Nosslaks Portfolio Work

Nosslak

I really need to get my portfolio going so here's a new generic thread that I'll post all my new stuff in. At first I'm just going to fix some of my older models to bring them up to snuff and then I'll get going on making some new content.

Here's my latest work:

806 triangles, 1024^2 diff/norm/spec.

I'm not really happy with how the diamond/gemstone is looking, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it. I'll try tweaking the gem some more, this is what I'm aiming for.

It's a remake of an older model that I made a year ago or so. The old one was a flat model with an alphamap and some pretty boring texturing, so I remade it as a regular "water-tight" model without any alphamapping.

Cheers

DWalker

I think the main problem with your gem is that it's completely opaque. Standard colored glass shaders would be a good starting point. http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2009/11/fire-and-ice-rendering-diamonds-and.html is nice if you're rendering in Max using mental ray.

Obscura

I can recommend to use a little plane with normalmap under the gem, to fake it's interior.

Nosslak

DWalker wrote: »

I think the main problem with your gem is that it's completely opaque. Standard colored glass shaders would be a good starting point. http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2009/11/fire-and-ice-rendering-diamonds-and.html is nice if you're rendering in Max using mental ray.

Thanks, but I'm going to be rendering it in real-time with either Marmoset or UDK.

Obscura wrote: »

I can recommend to use a little plane with normalmap under the gem, to fake it's interior.

So what you're saying is that I should make the gem semi-transparent? It sounds like a good idea, but it feels a bit overkill for such a small gem. I'll try experimenting with cubemaps a bit as well. Thanks for the advice!

Obscura

We are in 2013. Today's computers are not that weak Anyway, another option: You could use parallaxed interior, but that would be more expensive than using transparency. You can place your transparency map in one of your texture's alpha channel.

Nosslak

Obscura wrote: »

We are in 2013. Today's computers are not that weak Anyway, another option: You could use parallaxed interior, but that would be more expensive than using transparency. You can place your transparency map in one of your texture's alpha channel.

It's a good idea, but the mask is pretty small so it didn't really feel worth it even if we have the technology.

I did finish the mask and here's how it turned out:


I also started working on another older model that I made some time ago but my baking and texturing skills let it down:

Here's the old one if anyone's curious.

There are a few baking errors so I'll have to re-bake it, but otherwise it's getting there.

Also quick question: When using UDKs material editor is there supoosed to be a small lag whenever you change a single value (e.g when you change a single constant it lags for maybe a second or so)? I'd guess it isn't but I'm new to UDK so I don't know for sure.