The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Best Of
Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game textures
Heh, that's funny. I was there when the deep graphics were written.
In the early 2000s GPUs didn't have enough VRAM for baked normal maps, and didn't have enough zoomies to run more than 1 simple shader calculation per pixel. When you did see normal maps, it was only as tiny tileable detail normal maps that would help sell the effect of sand, rock or brick. (see halo 1)
So a model really only had a single texture, which depending on the artist would either be entirely hand-painted, sourced from images or a mix.
Then a simple light would provide a bland lighting effect and environmental coloring.
Things like AO, shadows and reflections were painted into the texture. There were many methods, but what I did was create tileable detail textures for each material, and blend them on top of a base lightness/color layer in PS.
Using dodge and burn tool in photoshop, I'd create the reflections and shadows. Baked AO (if available) would be set to multiply.
For dirt and rust I'd source it from a picture of something white and blend
For dust I'd take pictures of dirty black cars with MY HANDHELD DIGITAL CAMERA.
Scratches I liked to do with a mix of custom brushes and stencils I made, got from others, or pirated third party grunge brushes, which were an actual thing you could buy with real money.
To give you an idea of what the process would look like, here's a couple of before, during and after pics of me revisiting a skin I was never really happy with.
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/1.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/2.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/3.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/render.jpg
In the early 2000s GPUs didn't have enough VRAM for baked normal maps, and didn't have enough zoomies to run more than 1 simple shader calculation per pixel. When you did see normal maps, it was only as tiny tileable detail normal maps that would help sell the effect of sand, rock or brick. (see halo 1)
So a model really only had a single texture, which depending on the artist would either be entirely hand-painted, sourced from images or a mix.
Then a simple light would provide a bland lighting effect and environmental coloring.
Things like AO, shadows and reflections were painted into the texture. There were many methods, but what I did was create tileable detail textures for each material, and blend them on top of a base lightness/color layer in PS.
Using dodge and burn tool in photoshop, I'd create the reflections and shadows. Baked AO (if available) would be set to multiply.
For dirt and rust I'd source it from a picture of something white and blend
For dust I'd take pictures of dirty black cars with MY HANDHELD DIGITAL CAMERA.
Scratches I liked to do with a mix of custom brushes and stencils I made, got from others, or pirated third party grunge brushes, which were an actual thing you could buy with real money.
To give you an idea of what the process would look like, here's a couple of before, during and after pics of me revisiting a skin I was never really happy with.
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/1.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/2.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/3.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/render.jpg
Thanez
3 ·
Re: Blender Mega Thread
thomasp said:In other news I have an issue with Blender where it sometimes (a few times during a work day) just crashes to desktop on fairly simple operations in eevee with the Windows event viewer listing an "NVidia OpenGL driver error 3 subcode 7" and tells me "Unable to recover from a kernel exception. the application must close."Updated the driver to a recent Studio one, updated my LTS version of Blender 3.3 to the most recent release and set the graphics driver to maximum performance mode which is what the web recommended to solve this error. No difference. The only thing that seems to greatly reduce the number of crashes is to start Blender with the flag--debug-gpu-force-workarounds. That keeps things workable for now. Just wondering if disabling GPU extensions is a concern for features and reduces performance measurably?I'm not even sure how I picked this up - stepping through the versions Blender used to be rock solid for a good few of years, on this machine as well. And the configuration didn't change, only Blender got moody. Can't get other applications that tax the GPU to crash either (so far).
Totally forgot about this post: the crash issue persisted and drove me crazy in the last few months with some more demanding scenes. I wore out the CTRL and S keys to preserve at least my work. Finally ended up getting a new GPU (and a new, beefier power supply with it) to resolve it once and for all.
Well, guess what - that didn't resolve anything. So - toss out the whole damn machine next? It is almost past the tax write off period anyway.
Then I found a post on Blenderartists about a crash error that sounded related and the solution there was that the RAM sticks were being clocked too high. Didn't make sense to me how that should be the solution to an Nvidia driver problem. Anyway I went into the BIOS to downclock my RAM and discovered a feature called XMP - some Intel auto memory overclocking thing that is part of the default performance settings. Disabled that as an initial test and touched nothing else...
...Blender perfectly stable for a month now. 
thomasp
3 ·
Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game textures
Alias Maya and Kinetex 3Ds Max as they were before Autodesk, offered built-in baking. Its still there now Render to Texture afaik its called where you can choose types of maps you want to bake including lighting.5rettski said:All of these have given me very good ideas, but what about baking? I've seen some people say that it's a similar process? What software was used for baking and whatnot?
Unreal Tournament baked lighting info on the base texture to have that distint look.
Below is an example, using the same old 2k technique I baked lighting on the texture itself (3ds max, Mental Ray) using a plugin called Flat Iron. This saved ton on performance for VR.
HAWK12HT
3 ·
Re: Anatomy stuck, need some advice
Reduce zygomatic arch add basic ears and fix neck volume also look like he doesn't have under chin planes + nose and teeth cylinder looks to short , mouth is too flat you could push it back a little
I am attaching few references you can practice with + you might want to hunt down loomis and hogarth books + famous artist course 6 book I think all of that is available on the internet for free
Let me know if you don't have digital skull because if you plan to be good and fast at head/faces you have to know skull pretty well
exercise :
skull studies
blockout studies like pictures above
head plane studies
proportions
profile studies :
easy ones in zbrush make a thin slice of any of the primitives(or you can do this in photoshop is pretty much the same thing just in 3d ) and try to match a profile view do this till you are happy with proportion ,angles and likeness
advanced start with basic head (the one from blockout stage) and try to match a profile view
As for reference you can use either Xrays or shaved/short haircut images so you can see the skull
I am attaching few references you can practice with + you might want to hunt down loomis and hogarth books + famous artist course 6 book I think all of that is available on the internet for free
Let me know if you don't have digital skull because if you plan to be good and fast at head/faces you have to know skull pretty well
exercise :
skull studies
blockout studies like pictures above
head plane studies
proportions
profile studies :
easy ones in zbrush make a thin slice of any of the primitives(or you can do this in photoshop is pretty much the same thing just in 3d ) and try to match a profile view do this till you are happy with proportion ,angles and likeness
advanced start with basic head (the one from blockout stage) and try to match a profile view
As for reference you can use either Xrays or shaved/short haircut images so you can see the skull
carvuliero
5 ·
Fantasy necromorph (?)
Would love to hear some opinions on this character im currently working on, kinda feel stuck because im not satisfied with the level of realism it currently holds, plus i have issues with bringing all the details of the sculpt to the render stage, it feels like half gets lost during texturing. ( also after texturing fingers look like sausages, i feel like im going to go insane )
pipapopapa
3 ·
[Finished Work] Winchester 1876
Hi everyone! Very happy to share my latest project, the Winchester 1876. It was a great challenge to recreate this piece of the old west. Hope you enjoy it.
AlpineCurd
3 ·
Wardaddy
This is the finished result of an art test that I just took from a certain video games company. The task was creating a textured game model waist down with poly budget up to 40k triscount based on Brad Pitt character from the movie "Fury" in under three weeks calendar days.
It was really a test and challenge for my knowledge and experiences as character artist in this industry all these years, to create something like this within limited timeframe. Nevertheless this is the best what I could do within the budget and Im grateful that I could use the result my personal portfolio, cheers!
More can be seen at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zxe40d
More can be seen at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zxe40d
Every Ending is a New Beginning
Hello everyone!
I’m excited to share my latest Unreal Engine project with you.
This was my first time experimenting with ray tracing, and I’m truly amazed by the level of quality that UE5 can deliver. I hope you enjoy the results!
I am hoping to focus and improve my lighting skills for my next project, does anyone know any good tutorials/courses i could take to do that ?
You can find a more in depth breakdown on my ARTSTATION page: https://www.artstation.com/bbgzla
https: //vimeo.com/1109003059?share=copy#t=0
Thanks for watching feel free to leave any comments or feedback, always looking to improve!
Otherwise you can reach out to me at my Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/nibir-khan
I’m excited to share my latest Unreal Engine project with you.
This was my first time experimenting with ray tracing, and I’m truly amazed by the level of quality that UE5 can deliver. I hope you enjoy the results!
I am hoping to focus and improve my lighting skills for my next project, does anyone know any good tutorials/courses i could take to do that ?
You can find a more in depth breakdown on my ARTSTATION page: https://www.artstation.com/bbgzla
https: //vimeo.com/1109003059?share=copy#t=0
Thanks for watching feel free to leave any comments or feedback, always looking to improve!
Otherwise you can reach out to me at my Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/nibir-khan
bbgzla
3 ·
Re: LOW-POLY ART
First time posting...
Doing a rework of all the original vehicles from the original Playstation game Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense. Using original assets from the game to recreate the vehicles and then also creating more characters and vehicles for a fictional follow-up. Let me know what you think! (Made in Blockbench)
Doing a rework of all the original vehicles from the original Playstation game Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense. Using original assets from the game to recreate the vehicles and then also creating more characters and vehicles for a fictional follow-up. Let me know what you think! (Made in Blockbench)
NixelsPixels
3 ·
