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Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game Models
whatever works for you. 
Modelling parts and merging them later can work well and is a valid strategy.
Thanks to pior for showing those displacement examples.
It helps in iterating that the artificial separation of modelling and texturing is imo a mistake.
Especially with the emergence of normalmaps in the 2000s.
you can combine and mix modelling/Sculpting/texturing.
Especially with the emergence of normalmaps in the 2000s.
you can combine and mix modelling/Sculpting/texturing.
With texturing you can also easily calculate how many vertices you want to visually emulate so yeah I am going to ignore a bit the modelling/texturing distinction.
If we go further back in time for Software (for example to the Film Jurassic Park) ~1992-~1994 there was Viewpaint before Mari.
Back then they for example painted 2k textures of the snout of a dinosaur...
There was and is a big difference between in-house tools and what the rest of the industry was/is able to get their hands on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_koaelNZpTs
Back then they for example painted 2k textures of the snout of a dinosaur...
There was and is a big difference between in-house tools and what the rest of the industry was/is able to get their hands on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_koaelNZpTsthere was also Amazon 3D Paint available.
which was used by many companies and projects.
amazon3dpaint.pdf
Capcom in ~2009 used Bodypaint3D(4.5) for Monsterhunter3 or at least that is what an advertisement from that time told...
to get back to the threads topic, there was this funny looking device from Geomagic which was used with their Freeform Software?
I think some members here have first hand experience with it and can write more how it worked or didn't work.
you probably mean something like the Polhemus digitizer?thomasp said:You'd have to go back to the 80's and earlier to find some mindblowingly convoluted ways of working (like constructing models on paper and then typing the coordinates into the computer and having the frames printed out without actual preview onto film - I believe they did stuff like that on Tron).
For Tron it was probably more this device in the below video.
can also be seen around 2:20.
https://youtu.be/Tm4i6D3XXBQ?t=948
myclay
1 ·
Re: Relevance vs. Quality
The market is indeed difficult for job seekers, unfortunately.
That doesn’t preclude a chance to be hired showing insufficient examples, but it does make it much less likely.
If you can’t show examples of the kind of work an employer is looking for, then it’s really unlikely they will hire you. Simple as that.
Why not make an architectural render or two?
If you can’t show examples of the kind of work an employer is looking for, then it’s really unlikely they will hire you. Simple as that.
Why not make an architectural render or two?
Eric Chadwick
1 ·
Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game Models
Well, that's precisely why I was mentionning earlier that some of the confusion in this thread might be coming from where you are in your learning of polygon modeling in general. This (and the weird question about the ears) 100% confirms it. And again none of this relates to "old" or "new" models (beyond the fact that observing "old" models made you indirectly realize that there is a gap in your toolset).
Things like "edge modeling" or "box modeling" (or "strip modeling", or anything else really) are just casual terms that artists make up on the spot to summarize a given approach they like. You won't find books on these things. Perhaps some video recordings done by artists to document this or that trick, but nothing of substance - because it would be pointless. What you need first is to master the polygon modeling toolset of your software, in and out.
If you don't know where to start (for instance if the software you are using doesn't have any official Getting Started content - like this is unfortunately the case with Blender, as the official Blender help link basically states "we have no time for this, go look for stuff on youtube lol") then look up *quality* educational content from older sources. I mean specifically older in this case in order to avoid sculpting-centric material. You could basically sort through Gnomon DVDs and look for anything related to character modeling from 2010 or earlier. They had top-notch content.
https://vitalybulgarov.com/dvds/
https://www.ebay.com/shop/gnomon-dvd?_nkw=gnomon+dvd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8AxXG_6jyA
Or, look up any version of the "Johan of Arc" tutorial PDF even if it isn't ported to your own software. You'll see all the steps people go through when building polygon models from scratch, you'll learn the generic names of the various tools and actions (extrude, merge, divide, delete ...), and you'll then be able to research how to perform these action in any software easily. Heck, you could even download help files from various software and research the tools that way.
https://fr.scribd.com/document/51416931/Joan-of-Arc-3dmax-tutorial
https://store.3dtotal.com/products/joan-of-arc-cinema-4d-download-only
At the end of the day you should be able to build any mesh topology that you can think of (or draw on paper). If you can't, then you're not familiar enough with your software. People learned all these things back then by studying the aforementionned ressources as well as studying casual video recordings of artists at work, shared in places like ... Polycount A lot of this naturally gets lost with time. In my experience there is also a lot of knowledge that gets exchanged in the workplace. And 15ish years ago was the peak of monthly CG magazines too.
Some gifs from cool artists in action :
https://imgur.com/a/csZuw#pn5lrBu
Also the Vertex books by Ryan Hawkins are still as awesome as ever, and should be easy to find a DL for since they were a community project released for free. These are not just about polygon modeling though of course, they cover anything that the contributing artsts wanted to share.
https://gamefromscratch.com/free-art-e-book-vertex-released-by-ryan-hawkins/
More recently, I've seen people pick up polygon modeling from complete scratch as a direct consequence of their interest in modding games or contributing to a Steam Workshop. In such cases the information is mostly in the corresponding Discord servers.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to studying good models and being able to create any topology. Videos are cool and all and they can reveal neat tricks, but at the end of the day a polygon is a polygon.
Things like "edge modeling" or "box modeling" (or "strip modeling", or anything else really) are just casual terms that artists make up on the spot to summarize a given approach they like. You won't find books on these things. Perhaps some video recordings done by artists to document this or that trick, but nothing of substance - because it would be pointless. What you need first is to master the polygon modeling toolset of your software, in and out.
If you don't know where to start (for instance if the software you are using doesn't have any official Getting Started content - like this is unfortunately the case with Blender, as the official Blender help link basically states "we have no time for this, go look for stuff on youtube lol") then look up *quality* educational content from older sources. I mean specifically older in this case in order to avoid sculpting-centric material. You could basically sort through Gnomon DVDs and look for anything related to character modeling from 2010 or earlier. They had top-notch content.
https://vitalybulgarov.com/dvds/
https://www.ebay.com/shop/gnomon-dvd?_nkw=gnomon+dvd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8AxXG_6jyAOr, look up any version of the "Johan of Arc" tutorial PDF even if it isn't ported to your own software. You'll see all the steps people go through when building polygon models from scratch, you'll learn the generic names of the various tools and actions (extrude, merge, divide, delete ...), and you'll then be able to research how to perform these action in any software easily. Heck, you could even download help files from various software and research the tools that way.
https://fr.scribd.com/document/51416931/Joan-of-Arc-3dmax-tutorial
https://store.3dtotal.com/products/joan-of-arc-cinema-4d-download-only
At the end of the day you should be able to build any mesh topology that you can think of (or draw on paper). If you can't, then you're not familiar enough with your software. People learned all these things back then by studying the aforementionned ressources as well as studying casual video recordings of artists at work, shared in places like ... Polycount
A lot of this naturally gets lost with time. In my experience there is also a lot of knowledge that gets exchanged in the workplace. And 15ish years ago was the peak of monthly CG magazines too.Some gifs from cool artists in action :
https://imgur.com/a/csZuw#pn5lrBu
Also the Vertex books by Ryan Hawkins are still as awesome as ever, and should be easy to find a DL for since they were a community project released for free. These are not just about polygon modeling though of course, they cover anything that the contributing artsts wanted to share.
https://gamefromscratch.com/free-art-e-book-vertex-released-by-ryan-hawkins/
More recently, I've seen people pick up polygon modeling from complete scratch as a direct consequence of their interest in modding games or contributing to a Steam Workshop. In such cases the information is mostly in the corresponding Discord servers.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to studying good models and being able to create any topology. Videos are cool and all and they can reveal neat tricks, but at the end of the day a polygon is a polygon.
pior
3 ·
Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game Models
pior said:Well, that's precisely why I was mentionning earlier that some of the confusion in this thread might be coming from where you are in your learning of polygon modeling in general. This (and the weird question about the ears) 100% confirms it. And again none of this relates to "old" or "new" models (beyond the fact that observing "old" models made you indirectly realize that there is a gap in your toolset).
The thing is, I don't know how to find older sources, believe me I have tried. I don't know where to find older videos or books. If you can tell me how or where to find them, that would be extreme help.pior said:
then look up *quality* educational content from older sources. I mean specifically older in this case in order to avoid sculpting-centric material. You could basically sort through Gnomon DVDs and look for anything related to character modeling from 2010 or earlier. They had top-notch content.
5rettski
1 ·
Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game Models
@myclay May I point out that your screenshot of viewpaint is really the exact interface of Avid's Matador, so it was likely cobbled together with duct tape from commercial software somehow at ILM. Also felt truly awful to use (Matador, that is). Not envious of super secret inhouse software if we're counting that one. 
Amazon 3D Paint was just really really crude.
My memory is hazy but I don't think it supported anything noteworthy and was just barren, feature-wise, like an alpha version of some super-basic paint program. Alias Studiopaint on the other hand was worlds apart. So hard to find anything about it nowadays since there is an identically named software module on Windows as part of Autodesk's StudioTools/AutoStudio. But it was the real deal: unlimited canvas size, 16 bpp, stencils, hardware acceleration (they called it hardware brushes), natural feeling paint engine well beyond Photoshop until the 2010's. It was able to paint on Nurbs patches too so a bit like working with UDIMS - and you could populate the layer stack with both geometry and images and merge images onto meshes (baking them before it was a term).
Apparently it was so deeply tied to the hardware/OS it ran on that Alias didn't see the business case to porting it when Windows/Linux took over so we sadly lost it. It was obviously the inspiration for Mari's functionality and dare I say the whole interface of Mudbox. And it had a Maya shelf you could customize.
Still have the installation media - but sold the hardware long ago...
Anyway if you want to dive into that period and how things were done may I recommend Reddit for once - they have the 'vfx' and 'vintagecgi' subreddits and you can bump into a number of veterans there. I had some convos with guys from 90's Digital Domain there (Titanic, Starship Troopers, 5th Element, etc) as well as the one considered responsible for the Jurassic Park dinosaur models who also had stuff to say about Terminator and The Mask. Interesting, to say the least.
thomasp
1 ·
Re: How do you make the 3D pipeline less painful?
They didn't even bother staggering their account creation dates. Either way, I don't see why anyone would want to make services for game developers. We're poor as shit, and if there was a 1 button asset creation pipeline, which there NEVER will be, we'll all be waiting on the free, open-source version - likely a blender plugin, or similar, or code our own trained off our own data
zetheros
1 ·
Re: [FINISHED] Jedi Realtime Character - Metahumans in UE 5.6
Bakes are done, might be a bit of cleanup on the AO, but otherwise I think it's time to start texturing
Re: Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game Models
Well, it's just like any greyscale map - it could be handpainted, photosourced, procedurally generated, baked from a high ... anything goes really. You could look up Mari texturing tutorials perhaps, and old Gnomon DVDs covering character texturing for non-realtime rendering.
This artist did it through projection in Zbrush :
https://texturing.xyz/pages/jonas-skoog-black-guy-making-of
And sure enough, the displaced details on Monsters Inc. characters where not sculpted but simply textured. If anything it keeps the designs streamlined and striking ...
This artist did it through projection in Zbrush :
https://texturing.xyz/pages/jonas-skoog-black-guy-making-of
And sure enough, the displaced details on Monsters Inc. characters where not sculpted but simply textured. If anything it keeps the designs streamlined and striking ...
pior
1 ·
