in a way gears is over detailed, huge amounts of normals information on all surfaces even in real life it wouldn't appear that detailed unless really close up, and the levels of damage and types of damage to things are pushed beyond what you would see, in picture of destroyed cities from the world wars, or even current…
I found the original article http://1ucasvb.tumblr.com/post/44666043888/easing-functions-are-an-immensely-useful-tool-for It's very mathy. I think it's meant more for UI animators. I roughly understand it similar to rhythmn notation in music. 4/4 for example means 4 beats per bar; 1/4th note per beat. In those graphs…
Have the light source come down from above and maybe have some indirect lighting/second light source from the floor. That combined with a proper AO pass should give the model enough info to convey the forms properly. This would work in an open environment. If these models are to be placed inside a dungeon or something I…
You might find this thread interesting: http://tech-artists.org/wiki/Beveling (And possibly also http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=106108) So it's the vert count that matters rather than tri count. My understanding is a vert can only have one normal. So when there's a hard edge, say at the edge of the cube,…
imo, if something like this were to work it would need to be very easy to add lots of 'chunks' into it (user work), without specifying exactly what those were or precisely what style they were in. so - a game where content can come in seperate interchangable pieces at varying levels of size (or work requirement) -…
Hey man, I think it looks really neat right now, however; you might wanna take some more time with this. Really, I think you shouldn't be afraid to work on a character at a much slower pace. For example, the arms and legs sort of look unrealized at the moment. They appear as bent cylinders, instead of the complex shapes…
Coloured spec is fairly straightforward for the most part. If you want an unsaturated highlight that tends towards white, your spec colour should be the opposite colour from the diffuse. That's why people often use a blueish/purple as their spec for flesh tones. Invert a flesh colour in Photoshop, and you'll get a…
I don't have much time, so I hope this all reads right. This is much less an issue of UDK and more an issue of improper tree/canopy construction.I would rethink how you're doing your texture for sure. You should make a few branch variants and leaf clusters instead of that one massive thing(it looks more like the structure…
I did one for Maya, it's slightly harder in Max because smoothing groups are horrible - for example if you have a mesh with more than 32 unique UV shells, you're going to run out of smoothing groups unless you start doing stuff like comparing UV shells to see which ones aren't geometrically "touching" at all in order to…
"To what extent can someone who works on a different aspect of a game contribute to another area?" Your example, isn't an example... core game design? The answer I'd give to your question above, is that these boundaries depend on the studio and its people that you're working for. "What's your experience of contributing to…