal map baking will not cause me a lot of headaches.  More to come soon!



Mr. Gardner's techniques for modeling tires was very fast and efficient.  Model one piece of tread, duplicate special with transformations, combine the meshes, then apply a bend deformer to wrap the piece over.


I'm concerned the tag on this fire extinguisher might cause problems when baking on my normal maps.  I'll let you guys know how that turns out.



And lastly the instrument panel.  I added some gauges that will display voltages and gas levels, etc.  Also a gas cap on the left side as well as activation buttons.


Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Game Modeling Project 3 - Low Poly

My low poly is now complete.  My budget was 5000 triangles and I was successful in maintaining.  I clocked in at 4,256 with a decent amount of detail.  Additional detail will be added soon in the way of textures, bump maps and normal maps.  Stay tuned!


UPDATE:

My teacher, Mr.Gardner had some vaulable insight on my model.  I have since retouched the piece adding more detail pushing it a little farther.  The updated model with UVs can be seen below.