Digital Mercs

I thought I was going to be able to get away with just low poly weapons, but as I began texturing it became evident that they were bringing down the quality of the project as a whole.

I decided to man up and knock out quality High poly models. Most of the hard work was already done. And by hard, I mean tedious, EG Unwrapping and optimizing the model. High poly modeling is really a lot of fun. You’re free just to make it look awesome.

Here’s a quick progress shot of the M61 Vulcan:

I put these turn-around videos together largely for myself so that I can see how a project is progressing. Having the model in motion makes judging the quality of the normal maps, and the correctness of the specular maps much easier.

The easier answer is to dump the model into your game engine du jour, which is my next step, as I make another pass on the textures and make shaders for the glass and lights. I also have to tackle the weapons. They’re all unwrapped and ready to go, but the jury was out on whether I needed to make high-poly models of them or not.

I’m going to relegate that to the ‘After GDC’ column on my to-do list, and just put a nice texture on each one right now. Throw a little crazy bump at ‘em.

I’m glad for friends who lend some perspective to my life.

Over the last ten days or so I’ve spent as much time fighting with hardware, software, drivers, and firmware as I have working. I seriously considered breaking up with the digital world. I made a comment to Johnny along the lines of, “This just won’t fly in a production environment.” He was quick to point out that in a studio environment they have tech guys to solve these problems, and the artists just get to make art. Now I remember why I want to stop freelancing and join a studio.

I put together a playblast of the Low-poly version of the Truck, with Normal and Ambient Occlusion maps. I was curious to see what kind of rendering power 8 cores running at 4.17ghz, a SSD Raid0, and 12gb of ram would deliver.

Click the pic to be taken to the video.

Here’s a second update, after a few hours of texturing…

I have been working on some prop pieces along with the Riviera, I am building “kits” that can be tiled and configured in different ways to quickly create dynamic scenes . The above image is an example I threw together in about 20 minutes. I will be updating the scene tomorrow, and I will post another render when I am finished.

I have been trucking away at the textures, normals, spec maps, etc… on the Riviera since the last update.

Below are two progress renders:

I’d say I’m about 85% done now. There’s some details I still plan to add, a few areas need touching up, and the weapons need textures… Other than that this asset is pretty much completed.

From this point on I wont be posting anymore renders from 3DSMax. I will be posting in-engine images from UDK. They will give a better indication to how the car looks.

-Johnny

I spent a few more hours finishing up most of the modeling on the Ram. A lot of that time was spent modeling the weapons on the truck. The Ram is armed with two M61 Vulcan Gatling style machine guns, five Browning M1919 machine guns, and near the end of the movie they add six RPG-7′s. Since these are all real world weapons, reference images were plentiful. I wasn’t worried about modeling super-high poly versions of the weapons, I just wanted to use enough geometry to make the guns believable from a distance.

Unwrapping is going to be a beast, as the truck is made up of some 85 individual parts. All along I was planning out in my head now I was going to UV and Texture everything, which is why the truck isn’t one solid chunk. This will also allow me do add some really great secondary motion to the animations, time permitting. Also, while modeling I kept in mind that the player is going to be seeing the truck mostly from behind, and so I tried to play up the visual interest at the rear of the vehicle.

I’ve been working on the mustang pretty intensively. With the model complete, I’m deep within Mudbox sculpting away. The reference from the movie shows the car as pretty beat up. With lots of rust and crumbly metal that’s been wielded together. This screen capture is from an earlier stage of my process. I’m hammering my way through mudbox, excited to take everything over to Photoshop and finish up with an awesome looking car in UDK.

Last night the PDR team got together with Jim Rivers to formulate our plans for GDC… Jim is about as close to a professional ‘convention goer’ as you can get, and so his words carry serious weight. Also, he knows how to have a good time. I actually met Jim at last year’s GDC, and this past year has been strictly better for it. Either directly through him, or the events he organizes, I’ve made a ton of quality friends.

Lately I’ve been so stressed out about getting quality art together that I’ve literally been making myself sick. Anyways, after our little get together, my path from here to GDC seems manageable. It’s going to require sacrificing just about all my free time to art, but it’s doable.

I was reading the postmortem on Borderlands in this months Game Developer magazine and they mentioned that one of the things that really worked well for them was ‘Kit Bashing.’ The basic premise is to use a small set of ‘parts’ to build an environment by scaling and rotating those parts. It’s a bit like building with Lego’s. I have tons and tons of props sitting on a big hard drive labeled ‘Projects.’ They’re mostly minor stuff, so I’ve never really felt like showing them off. Using this ‘Kit Bash’ approach and the skills I’ve picked up in Unreal over the last few years, I think I could make good use of a lot of them to assemble compelling environment shots. After all, I keep applying for environment jobs, and i don’t have a whole lot of complete environments to show… Model a star asset or two, and then flesh out the background with old models I’ve created. Bam. Completed environment.

I put a few more hours into the Truck last night, mostly cleaning it up, and reducing the poly count by about half. I also added a few more details like the rear-view mirrors, and the Ram Skull on the grill. I thought the skull was going to take a lot of time, but I knocked out the low-poly model in about 45 minutes. A little Mudbox and she’ll be looking pretty.

So I was thinking to myself how I’d really like some extra time to work on our project. The universe, as if in reply granted my request by laying me low with bronchitis. It’s an interesting illness, because unlike a cold, or the flu, you don’t really feel that bad. In fact, aside form the constant coughing, and labored breathing, everything seems fine. This makes sitting at the computer for hours and hours basically the optimal activity, next to sleeping, when recovering from this particular malady.

Also, my internal clock is all out of whack from sleeping long hours, and then modeling long hours. Hence this early morning post.

I finished a couple smaller assets earlier this week as a sort of personal practice before I tackle unwrapping/mudboxing/texturing the Ram. The model is deceptively complex. The individual armor plates demand to be each modeled separately, as extruding them all off the base mesh results in it looking really low poly, rather than covered in unique angle metal pieces.

At this point I just need to clean up the armor a little, and model the weapons. Here’s a couple WIP shots:

While this is not the most visually appealing post on the blog, I wanted to give my self a small pat on the back for finishing the UVW unwrap on the Riviera… I’ve never been a fan of unwrapping models, I find it tedious. Thankfully Jon & Bradd showed me some pelt mapping techniques I had not tried before, and the process was sped up quite a bit!

It might not be apparent in this images, but those checkerboards are ruler straight!  Thanks Pelt Map!!!

I should hopefully be posting final, textured, renders and in-engine screen shots of this asset by Sunday night.

[This post was edited by Johnny on 2/5/2010]