[WIP] Z's Models

[Hellkite]

Good job Z
It looks a lot like the Tin Toy Robots I had to play with in my youth

 

[Adm_Z]

Yeah I"m actually at a university for Game Design. It is kind of strange, but it matches the reference image pretty well.

 

[Majestic]

Yeah I"m actually at a university for Game Design. It is kind of strange, but it matches the reference image pretty well.

I'm doing a diploma in game design through a college though mine is online as I don't want to travel 6 hours a day to and from (3 hours each way). lol

 

[kjc733]

Using Autodesk Maya as well. Looking good, I see some different material types in there.
If you come across any interesting tips please say, some of us have been figuring it out the hard way!

 

[Majestic]

I'll be learning 3D Max in my course though once I learn it, transferring to other programs won't be that difficult.

 

[Adm_Z]

Hey y'all! Back again. Here are some renders of some things I've been working on. The "wagon" is a low poly(at least by class standards) model, experimenting with bump and spec maps. The Rocket is WIP with no textures currently.

 

[Majestic]

Top quality stuff mate, what programs are you using?

 

[CABAL]

The wagon reminds me of the pre-rendered cutscenes from this isometric city builder I have. It would fit right in.

 

[Adm_Z]

Thanks guys! I'm using Maya 2014 still, and I'm making my textures in GIMP. I never thought I'd need more than 16 GB of ram, but now that I"m rendering and editing textures in 8k (!) I might need to dump some more money into my computer, just for school.

 

[Majestic]

I haven't gotten to the modeling side of my course yet, doing all the project planning stuff. But I will be using 3DMax and Photoshop for my course work.

Rendering can really bog down a PC, my Quad Core with 4GB of Ram struggled a little with rendering in Daz. Doing the stuff we do you really need a pretty high end PC or Laptop.

 

[Adm_Z]

Yeah, It can be pretty demanding. Right now my PC does pretty well with rendering, but like I said, when editing multi layer 8k textures, the Ram gets eaten up. I have i7-3770k @ 4.4ghz, and a Radeon 7970 GhZ, so I don't have many performance issues, but If I wanted anything better it'd start getting reaaally expencive.

 

[Majestic]

Yeah, I am using the Laptop that the course gave me as part of assisting in my work. It's an alienware one and works a lot faster than the old desktop. It has really come in handy now that my PC monitor died and the HDMI port on it's graphics hard is gone as well. Fuzzy TV as a monitor makes my eyes hurt.

Doing A2 stuff is really child's play compared to what you're doing now and what I'll be doing next year. My last assignment that will probably take about 3 months to complete is to make a full playable game.

 

[Adm_Z]

That's awesome! I will be making games in future classes. For now all I've done is worked with teams to create analogue games, some of which came out really well. My campus also has 3D printers, a Motion Capture lab, and numerous other fantastic pieces of equipment that I hope I'll get to use at some point. Not much beats them supplying you with a computer though!

 

[Majestic]

3D printers are cool, it would be awesome to have one of your models sitting on your desk at home.

The computer is part of the fees and isn't fully mine until I complete the course. The course is costing me $27,000, which is paid back when I start earning over $51,000 a year.

It's a course that is done online via help from a tutor that I can communicate with via Skype. It's a course you can do at your own pace and is usually expected that you do an assignment a week which is usually around a day's worth of work. They are put into units, usually the first assignment for a unit is fairly easy and they get harder as you progress through. I am currently doing the Level Design Document (LDD) unit, where I am designing a level for a game that is made up and I have to pitch it to the Product Manager (tutor) with concept art, a level design and a load of other stuff. Assignment 3 which I will be starting either today or tomorrow I need to do a power-point presentation and pitch it to him over Skype. Then he'll give me changes that I need to implement for assignment 4.

 

[Adm_Z]

Nice! It sounds like a lot of the courses I will eventually take, but in a more condensed form. That's really cool.

 

[Majestic]

Well the units I have already done are:

• Work effectively in the digital media industry (all about working as a team)
• Contribute to the implementation of the OHS consultation process (Heath and Safety junk)
• Manage IT projects (Plan a game using a GDD [Game Design Document] among other things)
• Collaborate in the design of 3-D game levels and environments (currently doing, designing an level)

I will next have some 3D modeling and then particles, fluids and bodies.

 

[Adm_Z]

That sounds pretty cool. Very business oriented. Probably something my program is weak on. So far I have taken classes like C++, Sound Design, Video Production, Digital Imaging, Game Design(analogue) and some others. In the future I plan on taking Level/Enviromental Design, Lighting, Digital Game Design, Digital Fabrication, some more programming classes, etc. I can't wait for the higher levels, but each semester some of the classes change, so I could possibly get some others I don't know about yet. I've also pretty much decided I don't want to make a career out of simply 3D modeling. Haha, not really my thing.

 

[CABAL]

Fuzzy TV as a monitor makes my eyes hurt.

Woah, I just had a flashback to my last CRT monitor...

I'm starting on a computer programming course. It looks like there won't be actual programming until my second semester, but still.

 

[Majestic]

That sounds pretty cool. Very business oriented. Probably something my program is weak on. So far I have taken classes like C++, Sound Design, Video Production, Digital Imaging, Game Design(analogue) and some others. In the future I plan on taking Level/Enviromental Design, Lighting, Digital Game Design, Digital Fabrication, some more programming classes, etc. I can't wait for the higher levels, but each semester some of the classes change, so I could possibly get some others I don't know about yet. I've also pretty much decided I don't want to make a career out of simply 3D modeling. Haha, not really my thing.

Well all my units aren't unlocked but I am fairly certain some C++ programming will be involved, at the end of the course I will be fully qualified to be a game designer in a number of fields including programming, level design and modelling.

I actually enjoy modelling the most, so we seem to be at opposite ends of the stick here.

Woah, I just had a flashback to my last CRT monitor...

I'm starting on a computer programming course. It looks like there won't be actual programming until my second semester, but still.

Yeah the VGA connections to LCD TV's aren't very god. We had the same issue with our son's TV (HD LED/LCD TV) we bought him a few years back, once the PC and Xbox360 were hooked up to a HDMI cable it was clear as.

Programming huh, sounds cool. Looks like MSFC is getting quite a lot of talent in the computer department.

 

[Adm_Z]

Here are some final renders. I"m really proud of how the interior textures came out. Unfortunately, it was required of us to make the textures look unclean, and we had to pick a "theme" So rather than just making a cool clean ship, I themed it after Pixar's Incredibles, and did a not so great job roughing up the paint job.

 

[Majestic]

Beautiful texture reminds me of the Jetson's cartoon from the 90's. Is that the Incredible's logo on the tail fin?

 

[Adm_Z]

It is. There is also a bumped one on the bottom, but that last pic took 25 minutes to render lol, so I can' show you easily. From what I hear, the concept sketch we worked from was originally from the jetsons.

 

[Majestic]

That was a cool cartoon in the day, I used to watch it when I was a kid/teenager.

You've really come a long way with your course, you should be proud of what you can do now.

 

[Adm_Z]

So here is a long overdue update on stuff I"ve been up to haha. Sorry, its been so long, I"ll try harder to keep in touch this time around.

Anyway, my focus has lately been on the fabrication application of 3D modeling. Here are some of the projects I've done. One of my favorite things to do is serial slice "sculptures" where I take a model, slice it every 1/4 inch or so, and then cut those slices out of 1/4 inch material, and then stack it back up in real life. It has a very cool stylized look, especially on ships.

Tantive Slice model:


Lamp:


Pegasus and Chest Graduation Gift:


Random Ironman Bust Graduation Gift:

 

[Adm_Z]

And since I hit the attachment limit haha... One last project unless anyone wants to see more, the Arcade I built for my capstone/thesis project.

 

[marsneedswomen2008]

Nice work. I wish I had the patience, time, and money to get into modeling.

 

[Adm_Z]

Latest project is some digital sculpting in Mudbox. We 3D printed these sculpts and we are now going to use them to learn mold making and casting. It is mostly based on the creature from Episode II Anakin fought on Geonosis.

 

[Adm_Z]

Ok guys, so I have some catch-up to play from college. The last stuff I posted with the arcade was my undergraduate thesis project, which was actually put on display at my university in the undergraduate advising office. After that, I started and finished my MA in the same degree field, with a focus on Digital Fabrication. I got to play with a lot of different tools and fabrication processes. The last post here was 3D sculpting and 3D printing. I then went on to make resin casts of those 3D prints, add electronics, etc. (if anyone wants to see that stuff let me know) I learned some more traditional sculpting techniques and made a 3 foot sculpture of the same Star Wars ish model.

Later on I learned about the awesome "3D modeling technique" called photogrammetry, and that is where I will pick back up with pictures and the like. Basically all you do is place a real world object in a well lit environment, take a bunch of pictures of the object from as many angles you can get, and load them into a software which stitches them together to make a 3D model. This link is the 3D model which makes up my first attempt at this process. https://skfb.ly/69yXx

I have also attached pictures of the original sculpture and the scan, just for reference. You should be able to see some of the pros and cons to this process immediately, just from the results I had haha.

 

[CABAL]

Immediate photo-realistic model is a pretty big pro. I'm guessing that a con is that it has an impractically large number of polygons?

 

[Adm_Z]

Immediate photo-realistic model is a pretty big pro. I'm guessing that a con is that it has an impractically large number of polygons?

Honestly, the number of polygons isn't that big of a deal, but I'm biased nowadays... You'll see later haha. The textures are so good that the resolution of the model isn't really a factor. The biggest issues are, the process doesn't like reflective or transparent textures, it can only account for parts of the object you can actually capture (so undersides are pretty much out) and unless you have a very complicated setup, the lighting is baked into the texture. I only took about 80 pictures for that model, and had I taken about twice as many the tips of the horn/tusks probably would have come out, so I don't really count that as a drawback.


If you wanted to make low poly game models this way, you would have to take your model and somehow suspend it without letting it move, so you get a full spherical capture angle (or use a multi-cam setup) and then keep the textures but retopologize the final model to reduce its subdivision count. Even then, I doubt they would be much higher model quality than the original A2 models themselves. And they would likely be asymmetrical at that.