Sketchbook: aphexx

aphexx

hi, so i think i also start a sketchbook thread.
i hope i can get some stuff collected over the time.

feel free to share your opinion on the items!

here is the first. its a medieval chest made at games-academy for a lecture.
some sloppy but medieval







look at an animation, how it closes.
you might recognize some strechy polys and ambient occlusion, where you dont want it..
http://vimeo.com/11569025

marlfox8

cool... is that sand or cloth in the chest if its sand it looks like cloth

aphexx

thank you, and yes its cloth

marlfox8

is that all thats in there how about gold, silver, weapons etc.?

aphexx

yes thanks, that would be cool.
but since i come from 3rd person role playing games, its most generic for us to only put a cloth into chests, that hides the contents. since a chest can always contain many items.
so that is what i also teach to my students.
but yes, when you have the ressources, to make more different chests, it would be way cooler to place some real items in there!

ENODMI

Really nice chest, reads hand made in a really good way. Love the hand pounded looking braces and hinges and the way the wood is cut and fitted together. Did you use refs? It has a very believable looking design. Also, how did you go about building the wood, did you sculpt the wood grain manually?

Syros

Very nice and readable chest you got man, agree with ENODMI, let us know the pipeline you got, I always have this "sculpting details vs color texture" question in mind. and knowing the way you made it so nice and clear would be my answer!
cheers! \m/

aphexx

hi enodmi and syros.

i used a cellular map and some noises in 3dsmax as a diplacment for the metals.
so the metalparts of the basemesh are made highpoly and displaced all in 3dsmax.
the wood basemesh was exported over to mudbox, and then sculpted.

the basemeshes were also already uvmapped, so that i also loaded a midpoly version of the metalparts into mudbox and then painted all highpoly parts (metal and wood) in mudbox. (to also bake down the diffuse later on)

then you would do a retopo, but for this lecture, i just exported a midpoly version of the wood to 3dsmax and prooptimized both metal and wood.
then mapped the resulting lowpoly and baked the two highpolyparts onto my lowpoly mesh in xnormal.

i baked the normal, the diffuse, the AO and the cavitymap.
then did some phtotoshop work to merge the AO and cav map to the diffuse. and do tome colorcorrections.
then i made a specmap out of the diffuse, where i exposed the metal parts.

then put everything into the xoliulshader and lit it with 3 lights.
for the animation, i detached the top wood and its braces, set the pivot to the hinge and did some simple keyframe ani with auto key and tweaking of the curves.

that is all i think. does this answer your questions?
btw, indeed i used a reference..its this here

DerDude

no stones, i´m bitterly disappointed
nice chest man, but where is the animation?

aphexx

hey didi,
read the post carefully to the end, and you will be enlightened

DerDude

lol, my bad

aphexx

just checking in to show some older stuff
since none of these assets ever got it into any engine. so unfortunately only sketch book stuff..
i'm planning to grab all 3d and texture assets i ever done and put it into a package for UDK. many things are done again and again over the years.
if i only had one master package in UDK i could easily build whole levels with all the single assets.

SimonT

nice. greetings to the games academy.

aphexx

here is something new.
its a test about worn out and old metal surfaces.
all rendered and done in mudbox and photoshop
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSD1zOv7IGk[/ame]