Hello world, long time no post!?

Well, I’ve been busy! During the evenings I have been working on several Unity-projects and here ‘s one of them. VERY unfinished, I should add. The building model needs a lot more work before I can call it finished, but since this is a free-time project, I went ahead and played with some effects work first.

The rain effects are not mine, I saw them in the Asset store and couldn’t help but grab them – pretty nifty! Go check it out here

The thunder “system” however is mine. Nothing much there, but it should choose randomly from a bunch of different lightsource-soundeffect pairs.

Try it out – don’t forget to put audio on!

This is a follow-up for the earlier Tower-post.

I have continued the project by adding a straight castle wall piece, which is tileable so that you can build as long a wall as you need. It consists of just a 2-tri plane for the bulk of the wall and a top piece. I modeled both of these paying attention to the grid in Max and made sure the normal diffuse maps tile.

In Unity, putting the blocks together is pretty straightforward. Thanks to the new vertex snapping feature, modeling to grid is not so important anymore, as you can snap game objects together regardless of their position to the grid. I can see some room for improvement in my textures – they show quite noticeable patterns when tiled several times, but the clean up will have to wait for later  - after all this was just a test.

After trying out several ideas for a new project, I decided to go with the old medieval theme. So, here’s a guard tower, that might accompany the earlier bridge project some day.

The image in the bottom of the page is a link to a camera fly-through I posted in Youtube.

I was testing rigging and skinning on a lowpoly version of a jacket I sculpted earlier. Well, one idea followed another…

Big thanks to Incompetech.com for the music!

Here’s a jacket I’m working on. All the details are missing for now.

Here’s a face I’ve been working on.

I added the shirt as a last minute tweak and it shows!

Don’t get me wrong though, I didn’t actually use the skull as a base although it taught me a lot of the proportions of a face.
This was a more general study of an older man’s face. My sculpt turned out a bit feminine though

Long time, no post? Well, I’ve been busy In addition to a customer project I have started working on a ZBrush class and this skull was one of the first exercises. It is incomplete as you can see, with the teeth and the mandible missing, but I will finish it later if I find some use for the model.

To test it in a real-time environment, I quickly made up a “dungeon” scene in Unity3D. It was so fun to make, that maybe I will continue to add stuff to it and turn it to a playable demo, but for now I need to continue with the studies and leave this as it is. Check back during the following weeks, I will be posting more class work as I get it done!

I had some time in between projects and I decided to make a character in ZBrush, just to see if I have learned the software enough to pull it off.

The project, while not finished, has already been both a success and a failure: I’m fairly happy with the progress so far, but I did found it necessary model some parts Max rather than sticking with ZBrush as I originally planned.

It started out as just a general character, but while I was working on it, I got some ideas of dressing it in armor. I wanted something rather light and went with leather – searching for reference lead me to pictures of some awesome “elvish” armor and my mind was set! With elvish ideas I couldn’t help but dig around for elvish fonts – I ended up using them in the belt clip for now.

When I started doing game graphics, it took me a while to figure out how to get those fancy details from ZBrush into an in-game mesh. Well, here’s how I do it currently. This is not the only way to do it, but I think it works pretty well and gives you quite a bit of control on just how much detail you want to save. Please note that this is not a modeling, nor an UV unwrapping tutorial – I made this in quick & dirty fashion, so especially unwrapping is not optimal in this example. There are plenty of tutorials for unwrapping and modeling around the web.

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There was a twitter-discussion this week on how to get distortion-free UVs for a sphere. At first I thought it was a trivial task, but when I tried it out I realized that a) I never had to unwrap a simple sphere before and b) it’s not as trivial as you would think.

So after a few trial-and-errors and some Googling, I came up with this workflow. It’s definitely not the only way to do that – as nothing usually is in modeling – but it gives fast and decent results. I cannot take credit for this, either – it is the result of a discussion and bases on other people’s tutorials.

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Here’s a little demo I made for my bridge model.

To be honest, I actually did it to learn about the new features in Unity 3.0. While I’m not a game developer, I think it’s important for me to understand how a game-engine works and especially how my 3d assets behave, when put to use. Of course this was also great fun to do and I had to make myself to stop “improving” it – I could go on for ever just adding features to it, but it needs to be put online and I need to focus on other projects

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This is a test I did a while back using Object2VR tools.

It’s a single-row flash thingy. You can orbit around the car by grabbing it with your mouse. There are also a couple of buttons on the side where you can change the car’s color and toggle it’s brake lights. This was a fun project, but very time-consuming too, as I needed to render the images for each combination of color and %thumbhere% lights.

This is another early viz project featuring a living room. Customer wanted both day and night images of the same room, also an alternate version was made from the night image.  Interior design is by Nonni Creative.

Here’s one of my earliest viz projects. Nonni Creative is behind the interior design of the bathroom. I made two variants on customer’s request. Some special love was given for the towels