BAM! New environments!

I’m assuming it’s pretty shivery in hell right now, being as I actually finished some things. Been trying to practice more current-gen (or at least less blatantly past-gen) modeling and texturing. It was fun, and I’m going to go make something that hasn’t even heard of spec maps now.

Greenhouse built in UDK, modeled in Maya, textured in Photoshop and nDo2, and weighing in at either 9300 or 3800 tris depending on whether you feel like counting instances.

This mighty kitchen has been forged of the same programs mentioned above and throwing around about 6500 tris. Also I learned all sorts of fun things about custom materials and it was awesome.

I should probably update….

As mentioned above, updates as to what I’ve been doing, besides being a jerk, and instead of daily 3D sketches like I should be, shall now follow:

Kitchen corner in UDK, about 5800 tris.

Greenhouse corner in UDK, about 7000 tris with instances, 3300 tris without.

They’re *mostly* textured at this point… Mostly… But you just get detail lighting for now.

Final(ly) high-poly kitchen

A quick AO render and wireframes of the high-poly version of the kitchen. I might do a render with real materials on here at some point if I want to be intolerably smug, but I’ll probably just jump straight into the game-res modeling.

Zbrush and some normals troubleshooting

This embarrassingly simple scene has been the one I’ve been using to reintroduce myself to all of Zbrush’s tools and foibles (whether I like it or not) over the past couple of weeks. Surprisingly little of this was actually spent sculpting- most of it was spent learning that no matter how many methods you try, tutorials (written or in person) you follow, how much you bed and how many bribe cookies you bake, sometimes Zbrush just doesn’t want to let you transfer detail between meshes and/or reimport UVs. I wound up just painting the maps in Photoshop, but that’s still been fun. And now I’m just obsessively UVing ev.ery.thing. before I put it in Zbrush to start with. Although for the stuff I’m doing now it, er, doesn’t really matter, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

But this! This was cool! This was exciting! This was also embarrassingly simple.

Totally ugly normal map. It makes me sad.

Totally sweet normal map that my teacher showed me how to bake from the same exact meshes. All he wound up doing was splitting up the mesh along the hardened normals (anyone who actually knows what they’re doing is probably shaking their head and sighing right now).

Theme of the day: embarrassingly simple things that I’m botching. And/or learning. The two tend to go hand-in-hand.

Oh, P.S., if anyone has any brainwaves on how to make that knife look like it isn’t floating, please let me know. Cheers.:)

Deep Sea Sub… Fancy Thing

Can you tell I’m just getting everything together for portfolio for GDC? This is the main assignment from my mapping for games class, which I love, and it was a lot of fun. Might still have to tweak it a leetle, but in the interest of sanity I’m pretty much calling it.:)

Progress on the temple that you guys haven’t heard of until just now

So I have a magical knack for vanishing into the real world (it’s terrible, I know).  But I brought presents!  Not gym memberships or health food or anything useless like that.  Oh no!  I brought back awesome stuff, cool stuff, totally sweet stuff that consumed my life for the past two and a half months with ruthless efficiency

Okay, that sentence is only true if you remove everything from “awesome” to “sweet”, but I’m working on making something those adjectives apply to.  In the meantime, you’ll have to put up with my work in progress…es.  God, what an awful word.

Anyways, this one is a temple based off of the Katrik Swami temple in Nepal.  At this point I’m mainly polishing up the building interior and exterior textures and starting to work on the surrounding environment.  Glee!