Digital Mercs

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]

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.

With GDC quickly approaching, I’ve been making a big push to get my vehicle completed. I feel good about it’s current state and am ready to pop it into Mudbox to add some nice detail. Then over to Photoshop for a paint job, and then into UDK. I’m really hoping to have it all wrapped up by this weekend so I can focus my remaining time on making props for the track. Wish me luck!

After a few rounds of “How did I do this before?” and countless crashes from the Unreal Editor, we have two of our three custom cars drivable in game. They aren’t finished being modeled, nor are they textured but they’re setup and ready to go as actual vehicles. Once they’re completed it will be as simple as reimporting the skeletal mesh and driving away.

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.

Following Johnny’s lead, last Saturday I started on the car that I’m modeling for this project, known as Frankenstein’s Monster. A Fifth-generation Ford Mustang armed with 2 M134′s, smokescreen, napalm and oil slick for defense, as well as a 6-inch thick steel plate on the rear bumper called “The Tombstone.”

After quickly finding front and side line drawings of the Mustang, I started the process using a technique that I’ve learned relatively recently which involves using splines to create a cage of the model.

From there, using a surface modifier and converting it to polygons, I ended up with some pretty rough geometry, but it was a start.

More time working on it (and temporarily borrowing wheels from my Ducati Motorcycle model)

Having the general shape of a 2005 Mustang, I load up my movie reference and realize my front end needed tweaking.

She’s far from finished, but I’ve got her rolling.