looks pretty good. keep in mind if the objects are symmetrical or have repeated shapes (like the legs) u can delete half of it and only unwrap that half. then mirror it after u texture. also 1024x104 is pretty generous, id give 512x512 or smaller a try
All of it is looking pretty good. If you can get some good textures on this stuff I'd say you would be well on your way to a good portfolio
In addition to what Minimoose suggested, I think you can also scale the legs vertically so they are shorter. If you are careful what kind of texture detail you apply no one will really notice the stretching. Which would give you more room for the sign.
Also if you mirror the sign and maybe the walkway (provided they will be the same on both sides), that will give you more space to scale up the sign. The cool thing about billboards is that people hardly ever see both sides at the same time and mirroring, is almost always ok
As for the seam edges I'm not really sure what you mean? There are two ways I know of to define seams. Pelt mapping where you plot your seams by drawing the edges or detach pieces by high lighting them and using the "break command" CTRL+B (I think keyboard shortcut overide needs to be turned on).
Minimoose: hmmm, thanks for the tips. i will have to start thinking like this now. my brain is not routed that way yet. i will have to look for some examples to fully understand what you mean. got any by chance?
Vig: thanks for the kind words Vig! hopefully, my texturing skills will improve quickly as i seem to have only been focusing on the modeling aspect. unwrapping has scared me since the beginning.
as for the seam edges, i was just worried because when i used the cylindrical unwrapping tool, it just seemed to place the edge where ever it wanted. i will have to continue to play around with the unwrapping process as this was my first unwrap ever and i pretty much guessed the whole way through. : / anyways, thanks again.
Quokimbo: thanks for all the kind words man. it is all awesome encouragement for me and i appreciate it. remember though, most of the things i have been modeling are so simple. the true test will be to see if i can tackle something much more difficult, and i am trying to build up to it. i would love to see your stuff as well. let me know and i'll try to give my best crit, even though i'm just a n00b!
alright. well, i am pretty damn happy and feel accomplished. maybe the texture sucks, but here is my FIRST EVERY FULLY COMPLETED, UNWRAPPED and TEXTURED MODEL! whew. been painting all day but i don't care. i feel pretty good! of course, this is just the diffuse map as i have no idea how to do any of the other ones, but i guess one thing at a time eh?
anyways, i welcome all crits and tips from anyone that wants to give it! by the way, used one 1024x1024 map. the model is not very refined or low in polygons probably. forgot to delete certain poly's until it was too late (already finished unwrapping most of it). i'll have to keep a clearer mind on my next complete modeling project.
Ahh I see, you can transform the gizmo in the view port by move/rotate/scale it around to manipulate how it unwraps. There is a green line that indicates where it will attempt to place the seams.
As for the texture, thats pretty damn good for a first attempt, you should be proud!
Here are a few crits to help things along:
- I think its a good thing to concentrate on painting a good diffuse, a lot of people try and skip over that skill and attempt to fill in the talent gap with the other types of maps but without a good understanding of how to really work the diffuse it just gets messy and ugly. So I think you're right where you need to be, learning what you need to learn
- At some point you'll want to figure out how to use the Render To Texture feature. It will help you greatly if you need to transfer your material from one UV layout to another and it's how you create normal maps, and Ambient Occlusion (fancy term for shadows in the nooks and crannies). Very powerful, kind of unfriendly but once you start using it, it will save a bunch of time. But we can cross that bridge when your interested and ready
- But we have a few more things to cover before we get there. Advanced texture skills aside the texture is kind of noisy and I think some scratches could be taken out to make it more readable. One thing that will help is to squint at your model, step back across the room or take a render and scale it down 25% and see what the major color blocks are doing.
- You have to remember what angles the player will view your work at, and from what distance. Often people zoom way in and really detail the crap out of things and what the player sees is a tangled mess of details. I put a few cameras in my scene set to the players height and render from those. Another pit fall is that people tend to texture while looking down at the model in the view port and with some props like billboards players normally look up. So save yourself time and work on what the player will see.
- The top is pretty rusty and stained, but that rust doesn't seem to transfer to the other UV pieces. It can be hard for sure to paint on seperate pieces and make them all jell together in the scene, but it must be done. How would the rusty billboard effect the support structure? They maybe seperate UV pieces but they are one object.
- The Brown Ale side of the sign is flipped in your texture. You should select those faces and detach them, and then flip them (its the icon at the top that looks like two triangles pointing at each other). You will also want to make sure that no other faces are facing backwards. The fast way to do that is to go to face mode (in the UVW Editor window) and click "Select > Select Inverted Faces" This will highlight all the faces that are "wrong reading or reversed". It's not so important right now that everything be right reading but it will be important later when you start using RTT, so best get in the habit now
- When your texture makes into a game, it will more then like be mip mapped. That means its going to be scaled down and possibly blurred slightly so a smaller texture can be used when the player is far off. It's important to know what it will look like mipped so scale it down 75% 50% and 25% and see how it looks.
- Its also a good idea to keep a proper amount of padding around your UV pieces because when the texture is shrunk down the blank area around the UV pieces will start to bleed in and create ugly artifacts. In this case white would creep into the seams.
- 12 pixels of padding is ideal to fix problem areas, but I normally find that 2-6 pixels is fine as long as the pieces around them are roughly the same color.
Despite my monster post, you're doing a great job keep at it!
Go to customize ---> preferences
> viewport tab ----> configure driver, then I thought it was setting both the lookups to none/nearest.
Right neighborhood, wrong door, but oh so close. You want to set the Background texture size & download texture size to a higher value, it will greatly effect the viewport speed but I haven't had problems with it set to 1024. Also check on "match bitmap size as closely as possible".
It also helps to see the texture for what it truly looks like if you turn off the shading. The quickest way to do this is to set the material to 100% self Illumination
Oops I forgot not everyone works on tiny texture and considers pixelated look a good thing. Good one pointing out the proper solution to the problem Vig!
Vig: Holy cow! Thanks for that wealth of information Vig! I really appreciate you taking the time for such a helpful post. Never knew about the 'Select Inverted Faces' feature. I was wondering why the UV was displaying backwards!
Also, when you talk about mip mapped, how exactly should I be shrinking the model down? Is this an actual shrinking of the model in 3DS Max or just a shrinking in an image editor to get an idea of what it would look like at a distance?
Also, is there a precise way to space the UV pieces, or is it just a general eyeball measurement?
I can see what you mean about how the rust does not show on the other pieces and agree with your crits. Do you think I should try to add more rust to the other pieces, or should I be removing some rust from the top piece? Does it look too rusty in your opinion?
Also, thank you for that viewport solution. I think it is working now, and the self illumination is very helpful also.
When you talk about mip mapped, how exactly should I be shrinking the model down?
You don't need to shrink the model just the texture. It might help to zoom out, but don't scale the model.
Mip Maps are small samples of your texture compressed so the engine doesn't have to use the full texture if not that close to the object. If you're 100ft from the model it uses a 32x32 as you get closer it ratchets up to the full size. It is also used to help FPS by only allowing certain systems to have access to the bigger mip maps.
When you turn down the texture settings in games, you'll notice the textures start to get blurry, thats because its using lower level mips for close up details. When it creates the mip maps (by scaling and blurring your original texture) the void around the UV pieces has a really good chance of bleeding into the viewable area. So we pad the void with pixels and pick a not so noticeable color.
Also, is there a precise way to space the UV pieces, or is it just a general eyeball measurement?
UV editor window > Tools > Pack UV's adjust the spacing.
The neat thing about pack UV's is that you can preform it on a selection. It's not perfect and it doesn't do a very good job of fitting non standard pieces together but for some things like boxes, circles, basic shapes it packs them pretty well. Enviro artists end up using it quite a bit.
Also if you aren't using stitch, I suggest giving it a try. You select an edge and go "Tools > Stitch selected". I use it so much I have it bound to S.
Also "Tools > Relax" is great for eliminating stretching. If it seems to skrunch up your piece and make a mess, it's probably wrong facing and just needs to be flipped.
Do you think I should try to add more rust to the other pieces, or should I be removing some rust from the top piece? Does it look too rusty in your opinion?
It really depends on the rest of the environment. If this billboard is in a normal urban area that is even moderately maintained they wouldn't let the ads get that nasty, they would loose money, not to mention the ads would be rotated out more frequently so they wouldn't have a chance to get that nasty. So the level of dirt, rust and grime are telling me this is in a pretty neglected place and has been that way for quite some time. Not only do you need to blend the UV pieces together but you need to blend the entire piece into the environment.
I would do both, dial down the rust on the top, and add some to the lower parts.
alright, just a few quick questions. i have modeled a bus stop to practice unwrapping and texturing. however, this model contains glass panels. how am i supposed to model to accommodate the glass panels? the way i have it modeled now, the glass panels are basically just inset pieces that are extruded into a box. should i just delete the glass insets and seal the frame areas that would be visible behind the glass, and then just create 2 seperate planes for both sides of the glass? does that make any sense?
also, can i add scratches and etchings into the glass texture? how should i go about texturing glass? is it just basically messing with the opacity in the materials editor?
what you did is fine. but what u do is when u go to texture it, you also make a opacity map (black visible, white invisible... or the opposite i forget) and have the glass a shade of gray.
Alright. I finally got this thing unwrapped. I'm sure it's a horrendous job, but can you guys take a look and let me know what I should change before I try to start painting over it?
Unwrapping so far has definitely been the worst part about creating models for me. I'm sure it's just because I suck so much at it, but damn, it is horrible. I got confused so much on this unwrap, it took me so much longer than modeling the damn thing. And i'm sure there is so much I should I change on the sheet. : /
alright, well this is what i have so far on my texture for the bus stop. took me a while to figure out the opacity map stuff, but i think i got the hang of it.
as for texturing in general so far, i don't know if i'm grasping the texturing concepts as well as i would like. i get stuck on figuring out how to texture the materials without adding too much noise to it. i have tried to keep the scratches and such at a minimum so far and have relied heavily on real life photos / textures to do most of it. is this bad? should i be trying to paint most of the textures by hand?
this texturing is definitely not close to completion. i really would like to get more help from you guys and try to complete this model with a top notch texture. how can i take it to the next level?
anyways, as always, crits, tips, and advice oh so greatly appreciated. thanks.
i think your doing a nice job. and i would say photo reference is a great way to get started or use as a base for your textures. those posters are fine to just drop in there. the purple does look like a little much. tone it down a lil bit
Great Sketchbook, you are really cranking them out. Like i should but don't
Anyway, the only thing that strikes me is the fact that de broken glass has so little texture space compared to the posters. I believe varying texture resolution (scaling your unwrap islands) can be be a good thing if you keep consistency in mind. You might want to scale pieces with so much detail up the next time.
If you really want to have 100% scale consistency you should decheck the checkbox: Normalize map in your unwrap uvw modifier. I makes all stuff huge but the scale is correct. Good luck.
stalsby:thanks for the words stalsby! you should definitely start one up! RIGHT NOW.
Minimoose: thanks moose. is that blue reading as a purple?! does anyone else see it as purple? either way, it does seem way too saturated or bright.
jerry: thanks jerry. i'm really trying to do as much as i can. every model is one model closer to my goal of landing a job somewhere! thanks for the advice. i definitely did not think things through enough before i laid out the UVW template. man, is it a pain in the ass not only to unwrap, but to also have to cram everything into that square!!! i will definitely try unchecking the normalize map.
if anyone has any advice as to how to add more detail along the edges to make this texture look more like a decent texture, please let me know! i'm kind of stuck as to what to do next. thanks!
Hey, this is all looking great! You are a number of steps ahead of me and my development, so it is great to see you treading a path I hope to follow as well.
On the latest texture, here are some of my thoughts.
- On the broken glass, you have placed a rather strong spec highlight across it in the texture, and as you view it from different camera angles it sits in the same place every time -- even on the back side. A strong spec like that would only be viewable from one angle with the light bouncing in just the right way. Maybe remove it and let a specular map tell the story (still unsure myself on how to accomplish that). Also, every broken window I have seen in the real world has a pile of broken glass on the ground, and it usually stays there for months.
- I think some nice lighting would really pop this and hold it all together. It looks flat overall -- I'm really struggling with this in my work right now so I am becoming more conscious of it. Putting it in a full environment would really help the transparency read -- right now the back windows look like a cloudy grey color.
- I agree on the blue being too saturated. The flatness on the color of the bench especially makes the texture read as any number of different textures -- plastic? painted wood? painted metal? It is not completely clear. The canopy reads to me as plexiglass, if that is what you are going for.
- I agree with you on the unwrapping -- it always takes way too long for me.
Again great work -- I hope to get enough time to catch up to you at some point.
Scott
scotths: hey! thanks for the comments and the crits. took a look at your stuff on your website and by no means am i ahead of you! you are doing great it looks like and i definitely have to catch up to YOU. i have taken note of all of your suggestions and will try to make the changes accordingly.
as for updates, they will have to wait until this weekend as i will be in vegas till friday. as arnold would say, AHL BE BAHK!
Since my last post, I was lucky enough to get hooked up with a short apprenticeship at NCSoft NorCal (Paragon Studios) and did some noobish stuff for the City of Hero's/Villains games. It was a great experience and I feel very fortunate and thankful for the people who made this possible. I was so new at everything that I even felt like I didn't deserve the opportunity to be honest!
However, I haven't done ANYTHING in the way of modeling since then. I should have been more motivated and excited than ever about the possibilities of my future. But, I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time, and the past few years have been mentally challenging for me to say the least.
I'm slowly starting to sort things out and figure out what I want, and i'm determined to become a successful 3d artist.
Sorry if this is sounding like a blog post. I didn't mean for it to be this long or deep, but it just kind of came out I guess.
Anyways, here is where I stand in terms of skill: www.ilyoungbang.com (hasn't been updated since my apprenticeship shortly after my last post here!)
I hope to keep this thread updated with my progress and hope to improve myself with everyone's help. And to start, i'm planning to properly learn the high poly to low poly baking technique, learn how to set up a decent scene in UDK, and to VASTLY improve my texturing skills. The first project i'm tackling is based off of this Dust 514 concept:
I have been working on it little by little. Damn, i'm currently a very slow modeler, so slowly but surely. Learning high poly techniques has been quite baffling for me as i'm easily confused on how to properly place edge supports for intricate details and cut-ins on my models. I did manage to get one object baked with a FAIRLY decent hi poly and imported into UDK though. Here are some shots of my progress.
Barrier asset in UDK (not textured obviously):
Blocking out other assets to get a sense of scale/proportion:
As always, crits, tips, and any comments in general are welcome.
Replies
In addition to what Minimoose suggested, I think you can also scale the legs vertically so they are shorter. If you are careful what kind of texture detail you apply no one will really notice the stretching. Which would give you more room for the sign.
Also if you mirror the sign and maybe the walkway (provided they will be the same on both sides), that will give you more space to scale up the sign. The cool thing about billboards is that people hardly ever see both sides at the same time and mirroring, is almost always ok
As for the seam edges I'm not really sure what you mean? There are two ways I know of to define seams. Pelt mapping where you plot your seams by drawing the edges or detach pieces by high lighting them and using the "break command" CTRL+B (I think keyboard shortcut overide needs to be turned on).
Vig: thanks for the kind words Vig! hopefully, my texturing skills will improve quickly as i seem to have only been focusing on the modeling aspect. unwrapping has scared me since the beginning.
as for the seam edges, i was just worried because when i used the cylindrical unwrapping tool, it just seemed to place the edge where ever it wanted. i will have to continue to play around with the unwrapping process as this was my first unwrap ever and i pretty much guessed the whole way through. : / anyways, thanks again.
Quokimbo: thanks for all the kind words man. it is all awesome encouragement for me and i appreciate it. remember though, most of the things i have been modeling are so simple. the true test will be to see if i can tackle something much more difficult, and i am trying to build up to it. i would love to see your stuff as well. let me know and i'll try to give my best crit, even though i'm just a n00b!
alright. well, i am pretty damn happy and feel accomplished. maybe the texture sucks, but here is my FIRST EVERY FULLY COMPLETED, UNWRAPPED and TEXTURED MODEL! whew. been painting all day but i don't care. i feel pretty good! of course, this is just the diffuse map as i have no idea how to do any of the other ones, but i guess one thing at a time eh?
anyways, i welcome all crits and tips from anyone that wants to give it! by the way, used one 1024x1024 map. the model is not very refined or low in polygons probably. forgot to delete certain poly's until it was too late (already finished unwrapping most of it). i'll have to keep a clearer mind on my next complete modeling project.
As for the texture, thats pretty damn good for a first attempt, you should be proud!
Here are a few crits to help things along:
- I think its a good thing to concentrate on painting a good diffuse, a lot of people try and skip over that skill and attempt to fill in the talent gap with the other types of maps but without a good understanding of how to really work the diffuse it just gets messy and ugly. So I think you're right where you need to be, learning what you need to learn
- At some point you'll want to figure out how to use the Render To Texture feature. It will help you greatly if you need to transfer your material from one UV layout to another and it's how you create normal maps, and Ambient Occlusion (fancy term for shadows in the nooks and crannies). Very powerful, kind of unfriendly but once you start using it, it will save a bunch of time. But we can cross that bridge when your interested and ready
- But we have a few more things to cover before we get there. Advanced texture skills aside the texture is kind of noisy and I think some scratches could be taken out to make it more readable. One thing that will help is to squint at your model, step back across the room or take a render and scale it down 25% and see what the major color blocks are doing.
- You have to remember what angles the player will view your work at, and from what distance. Often people zoom way in and really detail the crap out of things and what the player sees is a tangled mess of details. I put a few cameras in my scene set to the players height and render from those. Another pit fall is that people tend to texture while looking down at the model in the view port and with some props like billboards players normally look up. So save yourself time and work on what the player will see.
- The top is pretty rusty and stained, but that rust doesn't seem to transfer to the other UV pieces. It can be hard for sure to paint on seperate pieces and make them all jell together in the scene, but it must be done. How would the rusty billboard effect the support structure? They maybe seperate UV pieces but they are one object.
- The Brown Ale side of the sign is flipped in your texture. You should select those faces and detach them, and then flip them (its the icon at the top that looks like two triangles pointing at each other). You will also want to make sure that no other faces are facing backwards. The fast way to do that is to go to face mode (in the UVW Editor window) and click "Select > Select Inverted Faces" This will highlight all the faces that are "wrong reading or reversed". It's not so important right now that everything be right reading but it will be important later when you start using RTT, so best get in the habit now
- When your texture makes into a game, it will more then like be mip mapped. That means its going to be scaled down and possibly blurred slightly so a smaller texture can be used when the player is far off. It's important to know what it will look like mipped so scale it down 75% 50% and 25% and see how it looks.
- Its also a good idea to keep a proper amount of padding around your UV pieces because when the texture is shrunk down the blank area around the UV pieces will start to bleed in and create ugly artifacts. In this case white would creep into the seams.
- 12 pixels of padding is ideal to fix problem areas, but I normally find that 2-6 pixels is fine as long as the pieces around them are roughly the same color.
Despite my monster post, you're doing a great job keep at it!
It also helps to see the texture for what it truly looks like if you turn off the shading. The quickest way to do this is to set the material to 100% self Illumination
Also, when you talk about mip mapped, how exactly should I be shrinking the model down? Is this an actual shrinking of the model in 3DS Max or just a shrinking in an image editor to get an idea of what it would look like at a distance?
Also, is there a precise way to space the UV pieces, or is it just a general eyeball measurement?
I can see what you mean about how the rust does not show on the other pieces and agree with your crits. Do you think I should try to add more rust to the other pieces, or should I be removing some rust from the top piece? Does it look too rusty in your opinion?
Also, thank you for that viewport solution. I think it is working now, and the self illumination is very helpful also.
Thanks again Vig! Appreciate it very much!
Mip Maps are small samples of your texture compressed so the engine doesn't have to use the full texture if not that close to the object. If you're 100ft from the model it uses a 32x32 as you get closer it ratchets up to the full size. It is also used to help FPS by only allowing certain systems to have access to the bigger mip maps.
When you turn down the texture settings in games, you'll notice the textures start to get blurry, thats because its using lower level mips for close up details. When it creates the mip maps (by scaling and blurring your original texture) the void around the UV pieces has a really good chance of bleeding into the viewable area. So we pad the void with pixels and pick a not so noticeable color.
UV editor window > Tools > Pack UV's adjust the spacing.
The neat thing about pack UV's is that you can preform it on a selection. It's not perfect and it doesn't do a very good job of fitting non standard pieces together but for some things like boxes, circles, basic shapes it packs them pretty well. Enviro artists end up using it quite a bit.
Also if you aren't using stitch, I suggest giving it a try. You select an edge and go "Tools > Stitch selected". I use it so much I have it bound to S.
Also "Tools > Relax" is great for eliminating stretching. If it seems to skrunch up your piece and make a mess, it's probably wrong facing and just needs to be flipped.
It really depends on the rest of the environment. If this billboard is in a normal urban area that is even moderately maintained they wouldn't let the ads get that nasty, they would loose money, not to mention the ads would be rotated out more frequently so they wouldn't have a chance to get that nasty. So the level of dirt, rust and grime are telling me this is in a pretty neglected place and has been that way for quite some time. Not only do you need to blend the UV pieces together but you need to blend the entire piece into the environment.
I would do both, dial down the rust on the top, and add some to the lower parts. No prob, its a waste of info if I don't pass it on =P
also, can i add scratches and etchings into the glass texture? how should i go about texturing glass? is it just basically messing with the opacity in the materials editor?
thanks in advance.
Unwrapping so far has definitely been the worst part about creating models for me. I'm sure it's just because I suck so much at it, but damn, it is horrible. I got confused so much on this unwrap, it took me so much longer than modeling the damn thing. And i'm sure there is so much I should I change on the sheet. : /
as for texturing in general so far, i don't know if i'm grasping the texturing concepts as well as i would like. i get stuck on figuring out how to texture the materials without adding too much noise to it. i have tried to keep the scratches and such at a minimum so far and have relied heavily on real life photos / textures to do most of it. is this bad? should i be trying to paint most of the textures by hand?
this texturing is definitely not close to completion. i really would like to get more help from you guys and try to complete this model with a top notch texture. how can i take it to the next level?
anyways, as always, crits, tips, and advice oh so greatly appreciated. thanks.
Anyway, the only thing that strikes me is the fact that de broken glass has so little texture space compared to the posters. I believe varying texture resolution (scaling your unwrap islands) can be be a good thing if you keep consistency in mind. You might want to scale pieces with so much detail up the next time.
If you really want to have 100% scale consistency you should decheck the checkbox: Normalize map in your unwrap uvw modifier. I makes all stuff huge but the scale is correct. Good luck.
Minimoose: thanks moose. is that blue reading as a purple?! does anyone else see it as purple? either way, it does seem way too saturated or bright.
jerry: thanks jerry. i'm really trying to do as much as i can. every model is one model closer to my goal of landing a job somewhere! thanks for the advice. i definitely did not think things through enough before i laid out the UVW template. man, is it a pain in the ass not only to unwrap, but to also have to cram everything into that square!!! i will definitely try unchecking the normalize map.
if anyone has any advice as to how to add more detail along the edges to make this texture look more like a decent texture, please let me know! i'm kind of stuck as to what to do next. thanks!
On the latest texture, here are some of my thoughts.
- On the broken glass, you have placed a rather strong spec highlight across it in the texture, and as you view it from different camera angles it sits in the same place every time -- even on the back side. A strong spec like that would only be viewable from one angle with the light bouncing in just the right way. Maybe remove it and let a specular map tell the story (still unsure myself on how to accomplish that). Also, every broken window I have seen in the real world has a pile of broken glass on the ground, and it usually stays there for months.
- I think some nice lighting would really pop this and hold it all together. It looks flat overall -- I'm really struggling with this in my work right now so I am becoming more conscious of it. Putting it in a full environment would really help the transparency read -- right now the back windows look like a cloudy grey color.
- I agree on the blue being too saturated. The flatness on the color of the bench especially makes the texture read as any number of different textures -- plastic? painted wood? painted metal? It is not completely clear. The canopy reads to me as plexiglass, if that is what you are going for.
- I agree with you on the unwrapping -- it always takes way too long for me.
Again great work -- I hope to get enough time to catch up to you at some point.
Scott
as for updates, they will have to wait until this weekend as i will be in vegas till friday. as arnold would say, AHL BE BAHK!
Since my last post, I was lucky enough to get hooked up with a short apprenticeship at NCSoft NorCal (Paragon Studios) and did some noobish stuff for the City of Hero's/Villains games. It was a great experience and I feel very fortunate and thankful for the people who made this possible. I was so new at everything that I even felt like I didn't deserve the opportunity to be honest!
However, I haven't done ANYTHING in the way of modeling since then. I should have been more motivated and excited than ever about the possibilities of my future. But, I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time, and the past few years have been mentally challenging for me to say the least.
I'm slowly starting to sort things out and figure out what I want, and i'm determined to become a successful 3d artist.
Sorry if this is sounding like a blog post. I didn't mean for it to be this long or deep, but it just kind of came out I guess.
Anyways, here is where I stand in terms of skill: www.ilyoungbang.com (hasn't been updated since my apprenticeship shortly after my last post here!)
I hope to keep this thread updated with my progress and hope to improve myself with everyone's help. And to start, i'm planning to properly learn the high poly to low poly baking technique, learn how to set up a decent scene in UDK, and to VASTLY improve my texturing skills. The first project i'm tackling is based off of this Dust 514 concept:
I have been working on it little by little. Damn, i'm currently a very slow modeler, so slowly but surely. Learning high poly techniques has been quite baffling for me as i'm easily confused on how to properly place edge supports for intricate details and cut-ins on my models. I did manage to get one object baked with a FAIRLY decent hi poly and imported into UDK though. Here are some shots of my progress.
Barrier asset in UDK (not textured obviously):
Blocking out other assets to get a sense of scale/proportion:
As always, crits, tips, and any comments in general are welcome.