Eat 3D announces The Fountain Part 2 - Low Res Modeling, UVing, and Baking

Riki

May I introduce to you an exciting new training video brought to you by Eat 3D (www.eat3d.com).

Learn how to create professional low res meshes for next-gen games. After the low res mesh is created the instructor creates the UVs for all the modular pieces of the fountain and then goes into great detail about the baking options to create your normal and ao maps.

The techniques used in this video have been proven effective in production to quickly create professional next-gen game meshes.

To watch a sample of the video please visit this link:
http://eat3d.com/fountain2_lowres



Regards,
Riki Babington - Eat3D Admin

Riki

Once again I thought it would be a good idea to pre-release this to polycount and a couple others. The official release will be tomorrow evening. Thanks again for everyones support!

- Riki

Joshua Stubbles

Awesome stuff Riki. I'll have to pick this one up when I can.

Riki

That was a fast reply! Thanks for that Vassago.

whats_true

Does the video consider how different game engine render out seams?

Riki

No, I dont even take it into the game engine in this part, I figured that would be best left for part 3 when texturing and trying to hide seams. Sorry mate

HellMark

Looks great! Been waiting for this one. Grats on another release Riki.

Sage

cool, about time. LOL I might have to wait for part three to come out then.

Meh decided to get mine. Downloading.

JasonLavoie

Hell yuh Riki! The first video helped me SOOOO much man, definatly going to pick this one up as well. Really interested in the baking section, hopefully there is some cool little tidbits in there.

Just have to say once again, you guys are doing an amazing job with your tutorials, keep it up!

PixelMasher

wicked man, I love all your game art dvds, they are great nd always contain little things I didnt know as well as seeing another artists complete workflow is great!

TelekineticFrog

Awesome! I'll pick it up next weekend after I get moved to Austin. Don't really want anything in the mail until i get there. Oh yeah and we'll have to meet up some time Riki once I get there. I'm at Vigil Games now.

Riki

Thats great TelekineticFrog, I have a lot of friends at Vigil and I cant wait to finally get to play Darksiders. They have one of the best teams there and you are going to be planted in some very rich soil. Contrats man!

Taylor Hood

<Sigh> Think of the United kingdom! Oh why wont somone think of the United Kingdom! XD

Sage

Riki I have been watching the dvd finally. I was a bit bummed out that this didn't cover texturing, but I learned a lot more than expected with this low poly video. Really cool. Thanks.

Riki

Hi Sage, wow I cant believe you already watched it!

The next part should go into texturing and if anyone has any suggestions Id love to hear them for part 3 because I should start it very soon. I wanted to make sure this series was something where someone could follow along every step of the way like my other DVDs. This way hopefully it will cater to a larger audience.

scourgewarper

Hey Rik love your work mate really helped me, if you do the texturing aspect of this project could you possibly explain why you do certain actions during texturing, like when your making a spec map from the diffuse and desaturating it explain what the relationship is/end aim is and etc. Your texturing dvd was awesome don't get me wrong and most of the time you explained exactly what you were trying to achieve but sometimes i'd find it hard figuring out why you did a 'levels' or this or that action to a diffuse/spec/normal and what its relationship to the end result was. Texturing is my weakpoint so I do need to be baby-stepped through stuff sometimes!

Good work mate and look forward to next dvd

Sage

@ Ricki you have it so I can download it, why wait for snail mail. I'm glad gnomon finally started to do this with their dvds too. I'm to busy to wait for this to come in the mail. So far things are pretty good, you did a bunch of stuff I never considered. For the texturing one it would be nice if you can spend some time showing how to prevent seams and how to paint out normal map errors. That would be cool.

Riki

@scourgewarper Thanks! Thats a great suggestion, I admit that I forget far to often that it may not be apparent why I am doing some things. A lot of times in my brain I'm trying to translate the slight change I make to how its going to look inside UE3, so sometimes it can be fishing and other times may be more deliberate to get a certain look. Ill definitely keep this in mind for the future dvd, thanks for the input.


@Sage Yeah there are a few spots where the seams will be tricky, like on the bowl and a few other places. I did do a little bit of normal map cleanup at the end of part 2 and also went into this more with the pillar DVD, Im not sure how much more cleanup will be necessary but well see, hopefully not too much.

neolith

Nice! I'll get it next weekend since I really enjoy the first one.

kwakkie

I dunno, the fountain on that pic has a very uneven poly distribution, and I can see a ton of wasted polies that don't contribute to any silhouette or detailing. Also, there a big N-gon staring at me :P

Might sound a bit negative, but seeing things like that in the presentation image makes me not want to buy the tutorial. Just saying it for your consideration

Riki

kwakkie wrote: »

I dunno, the fountain on that pic has a very uneven poly distribution, and I can see a ton of wasted polies that don't contribute to any silhouette or detailing. Also, there a big N-gon staring at me :P

Might sound a bit negative, but seeing things like that in the presentation image makes me not want to buy the tutorial. Just saying it for your consideration

Thanks kwakkie, and I appreciate the honesty. I do agree that this could be optimized further and would need to be for certain platforms. However from my experience this model would work great and in some cases an LOD may would help but it all depends on what kind of game it lives in, and even what area of what level it lives in.

I would actually suggest using the model at demonstrated resolution to get a good normal map capture, then after that you could easy go back and start collapsing edges and verts to preserve the UVs and take it as low as you want. This could be a good technique and I do explain it near the end.

Ngons arent really a problem for games as I understand it because it all gets converted into triangle anyway. If I was to show you a screenshot from unreal, you would just see a mess of triangles. You could always cut it up in max to make sure it keeps the flow you want, and not a bad idea I guess. Thanks for that.
The reason you see that ngon at the bottom is a trick for mirroring that base piece and following the stone pattern in the texture. It would be even more of a waste of polygons to continue that slice around the model.

Its good to know the best practices when making something complex like demonstrated, but in all honesty in production you will be given a short amount of time to do it and it needs to be professionally done but it doesn't need to have the perfection you would expect. Its sad to know that much of what gets into games is very dirty and could use tons of cleanup because of of time constraints or someone never knowing any different. One thing I hope to provide with this series is a solid and proven way of creating something complex and people can go from there.

I hope this helps, no disrespect at all, just trying to explain some things. Keep up the hard work and good luck.

kwakkie

Riki wrote: »

Thanks kwakkie, and I appreciate the honesty. I do agree that this could be optimized further and would need to be for certain platforms. However from my experience this model would work great and in some cases an LOD may would help but it all depends on what kind of game it lives in, and even what area of what level it lives in.

I would actually suggest using the model at demonstrated resolution to get a good normal map capture, then after that you could easy go back and start collapsing edges and verts to preserve the UVs and take it as low as you want. This could be a good technique and I do explain it near the end.

Ngons arent really a problem for games as I understand it because it all gets converted into triangle anyway. If I was to show you a screenshot from unreal, you would just see a mess of triangles. You could always cut it up in max to make sure it keeps the flow you want, and not a bad idea I guess. Thanks for that.
The reason you see that ngon at the bottom is a trick for mirroring that base piece and following the stone pattern in the texture. It would be even more of a waste of polygons to continue that slice around the model.

Its good to know the best practices when making something complex like demonstrated, but in all honesty in production you will be given a short amount of time to do it and it needs to be professionally done but it doesn't need to have the perfection you would expect. Its sad to know that much of what gets into games is very dirty and could use tons of cleanup because of of time constraints or someone never knowing any different. One thing I hope to provide with this series is a solid and proven way of creating something complex and people can go from there.

I hope this helps, no disrespect at all, just trying to explain some things. Keep up the hard work and good luck.

Cool, now im actually curious to the mirroring trick you mentioned :poly121:
Im actually considering buying it now :poly124:
Thanks for the reply!