Tom C – A MDS Blog

The task was to model and texture a vehicle using the skills we had. Then to create a real world simulation of the car in the game development tool, Unity. We were provided a track to test and the scripts power our vehicles with.

The simulation side of the assignment was to use information like gear ratios, weight and engine RPM to create a playable vehicle that feels correct while driving

I created to do a Jaguar E-Type. I chose this car because the design of the car has a great deal of interesting curves and shapes over it’s shell.

Here’s the final result. You can see I had a little bit of fun with the design

You can play the simulation game I created here, online with the Unity Web Player.

(Arrow keys) Drive
(A) Up Gear
(Z) Down Gear
(1) Camera 1
(2) Camera 2

If the game starts lowering the resolution and quality of itself ( White textures and bright highlights everywhere ), then your current hardware is unable to cope with the number of cubemap reflections on the vehicle.

Over the past week I created an environment of a abandoned office building.

The task was to create a number of modular environment pieces that could be easily put together to create an environment by a level designer. This meant that we were to create models of structural pieces like walls, doors and stairs. They had to fit together correctly, and have textures that tiled. The second part of the task was to create a level out of the pieces we created, and put them together into one big group map. There was no overarching theme to what we were to create.

The environment I chose to do was partially inspired by these photos. ( Warning, many large images behind that link )

These are the individual pieces I created.

Last week my class was given a summative, which the task was to create a model of a weapon, texture it and prepare it for a game engine. We started on Friday the 18th and finished on Friday the 25th of June.

The weapon we were to make was a FN FAMAS, a French assault rifle. It has a very curious shape and design, one that at the start of the project we (the class) thought was ugly. Though as the project progressed I learnt to love it, it’s almost as if it were designed in a 3d package itself. As all the polygons seemed to fit together, just right.

Here is just some of the reference that I used for my model. You would be surprised with the number of images of this gun that I was able to find as reference, there was this one repository with over 1000 different images of the gun, with images on every little detail you could possibly imagine. Right down the firing mechanism in the mechanical spec sheets.

The requirements of the project were
Model:

View model – 5000 polys (Quads)
World model – 1000 poly (Quads)

Textures:

Diffuse map – 2048×2048
Normal map – 2048×2048
Specular Colour – 1024 x 1024
Spec Power – 512 x 512

Once the model was completed we were to bring it into UDK and set up the material on the weapon and make sure it’s scale was correctly sized compared to the ingame character.

These are the models I created.

The materials for my model. (Fun fact: My Photoshop document for these sheets was 700mbs big, which ate a whole 2gigs of ram when being edited!)

Here you can see the Diffuse, Normal, Specular Colour and Specular Power. In that order.

This is the final product,

You too can play around with the weapon and fire off some charged plasma in the level I created for it, but first you will need the Unreal Development Kit

762 MB .exe

And then download the package files from here. Included in the zip is the instructions about how to install it.
27,721kb .zip

Enjoy!

Materials:

As well as the materials for the column, we continued on with textures for another week. Here’s the output of a few days and a weekends work. Done as a project to try create many different materials on a single sheet and then to create the specific material texture components that will make the material look realistic when they are all used together.

Reading left to right.
Colour,Height,Normal,Specular,Colour,Specular Power
And on the texture sheet
Rubber tube – Car Air Filter – Copper – Bare Metal – Coal – Carpet – Plastic with a decal – Glass Brick.

UDK

I’ll start with saying, UDK is very cool. As can be quoted from class, ” It feels like it was made by artists, for artists”. The interface and shortcuts just make sense.
Throughout the lessons that we were taught UDK, we learnt a new thing each day. So I started added something new to what I had done the previous day, here’s how several rooms I did turned out.

And yes, knocking down a tower of barrels never gets old.

You can also see fire that I created with the built UDK particle editer. Check back here soon for a update that includes a video of both of the particle effects, fire and grenade explosion.

Prop Modelling

What we learnt over the past few weeks, in terms of materials and ZBrush really came into play when we were given the task of creating an “Improvised Explosive Device” prop. It was a pretty sudden start to the week, but as Confucious say “Idle man who is forced to think quickly learn lots”. No he didn’t, I totally just made that up.

Sketched up some quick concepts;

Three days later, with a poly count of 2800, and a texture size of 2048. We have a game ready model of C4 satchels taped to Petrol can!


Colour                                     Normal                                     Specular Power

And In UDK. You can see that I am able to separate out each part of the object.

Fun fact: Both the PSDs’ for the Jerry Can and Explosive attachment were each 200mbs!

The week began with a bang.
Set the task of doing an art test. One that a certain game company uses to test the skill of artists that apply for jobs.
We had to model, uv, sculpt and texture this column within 2 days. While we were limited to the style and polylimit(1000), the texture details were left up to us to decide how they should look.
Here is the original concept piece, including the colour pallet.

I used Maya for the modelling, ZBrush for the sculpting and Photoshop for texturing.
The process of taking a model from Maya to ZBrush was relatively easy to do. Albeit some errors with flipped normals and subdivisions.

Over the period of a day, I sculpted the low poly model into a nice looking shape.

The next day I baked the normal, painted the texture and cleaned up the sculpt. Then I lit a scene and rendered it off. ZBrush was tricky to get it to bake the normals correctly. so I used Maya’s built-in bake and transfer maps tool.

The render.

27,062kb .7z – Project files

On Wednesday,
My class did level of details for the hand we did the day before.
‘Levels of detail’ are used in video games in order to reduce the amount of visible polygon data on the screen. As objects move further away from the player, the overall level of detail of the mesh is reduced. You may know this as ‘popping’.

1,821kb .Ma

On Thursday,
We started learning ZBrush. Or rather, scratched our heads and fought with the interface. We were also tasked with creating a human skull. So I created a low poly human skull in a hour in order to make my sculpting easier the next day.

130kb .Mb

On Friday,
We used what we had gleamed the day before about ZBrush, to finish the task of creating a stylized human skull. I was not permitted to use the skull I created the night before as idea of the class was to learn how the software worked. So I like to think of today as the day ‘How I learned to stop thinking, and love ZBrush.’ Because I do. It is an awesomely powerful program, albeit one with a very curious choice of interface design and keyboard shortcuts. Though with practice even those are becoming natural.I had bought a Wacom drawing tablet the day before, and this made using ZBrush much easier to sculpt in. Since the program is able to interpret pen pressure/tilt very well. My wrist is killing me though! It got a real work out today.
Here is the skull I did today.

47,070kb .7z

Another day another model.

Today we learnt about subdivision surface modelling. Specifically different methods of modelling in this way, and how to do it.

We were tasked with quickly modelling a hand. I did the base mesh in an hour. Then spent another hour optimizing.

Included is the single hand mesh on one layer, and on another a lit scene with the coloured hand.

What is with the lack of updates you ask? Surely it’s not possible that our class didn’t actually have a summative due? It may have appeared that was not possible. But no, actually I’ve been on a week break!  So I caught a bus and left the city for a few days.

Now that I have returned to Auckland, and to class. I have moved up a whole extra dimension, to 3D. This week we look at the pipeline overview of game artists, specifically the process of creating assets and preparing them for games.

Today we did some quick models, and then were given a concept piece and tasked with modeling it.

Quick models:


Barrel – 5 mins
Traffic Barrier – 10 mins + 6 mins optimising
Park Bench – 6 mins
Traffic Cone – 5 mins + 3 mins optimising

Concept Model


Originally my model had a greater deal of detail infomation on the surfaces.Smoother edges, stronger curves, etc. But I had to limit it down to keep it close to the 1500 poly limit. It is currently 1774 polys.
Time – 3 hours

ps: You may have noticed the download button below the images. This is something new I will be trialling over the next few weeks. Depending on how it received, I may be able to offer them in various formats.

Hello boys and girls! What grand adventures await the dashing rock-a-billy space man, Captain Camaro today? What’s this! Master Cylinder has captured Holly Headlights? Oh no! Holly is a waitress at the local space burger joint, and is the Captain’s girlfriend. Captain Camaro  must defeat Master Cylinder and his gang of dastardly evil henchmen and rescue Holly.

Last Friday the artists in my class were given the task of creating assets that would go into a 2D sprite based game. One that fitted into the above story, and one that fit the feel of 1950’s retro space.

We had to create

A Character

- Model sheet

- Sprite sheet

- Walk Animation

- Idle Animation

- Death Animation

A Vehicle Prop

- Front, Back, LeftSide, RightSide

A Background environment.

And a composited scene of all the assets together.

There was the choice of several different characters, vehicles and environments to choose from. So each of us in the class created a different one from each type.

I chose to do,
SparkPlug (Evil Henchman)
Forklift
Command Center.

Without further ado, here are the assets I created.

Character.

Background.

Vehicle.

Composite.

This week I am doing 2d pixel based art.

Here is what I have done so-far this week.

Monday
I took a ‘Stalker‘ from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R by GSCWorlds, and made it look like it belonged in the classic game Contra.
How it would look ingame..

A larger version so you can see the individual pixels.

Tuesday
I created a backdrop for a 2d fighting game. The game was based around various monsters fighting within castles.
With most concept pieces, comes quick sketches of ideas. Originally I was deciding between castles and graveyards. I chose castles because I liked the idea of drawing bricks out of pixels by hand. In hindsight, that was a very bad decision.

And here’s the result!

Wednesday
I created a walk cycle based on a rough character sheet I was given by my tutor.

Click on the image to see it in all it’s 15 frames of glory

Tomorrow will be the start a four day summative. My tutor, would not drop even a clue as to what we are going to be doing for it. Although he did lead us to believe it is going to be a process that is going to devour our weekend/souls. Or you know, he could just be messing with us.