Cant wait to see your break down on how you achieved the vertex blending of tessellation. I find that really quite interesting and had been hoping that would be possible but wasnt sure. Hope the tut comes out soon and will need to get a DX11 card to mess around with it :)
from what i can gather they did this: style hair with hair-farm convert hair to splines. convert splines to very thin planes. use a vertex shader to move the verticies apart when the camera looks at them (creating alpha cards). apply alpha texture to planes.
that's true about optimization on the vertex level not mattering much anymore, but only on PC videocards. consoles still need the extra optimization (at least according to the article), and i'm assuming portable games will as well. still, it's good to know there's more we can get away with on the highest end hardware
Ok, so here is the finished game model of the sword. The lowpoly model was made in Max in the highpoly done in zbrush. I used a normal map, specular map and vertex colors from polypainting for the diffuse, if anyone has any critiques, you are more than welcome to post any:-)
Search for game pipelines on polycount wiki! There are a lot of info and new terms you have to learn, like baking maps from high to low poly, how smoothing groups and vertex normals afferct your normal map baking, and pbr texturing. Enjoy the frustration and problem solving :)
seems like its not using lightmaps. it looks like its using vertex lighting. does the model have a 2nd channel for lightmaps? double click the asset in the browser, is it pointing to the correct channel for lightmaps? also. this thread is for all UDK issues: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=67290
could be: +vertex colors +flipped normals +split edges/verts/polys that share the same space +material IDs +smoothing groups +zero face polygons Try dropping an "STL check" modifier. Its sort of an old school way of hunting down broken stuff on your model.
Yes, if you don't care about quality. Box mapping makes very uneven UV seams on curved meshes. With most tiled textures these seams become pretty obvious. It's also really inefficient, increasing the vertex count of an in-game model. It also doesn't work well with LODs.
'99 or 2000 for me I reckon. I recall Paul Steed's contest was on at the time I joined. Also participated in the Q3Arena one a few months later. Still recall your vertex color -> texture baking technique in Max using some tool from the utilities panel. :)
I'd like it a lot if within zBrush I could (vertex?) paint different maps at the same time, using or not tileable stuff! So either use textured alphas... either tileable materials.. That way you can, say.. scatter some mud, all height blended etc.