Brilliant work you have here. Your an inspiration to me not only because of the quality of your work but how well you respond to everyones questions.
I would loooove if you could make a timelapse video of you creating one of your highly detailed assets. To look over a talented shoulder as they work is one of the things I wish I could do more often.
Kevin: As others have already said, your work is really impressive and its so cool of you to take the time to post all of this. It's especially cool because it is like looking over your shoulder as you work, where in real life this could not be possible.
One question though: Could you explain your basic render setup? It looks like you are rendering these all out in a similar fashion, and I especially like how your renders are turning out. I read through the whole thread, and unless I missed something; I don't think its something you explained yet.
I was using a basic skylight with lighttracer, then stripping everything fancy out of the scene and rendering a standard render with the specularity element tag selected so I could just composite the spec with the lighttracer render and keep everything looking the same from 1 render to the other.
Thanks again for the comments, I have bought Camtasia now, Epic is talking to Eat3d about a DVD, I'm intent on mini video tutorials before that as I learn how to use video capture.
In the meanwhile, Nuala is at 4months, another couple months or so will see sanity return a little to my home heh
Wow, that's great news on the DVD bit; and I know what you mean about the baby (my bro and his wife just had one 5 months ago).
Thanks for the quick reply, since the thread hadn't been updated in a while I figured it might take a little while for a response, so I can't thank you enough.
So if nothing else I have some mini tutorials to look forward to... Sweet!
congrats! look forward to hearing back from you in 18 years ) but seriously enjoy nothing is better then watching them grow and showing them the ropes.
sweet! looking forward to the mini-tuts and the video.
If I may suggest some topics to include (sorry if some of these seem really noobie):
-I would love to see some of the prep work for modularity, re-usabilty and keeping things snappable for the level designers/UT editor
-what does your actual base mesh/medium poly mesh look like before going into zbrush
-how you build your low poly mesh after zbrushing
-and of course, your high poly work both in 3dmax and Zbrush
I was using a basic skylight with lighttracer, then stripping everything fancy out of the scene and rendering a standard render with the specularity element tag selected so I could just composite the spec with the lighttracer render and keep everything looking the same from 1 render to the other.
Thanks again for the comments, I have bought Camtasia now, Epic is talking to Eat3d about a DVD, I'm intent on mini video tutorials before that as I learn how to use video capture.
In the meanwhile, Nuala is at 4months, another couple months or so will see sanity return a little to my home heh
Hi Kevin,
Great stuff. Look forward to the videos too.
In the meantime can you post images of the wires with subdivision turned off?
yeah man i love this UT and Gears style so much that i remodelled the BigNose ( and some smaller stuff from these games) will pimp that a bit more in ZBrush but you already know that hehe
Great news Kevin, especially teaming up with Eat3D.
Congrats on the 2nd addition. My daughter is now 1 1/2yrs old and she's an awesome handful of fun but I'm not sure the misses and I could go through that again. I like my sleep...
Vig: Well, we waited 5 years before going for the 2nd one. Now I feel like we should have gotten over it sooner, still , this was just the right time for us; perhaps eventually you'll just feel its time again
Anyway, wires are being cut and pasted, I'll post as I get them together.
And an Ancient Warrior (any chance to throw some Scottish in there and spruce the place up a bit!)
Junkie: I tried a few different ways of planning out large chunks and fell on my face after too much concrete work previous, so I restarted with the nose / skull looking bit in the center at the crest of the center bend in the first wires.
I just started with 4polys and started pulling forms until it looked like it had a nice flow, then i split part of an outer edge out as a COPY and pulled some more. I made the long leg sections in a similar fashion , then made the big nobby sphere piece at the side from a sphere and started the long job of stitching the sphere into the long legs and center.
Its always good with this stuff to make the seperates as seperate elements first and then find ways to flow the forms into each other afterwards to make interesting new contiguous curved forms when you have a variety of polys to stich.
Konstruct: The Klaw piece took me about 10-12 days I think
I'm glad to see that this thread is back in the spotlight. I have recently been fooling around with zbrush but I just don't know how you do all of that hard surface modeling. All I can really find are organic modeling training videos/tutorials. You mentioned above that you were planning on putting together a series of tutorials... my vote is for zbrush hard surface modeling. Or if you have any quick tips that is good too.
Thanks again Kevin for taking the time to post some process. It's so awesome to learn from the best. That warrior is awesome too. Kilts ftw.
I'm trying my hand with some curvatures and such, for something simple like that little circular do-dad how do you decide how many edges/sides to put on your cylinder when you first create it? Is there any trick to adding more sides if needed? As in, I want to cut in detail into this 12 sided cylinder, but after sub-d I realize that 12 sides isn't enough to maintain a good circle and I have to restart.
Saidin: I usually go with 16 sides, with this i probably started with 32 as I knew it would be a bigger piece. I made this one from a larger shape and then made a copy of the inner section i showed here and reused it in a few circular insets around the main model.
So really its simply a case of thinking ahead, knowing how much detail you intend putting into the shape.
Hey! GoodWork dude. Like Johny said, its realy nice to see some clean meshes like that. Glad your still having a goodtime after all thoses years man ahahah Congrats on the new baby too
Thanks for the description. Are you concepting this stuff off the top of your head? Are the concept artists giving you the basic forms and then you improvise with all the little details? I'm curious to see the concept art.
We should hold contests where you pick a reference photo or concept and all of us here model try to model it. And you pick the winner.
That would be a lot of fun. I'm hitting a block and just can't find anything inspiring to model.
If you go to http://www.vancekovacs.com/ , Galleries / Concepts / page 5, top row, middle, you can see the concept I had for the ancient warrior. Also on page 6 you can see the concept for the necris walkway set I made and in general page 5 and 6 which were done for Unreal Championship2 and Unreal Tournament 3 and are of a representative mix of the type of concepts we used.
Concepts are great, they set the tone for the whole team to unify behind, but they tend rarely to be blueprints, you have to do some work yourself to ground it and flesh it out.
Thanks for those wires Kevin. I sure we can all learn a lot from them. I've noticed that you've got a few tris, pentagons and terminated edge loops in there. At lot of us would have continued the edge loops rather than terminate them. I guess it comes down to experience knowing when to terminate and when not to.
I always seem to get visible kinks in the mesh when I use tris, pentagons etc. especially on curved surfaces. Anway, thanks again.
that character definitely doesn't compete with your env work which totally kicks ass
love your super clean meshes and presentation, really great work overall
Irreal : There are situations where you can get away with ugly terminations of edgeloops with a bidge massage work of the verts with edge constraints on. You probably shouldnt assume I'm always doing it for a reason on each mesh, sometimes I'm just rushed, sometimes its not perfect but so slight that I know it won't be seen ingame, there are a few ugly warping bits on the Klaw that I don't like to look back on.
Neox: For sure, I suck as a character guy now, 5 years solid of env work has made what little ability I used to have in that area disappear. I still had a lot of fun with it though, theres something about making statues that make me feel more like an artist than a Lego Machine.
I was using a basic skylight with lighttracer, then stripping everything fancy out of the scene and rendering a standard render with the specularity element tag selected so I could just composite the spec with the lighttracer render and keep everything looking the same from 1 render to the other.
Hi Kevin,
This might be best suited for technical talk but I just had a quick quesiton back to the rendering...I've tried this before but I can't get it to work.
How do you keep diffuse & default scene specular in their own seperate files with the skylight and lighttracer? You are talking about Render To Elements right? And you are just refering to default scene spec? A default scene specular just comes thru as black when combined with skylight/lighttracer. I have to put an omni light in the scene and only have specular checked. But then I could just avoid the hassle of compositing altogether then anyway with the complete image.
Or are you talking about render to elements with mental ray? But then lighttracer is ignored?
This might be best suited for technical talk but I just had a quick quesiton back to the rendering...I've tried this before but I can't get it to work.
How do you keep diffuse & default scene specular in their own seperate files with the skylight and lighttracer? You are talking about Render To Elements right? And you are just refering to default scene spec? A default scene specular just comes thru as black when combined with skylight/lighttracer. I have to put an omni light in the scene and only have specular checked. But then I could just avoid the hassle of compositing altogether then anyway with the complete image.
Or are you talking about render to elements with mental ray? But then lighttracer is ignored?
Sorry just a bit confused.
I think the process that he describes goes like this:
1. Render out a basic skylight image of your object - Example
2. Delete the skylight from your scene. Apply a material that has a high specular to your object. Through Render Elements get an image of your spec highlights - Example
3. Take the two images into photoshop and composite them together - Example
if you want to do it in one pass (the results arent as good but still fine)
put the skylight down to 0.7 or so. then apply a specular material with an omni or something
I think the process that he describes goes like this:
1. Render out a basic skylight image of your object - Example
2. Delete the skylight from your scene. Apply a material that has a high specular to your object. Through Render Elements get an image of your spec highlights - Example
3. Take the two images into photoshop and composite them together - Example
Hope that helps.
haha, no I understand completely the concept of compositing. Thanks for trying though. :poly124:
I was just wondering if Kevin stumbled upon something I was trying to do in the past but not succeed. And that is hit it all in one shot with skylight/lighttracer and default scene specularity under render elements. Deleting out the skylight or just throwing in an omni with specular checked and diffuse unchecked was what I've already done before.
Nah I'm just doing it like Szark is talking about, because of exactly the problem you mentioned.
I just save the specular image as a 32bt TGA so I can composite it neatly onto the skylight rendered image and tweak the levels of the specular so it looks right.
I don't even put a light in the plain render version, I just turn the environment lightness up a bit, render, save the specular element as a tga and composite in photoshop.
Replies
congratulations!
: p
congratulations man
I would loooove if you could make a timelapse video of you creating one of your highly detailed assets. To look over a talented shoulder as they work is one of the things I wish I could do more often.
One question though: Could you explain your basic render setup? It looks like you are rendering these all out in a similar fashion, and I especially like how your renders are turning out. I read through the whole thread, and unless I missed something; I don't think its something you explained yet.
I'm really looking forward to seeing more!
Thanks again for the comments, I have bought Camtasia now, Epic is talking to Eat3d about a DVD, I'm intent on mini video tutorials before that as I learn how to use video capture.
In the meanwhile, Nuala is at 4months, another couple months or so will see sanity return a little to my home heh
Thanks for the quick reply, since the thread hadn't been updated in a while I figured it might take a little while for a response, so I can't thank you enough.
So if nothing else I have some mini tutorials to look forward to...
If I may suggest some topics to include (sorry if some of these seem really noobie):
-I would love to see some of the prep work for modularity, re-usabilty and keeping things snappable for the level designers/UT editor
-what does your actual base mesh/medium poly mesh look like before going into zbrush
-how you build your low poly mesh after zbrushing
-and of course, your high poly work both in 3dmax and Zbrush
Hi Kevin,
Great stuff. Look forward to the videos too.
In the meantime can you post images of the wires with subdivision turned off?
Congrats on the 2nd addition. My daughter is now 1 1/2yrs old and she's an awesome handful of fun but I'm not sure the misses and I could go through that again. I like my sleep...
Anyway, wires are being cut and pasted, I'll post as I get them together.
Could you post the concept art you were referencing from?
And an Ancient Warrior (any chance to throw some Scottish in there and spruce the place up a bit!)
Junkie: I tried a few different ways of planning out large chunks and fell on my face after too much concrete work previous, so I restarted with the nose / skull looking bit in the center at the crest of the center bend in the first wires.
I just started with 4polys and started pulling forms until it looked like it had a nice flow, then i split part of an outer edge out as a COPY and pulled some more. I made the long leg sections in a similar fashion , then made the big nobby sphere piece at the side from a sphere and started the long job of stitching the sphere into the long legs and center.
Its always good with this stuff to make the seperates as seperate elements first and then find ways to flow the forms into each other afterwards to make interesting new contiguous curved forms when you have a variety of polys to stich.
Konstruct: The Klaw piece took me about 10-12 days I think
This is awesome.
Great stuff too.
I'm trying my hand with some curvatures and such, for something simple like that little circular do-dad how do you decide how many edges/sides to put on your cylinder when you first create it? Is there any trick to adding more sides if needed? As in, I want to cut in detail into this 12 sided cylinder, but after sub-d I realize that 12 sides isn't enough to maintain a good circle and I have to restart.
So really its simply a case of thinking ahead, knowing how much detail you intend putting into the shape.
Dont stop ahaha
ben
Thanks for the description. Are you concepting this stuff off the top of your head? Are the concept artists giving you the basic forms and then you improvise with all the little details? I'm curious to see the concept art.
We should hold contests where you pick a reference photo or concept and all of us here model try to model it. And you pick the winner.
That would be a lot of fun. I'm hitting a block and just can't find anything inspiring to model.
Concepts are great, they set the tone for the whole team to unify behind, but they tend rarely to be blueprints, you have to do some work yourself to ground it and flesh it out.
I always seem to get visible kinks in the mesh when I use tris, pentagons etc. especially on curved surfaces.
love your super clean meshes and presentation, really great work overall
Neox: For sure, I suck as a character guy now, 5 years solid of env work has made what little ability I used to have in that area disappear. I still had a lot of fun with it though, theres something about making statues that make me feel more like an artist than a Lego Machine.
Any way,u r one awesome env artist of this generation.
Vj
Hi Kevin,
This might be best suited for technical talk but I just had a quick quesiton back to the rendering...I've tried this before but I can't get it to work.
How do you keep diffuse & default scene specular in their own seperate files with the skylight and lighttracer? You are talking about Render To Elements right? And you are just refering to default scene spec? A default scene specular just comes thru as black when combined with skylight/lighttracer. I have to put an omni light in the scene and only have specular checked. But then I could just avoid the hassle of compositing altogether then anyway with the complete image.
Or are you talking about render to elements with mental ray? But then lighttracer is ignored?
Sorry just a bit confused.
I think the process that he describes goes like this:
1. Render out a basic skylight image of your object - Example
2. Delete the skylight from your scene. Apply a material that has a high specular to your object. Through Render Elements get an image of your spec highlights - Example
3. Take the two images into photoshop and composite them together - Example
Hope that helps.
put the skylight down to 0.7 or so. then apply a specular material with an omni or something
I saw you in the pixologic interview also lol. major kudos.
and nice job making teh baby
haha, no I understand completely the concept of compositing. Thanks for trying though. :poly124:
I was just wondering if Kevin stumbled upon something I was trying to do in the past but not succeed. And that is hit it all in one shot with skylight/lighttracer and default scene specularity under render elements. Deleting out the skylight or just throwing in an omni with specular checked and diffuse unchecked was what I've already done before.
I just save the specular image as a 32bt TGA so I can composite it neatly onto the skylight rendered image and tweak the levels of the specular so it looks right.
I don't even put a light in the plain render version, I just turn the environment lightness up a bit, render, save the specular element as a tga and composite in photoshop.
Cant wait for the vids man! Grats on your little one bro.
i'm working on a ut3 style turret using your work as inspiration - infact i'll make a thread soon so hopefully you can check it out.