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.
February 10th, 2010
Bradd
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]
There’s been a lot of progress in different areas recently. My next focus is getting this truck finished. I put another couple hours into it, a lot of which was spent scratching my head figuring out the best plan of attack. Now things are moving right along and the end (of modeling) is in sight.
Last night I put some work into the warehouse and its textures. Turns out it’s a pretty major part of the game. Deserves some serious TLC.
I’m probably my own worst critic. At least I know that I’m not suffering from any illusions of grandeur. After taking a good hard look at the cars made by Johnny and Jon, and then perusing a few forums, and eventually ending up at looking at a vehicle wireframe on Tyler Wanlass’s website, I realized that I was working much too low poly. I was going to end up with a PS2 model that no amount of normal mapping could fix.
Rather than slice up the boxy model and pull a ton of verts, I made a clean start. I’m a lot happier with the way the base mesh is coming out this time around. The car has more structure to it, which is going to make extracting sections of the body to create armor plates much easier. Also, there is a lot more resolution to work with in the mesh , so creating damage states later is going to turn out better.
After reading Bradd’s latest update I feel like I should put something up here also. It seems like just last week I was the only one with any car related posts… and now BAM Bradd’s got his truck started and I’ve seen the mustang Jon is building, which I hear through the grapevine will be unveiled here shortly.
As for me, I have finished the modeling stage of the car and I am now knee deep in Mudbox and photoshop. I will be posting my progress sometime before next Monday.
I swear. There’s other people working on some great stuff. And if you’re lucky, someday they’ll share it with you. I hear Johnny’s car has turned awesome since the last time I saw it.
I just started blocking out the base mesh for Machine Gun Joe’s Truck. Since every square inch of the truck is covered with armor, I was only worried about getting the basic proportions and silhouette correct. 
I’m not going to brag or anything but we’re basically kicking ass at this point. It took some colossal effort over the last few months to get this ball rolling, but now we’re well under way. Jon is getting tons of requests to put together a video tutorial on how we got our car working, and it looks like he’s gonna bust that out when he rigs up Johnny’s car.
On the topic of Johnny’s car, how great is that coming out? I was worried at first when he chose to make that as his first truly next-gen asset. I mean, I wussed out an made a broken piece of concrete… He’s stepped up and proved that he’s got what it takes to be a game artist in today’s crazy-fast-paced industry.
Anyways, enough gloating about my friends… After work today I sat down to crank out some textures for major track assets… I feel like I’m starting to really understand the power of the UDK material editor.
Throwing some assets into a scene...
I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the past week or so brushing up my UDK skills. I’ve scoured the internet for answers to all sorts of problems. If anyone out there is looking for a good introduction to Unreal, and its capabilities I can’t recommend the videos from Eat3d.com enough. They are heavily production focused, teaching you good habits and workflow along with the regular instruction.
While building some materials for our game, I came across a problem that took me hours to find a solution for- The material blendmode BLEND_Modulate is not supported in the new versions of UDK for lit materials. Long story short, the answer it to use an unlit material. Here’s an example of this in action:
The walls and floor are just the same tiled metal texture. The grime on the walls is a 2-triangle plane with the above material on it sitting just on top of the walls. The mess on the floor is another material set up the same way using a different texture. It’s cool to note that this setup will accept global illumination and shadows properly.
Moving on, I’ve been scratching my head figuring out the best way to build a large warehouse for this level. And I mean Large. It takes up nearly a third of the racetrack. If the movie is to be believed, there’s something like three miles of track winding around inside it.
Originally, I’d blocked the main parts of the warehouse out in max, and was detailing high poly versions of the pieces to use like lego’s and build everything. Since the player is never really going to be looking at the building, and rather just racing around and through it, the High poly baked to Low poly approach was taking way too much time, and still resulting in a ton of assets. Instead, I’ve gone ahead and blocked out the building using BSP’s. Using some tricks I picked up studying materials and shaders all weekend, I know that I can make it look as good, if not better, with this approach.
