A place for my creative thoughts and experiences

Friday, December 17, 2010

Home Sweet Steampunk Home Pt.1

Next project lined up is a Steampunk inspired house. I wanted to make things modular so I have a couple instances and some tileable textures. Still have a ways to go, I need to unwrap some of the pieces and texture them and also polish up the rest of the textures. The model is still in it's initial phase and the details can definitely be pushed. I currently have 4000 polys in the scene with my goal to not exceed 10000 polys.

Here's my progress so far. Only using diffuse textures for now with some basic lighting from Max.


















 ...Needs more gears, valves, pipes..

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Cliffs

Sculpted some additional pieces for the cave temple environment. These Cliffs will be used as the backdrop to the cave temple environment. 

Sandstone Cliffs
Optimized Version: 1536 Polys
High Res: 1.5 Million Polys
Mudbox

Monday, December 13, 2010

Temple Pillar Pt.3

Completed the last section of the pillar, could still use some more work but it's fine for now. I may start to block out the rest of the environment this will fit in soon, couple other small props I would like to work on first before I get to that..definitely be a more contemporary piece.

Temple Pillar
Optimized Polycount: 2800
Mudbox

Mahab Temple Pillar Pt.2

Lion section is done for now, I have to remember next time to keep the pieces in separate files... I had frequent crashes and poor performance from Mudbox. I should have the rest done sometime this week.

Mahab Temple Pillar: Lion (WIP)
550,000 Polys
Mudbox 




Sunday, December 12, 2010

Mahab Temple Pillar Pt.1

Found some amazing references from temples all across India that are carved out of the side of mountains and cliffs. Lots of intricate designs that will be a good challenge to try and replicate it. The prop I'm starting out with is a pillar that is found at the entrance to one of the temples. I already got a good start on the project... gathering references, modeling the base mesh, getting familiar with Headus for UV mapping, and sculpting the base for the pillar.

The current count for the base is 1.55 million polys, I will begin baking the normal map from the hi-poly mesh when I complete the rest of it. Next I will be working on the mid section then the Pillar Top. It really is a great feeling when you see things starting to come together.

Mahab Temple Pillar: Base (WIP)
1.55 Million Polys
3DS Max/Headus/Mudbox 























+ 10 Headus
- 4 Sleep 
+ 120 Exp
 

Friday, December 10, 2010

Armored Guardian

Another Mudbox session, first time sculpting a character even just a bust. I had a lot of fun doing this, it really was an interesting challenge. Started with the base head mesh and chipped away at it. Didn't have too much in mind just looked for interesting shapes and silhouettes. I will definitely continue this process to gain some more mileage with this program.

4+ Hours
512,000 Polys





+ 253 Exp
* I think I'll stick with Trebuchet Font from now on. I like Sans-serif fonts.

In the Beginning

I'm not exactly sure where this will go but I wanted to make a place online to post my on going artwork and creative experiments. I'll try and keep it updated as best I can.

As of this moment I am working with the Digital Sculpting tool Mudbox and have really taken a liking towards it. Lots of cool tutorial vids from Wayne Robson that show the awesome potential of this program. I have already used it for 2 portfolio pieces and am working on getting more efficient with tools and pipeline.

Here are two things I've created using Mudbox

Tree Stump
I took a base mesh from Mudbox and used sculpting tools and the paint tools to add texture and details. I created a normal map from the high poly mesh and added it to the lower poly version for in game use. Polycount for the tree stump reached 1.8 million for the high res model and the lower res 1800.



Bricked Vent
I wanted to see if I could create some type of wall detail using stenciled alphas of vents and brick material. I also experimented with masking out multiple sculpt layers to create some detail on the wall. I have also found that the power to paint specular and gloss right on the model with make for powerful combination later although I didn't get the best results but I'm getting my muscle memory for the tools so that's what counts right now. Final polycount for the Hi-Res version is 409,000 Polys and the Low-Res with baked normal map has 1600 Polys.


+ 3 Mudbox