Lack of direction.

Twotents

Greetings all,

I have been teaching myself how to design in 3D for the past 2 years, (mostly as a hobby) but I now find myself pouring almost all my waking hours into it. I would say that I have some intermediate knowledge but lack the skill to implement that knowledge so it all boils down to practice and repetition for me.

However I am stuck at what seems to be an impasse with my studies. There are few places that I can go to study 3D design and game design through and fewer still that I can afford here in Perth Australia. (Western Australia seems a bit backwards when it comes to IT fields)

That being said I would appreciate some basic direction for a study path I can set myself,

Most of my strengths seem to lie in Architectural design and I do have a very soft spot for zbrush, but I constantly find myself mixing between projects never following one through to the end. My greatest weakness at the moment revolves around UVW Wrapping and creating textures.

So my biggest question is.

Should I start off creating high poly to medium poly models UV Wrap them texture them then from that point start progressing into creating game assets?

I have tried a few tutorials on baking normals and the likes but they just never seem to come out right even after trouble shooting as much as I can.

It is a bit difficult to find a coherent study path that I can follow.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thread.

Regards

TwoTents

Twotents

Well I just dove into something very simple today, made a crate both high poly and low poly, UV'ed the low poly baked the high poly over with normals and AO then dove into photoshop for some fun.

I tend to see something shiney and then go "oooh I have to make that in 3D!" instead of going "well lets start off simple hit the basics of everything and work from there!"

Heres a render of a crate I made today. Still have some texturing to do but it was fun none the less

Mark Dygert

Congrats on diving in and making it through, I would call it a successful test, so congrats!

However that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement...
1) There are a lot of similar materials applied to unique UV shells. They could be stacked fairly easily and allow you to pack more pixels on each face without bumping up the resolution of your textures.
For crates I like to do things like this:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1223840#post1223840

2) Each UV seam can double the vertices on that edge, so you want as few UV seams as possible. In fact Material and smooth breaks do the same things

(Taken from here: http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/provost/byf2.html)

Also detaching the edges makes the UVs harder to pack, if you leave the sides as 6 squares they will be very easy to stack (see example in #1).

killnpc

i think a great goal for you would be to participate in a game art contest! i think that is a great challenge for you to overcome. search around for contests and other similar forum events and learn what is required.

Twotents

Thanks for those link Mark, the info there has been a massive help to me, I realized on my AO bake that the bolts came out black, I may be wrong but that is due to the faces being flipped?

Killingpc - That is one of my goals, right now I am honestly trying to figure out my strengths as an artist, like I said in my post I love architectural modelling and zbrush so in one respect I am leaning towards environment art, at the same time I love hard surface stuff so its a constant battle between making vehicles or making buildings lol.

Deadly Nightshade

Maybe join a mod, and learn creating assets for some new game engine?
Check out www.moddb.com and the forums there.