Sketchbook: Conghal
polycounter lvl 3
Hey, I am definitely looking for feedback/critique, so please let me know what you think.
A bit of background: I quit my retail job a couple months ago and have been scrambling to get some kind of a portfolio together. I've been doing 3d game art stuff for a bit less than a year, but I've done a lot of traditional art stuff, I went to university for Painting and Drawing, etc.. Turns out this 3d game art stuff is pretty complicated. Anyways, I feel like I'm finally getting to a point where I can finish some cool stuff and then I can get serious about applying for jobs, I am hoping that this thread will be a good way for me to organize things and keep motivated.
Alright, let's do thissss.
So for starters I guess I have a portfolio-thing in progress over here: http://www.conghal.com/
All the stuff on there feels incomplete and poorly presented, but if you have any thoughts or feelings about any of that stuff, I would love to hear them.
Right now I am working on a tree:
(direct link: http://i.imgur.com/4Auhg6V.png )
To do:
- retopologize the trunk properly in Maya, unwrap UVs
- make tile-able branch and trunk textures (photos or zbrush, I guess)
- maybe try a simpler/emptier leaf mesh + texture
UNITY3D SHADER NOTES
Here I'm using the same geometry and leaf texture with some different shaders. First is Unity's built in "Transparent/Cutout/Diffuse" and second is the same shader with a line added to the code to turn off backface culling ( http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-CullAndDepth.html ). The third and forth trees are using the built in "Nature/Tree Soft Occlusion Leaves" shader, the only difference is that the third is set for directional occlusion and some base light with no amb. occlusion, and the fourth has amb. occlusion but no directional.
So, obviously the default cutout/alpha test shader looks pretty sparse compared to the rest. Disabling backface culling for the second tree seems to have the side effect of breaking the depth sorting, but that is probably possible to fix with more code? Maybe by figuring out how the Soft Occlusion shader does it.
It's a bit hard to tell from the photo, but this is the third tree's trunk rendering above the second tree's leaves:
.
Here is the first tree :
and the third tree :
from the same angle to compare.)
The cutout/alpha test shaders definitely benefit from edited vertex normals ( http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/VertexNormal ), but the soft occlusion shaders seem to ignore them, in this photo all of the trees have nice sphere-ish vertex normals:
and here I used a cube for the transfer map just to show the difference:
(I think I lowered the Base Light on the third tree, but it should normally look exactly the same)
I can get the directional occlusion shader to look quite close to the cutout by setting the base light just right, but it doesn't have the smoothness of the edited vertex normals:
Aside from that, I've noticed that you can't rotate a directional occlusion tree in Unity, you have to do it in Maya/whatever and re-export as a separate tree. Also, to work properly, it is very important that they be in the Standard Assets/Terrain Assets/Trees Ambient-Occlusion folder. Adjusting the Main Color seems to be pretty important for all of the shaders, they look pretty terrible if it's left as white. Also I think there is a thing about having to use the Nature/Tree Soft Occlusion shaders with Unity's terrain editor.
Okay! That's it for now, I will try to post again soon. If you've gotten this far, thanks so much for reading.
A bit of background: I quit my retail job a couple months ago and have been scrambling to get some kind of a portfolio together. I've been doing 3d game art stuff for a bit less than a year, but I've done a lot of traditional art stuff, I went to university for Painting and Drawing, etc.. Turns out this 3d game art stuff is pretty complicated. Anyways, I feel like I'm finally getting to a point where I can finish some cool stuff and then I can get serious about applying for jobs, I am hoping that this thread will be a good way for me to organize things and keep motivated.
Alright, let's do thissss.
So for starters I guess I have a portfolio-thing in progress over here: http://www.conghal.com/
All the stuff on there feels incomplete and poorly presented, but if you have any thoughts or feelings about any of that stuff, I would love to hear them.
Right now I am working on a tree:
(direct link: http://i.imgur.com/4Auhg6V.png )
To do:
- retopologize the trunk properly in Maya, unwrap UVs
- make tile-able branch and trunk textures (photos or zbrush, I guess)
- maybe try a simpler/emptier leaf mesh + texture
UNITY3D SHADER NOTES
Here I'm using the same geometry and leaf texture with some different shaders. First is Unity's built in "Transparent/Cutout/Diffuse" and second is the same shader with a line added to the code to turn off backface culling ( http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-CullAndDepth.html ). The third and forth trees are using the built in "Nature/Tree Soft Occlusion Leaves" shader, the only difference is that the third is set for directional occlusion and some base light with no amb. occlusion, and the fourth has amb. occlusion but no directional.
So, obviously the default cutout/alpha test shader looks pretty sparse compared to the rest. Disabling backface culling for the second tree seems to have the side effect of breaking the depth sorting, but that is probably possible to fix with more code? Maybe by figuring out how the Soft Occlusion shader does it.
It's a bit hard to tell from the photo, but this is the third tree's trunk rendering above the second tree's leaves:
.Here is the first tree :
and the third tree :
from the same angle to compare.)
The cutout/alpha test shaders definitely benefit from edited vertex normals ( http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/VertexNormal ), but the soft occlusion shaders seem to ignore them, in this photo all of the trees have nice sphere-ish vertex normals:
and here I used a cube for the transfer map just to show the difference:
(I think I lowered the Base Light on the third tree, but it should normally look exactly the same)
I can get the directional occlusion shader to look quite close to the cutout by setting the base light just right, but it doesn't have the smoothness of the edited vertex normals:
Aside from that, I've noticed that you can't rotate a directional occlusion tree in Unity, you have to do it in Maya/whatever and re-export as a separate tree. Also, to work properly, it is very important that they be in the Standard Assets/Terrain Assets/Trees Ambient-Occlusion folder. Adjusting the Main Color seems to be pretty important for all of the shaders, they look pretty terrible if it's left as white. Also I think there is a thing about having to use the Nature/Tree Soft Occlusion shaders with Unity's terrain editor.
Okay! That's it for now, I will try to post again soon. If you've gotten this far, thanks so much for reading.
Replies
The bark texture is kind of terrible at this point, but I learned a lot about how I ought to do it, at least.
And here are some pine tests with a super junky placeholder texture:
Okay, so here are some heads now. I'm still not totally clear on how many triangles I should be using for this sort of thing, I started with a lower poly version but I ended up mostly using the second subdivision out of zbrush, so here are the maya wires for that:
And some Unity screengrabs:
And some with the shinyness cranked up:
And here is the lowest subdivision level in Maya, I used the same eyelashes/eyebrows/hair/eyeballs, but they all could/should probably be reduced a bit:
I'm quite happy with the facial topology, I spent quite a lot of time learning about how all the different facial muscle groups work and at some point I ended up drawing on my face with a marker to try and work out the best edge flow. I'm still not sure about how the nostrils meet the upper lip, but I think it's a pretty good compromise for that level of detail.
Here are some shots of the lower subdiv in Unity, I baked a separate normal map in Zbrush but I used the same diffuse and specular. With the high-res maps, it looks pretty similar but you can see the lower detail around the end of the nose and the chin and the ear:
http://youtu.be/OLOpqiP0htc