Noob Challenge 7, More Progress

Been continuing onwards with the Foliage Tutorial from the lovely 3DMotive guys a little bit more today, very very cool stuff indeed.

I firstly quickly textured my leaves as I knew that they were going to be painted onto the tree branches. This result left many of the leaves faces odd angles and generally not quite right so I went through each of them to fix em up and make them look right which took some time and a lot of tweaking and I hope it turns out that it's all worth it.

Leave Diffuse

Tree Wireframe

Tree Render 1

Tree Render 2

Quite happy with how they've turned out and I hope they look great in the end, although I might revisit the diffuse of the leaves as they look a bit desaturated. Only I don't think I actually can with the process I'm going through.

Or rather I could but I would have to select each individual leaf and apply the material to it.

Really enjoying the challenge so far and I have learnt quite a lot from it already. Foliage aside, I've learnt that I really really need to manage my time more carefully, maybe even draw up a plan of what I aim to achieve at the end of each day or week.

As it stands there's exactly 2 weeks left for the challenge and I've the gatehouse and walls modeled and unwrapped and the foliage I'm currently working on, however the ground still remains to be seen to. Hopefully all will be well.

Noob Challenge 7 Progress

Unfortunately due to other responsibilities it has been some days since I was able to get back into flow with the Polycount noob challenge.

Spent a day unwrapping the gatehouse I had modeled previously. A whole day. Seems like a waste but it is necessary and perhaps it is something I could look into speeding up.

Today I then began working my way through 3DMotive's Foliage Tutorial series which has an amazing looking end product, although I do have to question some of the methods. Methods such as creating the grass using TurboSmoothed objects for grass and then replicating them and editing them to be unique before generating several maps from it such as colour variation and highlights which were then placed onto a low poly plane. There was nothing with the result, however the whole time I kept on thinking to myself, "I could just paint this in photoshop". Although I have enjoyed it and I've learnt a lot so far and I'm possibly only half way through the tutorial series such as branching within 3DS Max to quickly great branches or tendrils or anything like that and I'm quickly becoming a fan of using the FFD modifiers to quickly modify objects slightly.

So I'm currently in the process of making some trees, I have just finished making my first branch and my 4 leaf variations with them all unwrapped (although lazily)leaving me to paint them on next which I;m excited to learn.

Leaves Unwrap

Grass Render

Grass Wireframe

A branch

Polycount's Noob Challenge 7

I've been part of the Polycount forum for a little while now and it really is a great forum to be a part of. Full of very very talented people all with good critics and advice and are always happy to help which is very handy for anyone still learning and improving.

For a while I've seen "Noob Challenges" appear on the forum once a month as people recreate a piece of concept artwork in a fully fledged 3d environment representing it. Unfortunately I've never quite been able to take the time to do one as I've been quite busy with uni, however now that I'm off for summer I thought I'd try my hand at it.

Above is this month's concept piece, not quite sure where it's from but it is quite lovely. During this challenge many of the participants set certain goals aside for themselves to achieve such as learning something new or improving in a certain area.

I'll be happy to get it done, especially since I started into it 9 days late, silly me. However this piece will still be very good practice for creating realistic foliage as well as texturing, for which I think I will use hand painted textures.

Below is what I've managed to achieve after day 1, which I am quite happy with. Next step I think will be the walls and possibly mudboxing the terrain.

And here is how it looks within UDK.

I will have to remember to create some custom lightmaps for this mesh as well as you can seen the tris on the central gate house.

Greetings

Hey Everyone,

Since I have lots of free time on my hands over summer I figured I would create a blog to post my work in progress pics that I prefer to keep of more serious sites.

My aim to is be able to look back at this blog come September and be able to see progression and improvements in my work as the Games Industry is highly competitive and I'm simply not good enough for it, and I could be entering it (or trying to) within a year or 2.

Within further delay then, my first model to grace this blog.
 

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I found a rather interesting mini tutorial on high-poly modelling using turbosmooth which I wanted to experiment with, I thought it was very interesting and left me with quite a nice result.

Although as can clearly be seen there is some texture stretching which is something I usually avoid, however it is still something I need to work on.