Indie game work - Son of Nor

DigitalCrest

Hi, I'm a soon to be graduated student from Finland, and I'm in a indie game project working as a 3D environmental artist. I thought I'd create this thread to show my work and the progress I'm doing as part of the project. Feel free to give feedback or ask questions. As tools I use Blender 3D, Photoshop and Xnormals for my models.

The game is a fantasy game with a desert theme, and it uses Unity as the game engine. For more information on the game you can check the links I've posted below, which include video-footage of the current state of the game as well as some concept art.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143053545
http://stillalive-studios.com/portfolio-item/son-of-nor/

But to the topic itself. My latest task has been to create a tent for the military of the enemy race of lizardmen called Sarahul, which are found in the game. I'm almost finished with the tent including textures, but there is some work to do yet. Next are the details like sun stains and dirt, and the metal spikes need to be worked on yet. Also there have been some problems with the normal map, because the lower part of the tent has looked dark although it should be light. As for the model, in the latest calculations the tent was about 2800 tris.
Here are some images of the model with and without the diffuse and normal map.

DigitalCrest

I edited the textures a little by adding more stains and dust here and there,and I added a small shadow below the roof on the walls to separate them better. There was also a need for a version of the tent that is open, so I made one by rotating the front cloth and copying a spike from the tent. I managed to reduce the tri count to about 2600 too. Here's how the open version looks (inside Blender). : )

DigitalCrest

The tent is now finished! I added some shadows on the top part of the walls and cloth loops on the bottom parts of the spikes that I had forgotten. Here's how the two versions look inside Unity, which is used in our project.

cholden

texture stands out nicely. The project is pc and the camera gets in close. I think you can afford a few more triangles in the tent's silhouette. I mean, there's only two loops, and the smaller pieces are much more dense. It's smooth it out, and stop breaking the illusion.

DigitalCrest

Thank you cholden for your comment. : ) Unfortunately my boss, the AD, thinks that the tent is finished,so I won't be working any more on it unless he want me to. But feel free to comment on the coming models too if you like. ^_^

DigitalCrest

Here's a few concepts of what I will be doing next, a storage chest for the before mentioned Sarahul military. After doing several sketches with pen and paper I revised some of them in Photoshop into more detailed concepts. The latter image is the one that was created according to the leading artist's suggestions.

DigitalCrest

Here's now the base mesh of the chest. Now the next step is to sculpt the details, like scratches and such.

Neox

too many too steep angles, this will never bake out nicely into a normalmap

in stead of doing this
. . .__
__|

you should be doing this
. . .__
__/

at 45° to get the lighting information into your normalmap

however, why are the metal straps flowing into the wodden background? they should be seperated to create proper shading

DigitalCrest

Neox: Thank you for pointing out the errors I've made. The reason for my stupid approach is simply that I'm a self-learned 3D-modeller with still a lot to learn (the more reason to be a member in polycount, to learn from more experienced people like you). I'll make sure to remember your advice from now on. ^^

Also I apologize for forgetting to update this thread, I've had a lot to do besides this 3D-work. Here's how the low poly chest ended up looking with normals and color (it's about 300tris). I'll still have to edit the nails to look more logically placed.