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I am inherently skeptical of any art school that focuses on exclusively on VFX or Video Game art.
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Oct 16, 2009 06:02
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I'm not in the industry (so this might be a bad idea), but if I were I think I would just go to a normal school and double major in computer science/graphics and art(with a focus on illustration.) Then, if you get out and either decide you don't want to do video games anymore, or you can't find a job you've got two other potential career paths. Plus, you'll have a way better time at the state school parties and art chicks are easy.
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Oct 16, 2009 13:21
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I did a design undergrad with what would be considered a 'major' in multimedia design. 3d was spruiked as being part of the course, but 2 lovely intro classes didn't cut it. The way I learnt 3d was to see if I could fit it into all of my assignments, and just learnt from online resources. On the side it helps to try find a bit of freelance work if you can, or get some work experience somewhere.
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Oct 16, 2009 14:45
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AuntJemima posted:http://www.thinktanktrainingcentre.com/ Dude if you are in Vancouver go to Vancouver Film School their 3d program looks dope as gently caress and the student work I've seen from there is amazing. I only checked out the first reel for a minute and it wasn't anything amazing. I'm sure you could go there and get a good education if you busted your rear end outside of school, but the same could be said for any other school. To be honest I've never heard of that place before. sigma 6 posted:Thanks DefMech and Sigma X: It "should" be but we don't have ambient color maps passes in a game. AO maps are rarely used as a separate map in games (I don't know of any actual games that use them) as if you want real AO you typically do it as a realtime screenspace effect. Some people may call it a lightmap (if you are rendering a skylight pass in Max scanline and using that for AO/GI then you'll be saving out a lightmap) but that isn't what it people are talking about when they talk about lightmapping. Some questions: sigma 6 posted:Why would you need separate UVs? Why not use the same UVs as you would for any other map? The geometry should have the same UVs for diffuse color, normal maps etc. Why would lightmaps be different? The geo has the same UVs for diffuse, normals, etc, because those maps all directly affect each other and all the data there corresponds directly with the data on the other maps, even when tiled, flipped, etc. The lighting on those flipped, tiled, etc, parts will almost always be different however. The lightmap is unique for each instance of a mesh - lets say you have 20 pillars, they may all be using a tiling cylinder map on all of them, but they will need unique lighting, etc. sigma 6 posted:Sounds like this is just lighting baked into a texture map so you get things like bounced light and static lights added to the texture. How does the engine know how to do this? Does that mean the shaders apply it in the engine and how? Sounds like any engine which supports dynamic lighting would make lightmaps moot or at least not so important. Yes, this is the idea. If the engine is lighting all of the world geo dynamically, then yes, they are unimportant. However, dynamically lighting the world geo is expensive as gently caress, and if the world geo/lighting itself isn't dynamic, then there is no point in lighting it dynamically. For example, most of the world geo in Dark Sector, Gears of War, etc, is all static, so they bake the lighting in. They still have normal maps and such because they still have some dynamic lights in the environment, but the base lighting is static and baked. Lightmapping is a quality+speed thing. However, something to consider - most engines that do baked lighting like this do it through the editor themselves, like UE3, so you usually don't have to worry about this stuff. sigma 6 posted:Does Unity support dynamic lighting? I am looking forward to finding out how this works once my school gets it.
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Oct 16, 2009 15:55
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Sigma-X posted:Dude if you are in Vancouver go to Vancouver Film School their 3d program looks dope as gently caress and the student work I've seen from there is amazing. I went to VFS a few years ago and am a part time instructor there now. It is a good program. But the students that tend to produce the best work are the ones that have at least some sort of art background before going there. Be it drawing, painting, sculpture, photography etc. Not to say you can't do well there without that but it makes things a lot easier.
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Oct 16, 2009 18:11
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mashed_penguin: I feel your pain. I failed over half of my last class. There is definite delineation between the students who care about the work vs the people just in it for a passing grade. VFS does turn out decent students. Kolby Jukes mentioned that he was more impressed by the student's motivation vs VFS itself. Sigma-X: Thanks for all the info / advice. I am looking forward to implementing both normal maps and lightmaps in Unity. It occurs to me that both need discrete UVs vs color and spec etc. Your point about overlapping UVs is a good one. I try to deter any overlapping UVs for normal map generation etc but engines need as much overlapping UVs as they can get away with.
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Oct 17, 2009 12:32
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sigma 6 posted:VFS does turn out decent students. Kolby Jukes mentioned that he was more impressed by the student's motivation vs VFS itself. Totally, the first thing I tell people in my class is that the grade they get means diddly squat when it comes to getting a job. The thing that really makes good work come out of VFS is putting people that want to do really well in an intensive environment for a year. The good students cooperate and feed off of each other and hopefully make some good contacts in the process. The bad ones play left 4 dead in the labs and bitch about how nobody is holding their hand through everything.
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Oct 17, 2009 17:10
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mashed_penguin posted:Totally, the first thing I tell people in my class is that the grade they get means diddly squat when it comes to getting a job. The speech I got in my animation program was that... "Look around you. Half of you will not be here for the 2nd year. A quarter of you may graduate third year, and out of that, maybe half will actually get work in the industry if you are determined". That opened a few eyes. Of course that was old school Sheridan College where they would fail* your rear end out if you were slacking at all. These days it's not like that anymore but I can't tell you if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I think going to a good school with really determined people is important as it will start building up your networking ability, you will get more mileage out of your future contacts in the industry than having "just a demo reel". Assuming of course your classmates are good enough to get jobs in the industry. Half the people in any particular class is going to not really go anywhere. So in Canada I'd recommend VFS, Sheridan and Seneca's programs. *- An important footnote. When you failed one project, you were in danger of failing the entire course. Fail one course and you were kicked out of the program. Except for certain cases, you couldn't retake the program or course again. So yes, it was a very high stress environment for a number of years. It's not like that anymore though, it's a bit more sane now. I had a talented animator friend who did an amazing, Disney feature quality bit of animation for his short. It was a violinist playing as part of the short. As amazing as it was, it didn't meet the 45 [or maybe 60 ] seconds of required animation and he failed the very last project. No 3 year diploma. He was a bit pissed off about that. Meanwhile another guy met the criteria by having a single walk cycle loop over for 2 minutes with one huge panning background. He got a 50/55% pass on it because it met the minimum requirements. His short? 24 frames of an cartoon inspector gadget style Olympic runner looping over and over with different cities in the background.. "running around the world". That program was brutal back then. Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Oct 18, 2009 |
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Oct 17, 2009 17:49
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I'm attending Gnomon School right now and I have to say it's a fairly intense program. I basically do not have time to gently caress around because I have so much class assignments/homework, and I'm only in the middle of the first term (there's 7 over a period of 2 years). It's fairly nice because the majority of the instructors are working their full time jobs in the industry and teaching either in the morning or at night. They also are opening up their own "Gnomon Studio" with Shane Acker and there's already a bunch of students working there on his next feature/short/whatever. Also, Pixologic is right next door and they work with the ZBrush instructor here Ryan Kingslien. It's about the same price as VFS' one year program, but you basically get two for one here. Granted, the campus and classes aren't as huge as VFS but there are definitely some talented people working and studying here.
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Oct 17, 2009 22:30
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sigma 6 posted:tuna: I really want to see that with materials. You do not understand how loving angry I am right now at trying to get the simplest of shaders and displacement working in XSI. (I gave up entirely on normal mapping. Jesus gently caress). It all started from the time I made a test pose, rendered it, then did some testing in the FXtree. Found out I couldn't save the FX tree in any sort of external form at ALL. However, somehow, selecting it all of the nodes and copying them let me somehow paste them into another instance of XSI. Okay, that's cool, albeit loving poo poo as gently caress. Now let's switch to the render tree: I painted a Vertex color map on an object to multiply a displacement in the RT, this didn't work, but what it did do was explode my scene once, and then gently caress the gently caress out of it. Basically my specular is now WHITE no matter what I do unless I load the old scene. I was about to load in the old RT setup into the new one but copy and paste doesn't work between XSI instances (I loving love inconsistent methods of transferring data), I am now at this point in time wondering how the gently caress this gently caress is gently caress. Basically, gently caress you.
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Oct 18, 2009 11:58
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[fixed]Okay my mistake was using vertex maps in XSI. This hugely dysfunctional workflow is hosed. Rather than selecting the map property from the selection list and being able to paint, (as is consistent workflow in XSI for weightmaps) I had to dig into the object properties and change the "vertex color display properties" drop down in order to pain on a specific color at vert map. gently caress I just love inconsistent workflows where for each different property you have to dig into the manual to find out what arbitrary loving setting you need to change in order to paint on the correct map.
tuna fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Oct 18, 2009 |
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Oct 18, 2009 12:46
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So I made a model of my apartment and presented it to my apartment complex with the intent of making them a new website with a sort of 3d interface. The goal was to get them to let myself and a friend of mine make websites and 3d content for all of their properties. So we show him these two images:  and  After seeing these as well as a brief animation, he's not interested in us making a web site for him, but rather 3d models of all of his properties. Which took us by surprise. We expected him to want a new website (because their current one sucks) and not the 3d content. Anyways, the reason for this post is this: How much do I charge him per hour? This is my first attempt at arch viz, and I have no idea what people who normally do this work bill. Hopefully after completing all of his properties, my arch viz portfolio will be nice and beefed up and I can get some work in the field. Thanks.
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Oct 18, 2009 16:47
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HOB V2.0 posted:How much do I charge him per hour? This is my first attempt at arch viz, and I have no idea what people who normally do this work bill. How long did it take you, how much do you want to earn per hour, cover for some overheads and factor in if the client could be a fussy oval office. People always bill differently, and it's only after a couple of jobs you get a feel for whats needed. Just make sure you think of everything you have to pay for and come up with a fair balance, makes some notes and go over them a few times. The renders look good  The whites are a bit gray though, may be worth playing with the colour mapping and bumping your lights up. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Oct 18, 2009 |
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Oct 18, 2009 21:25
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HOB V2.0 posted:
$1000-2000 a week? Or more? It depends what you want to make out of it. I'd go with a weekly rate for TD time to allow for client revisions and changes vs an hourly rate. Bill it like a business. You'll need to break down expenses for yourself, benefits coverage, phone/fax photocopies and other overhead, computer and software fee, storage charges, etc. There's usually a reason why apartment buildings won't do visualization, it's too expensive unless it's to secure financing to build a new property, or to sell (expensive) condos to buyers when the property is incomplete. Last time I did a visualization of a property it was for a proposed casino and it was big money involved and it took about 6 months. On the other hand I did visualization of HVAC systems install at homes, made sure everything was to accurate scale, and the HVAC company wanted to cheat the scale of their equipment to make it actually smaller than it was, etc. So expect lots of revisions and bill accordingly.
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Oct 18, 2009 22:26
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When BigK says revisions, you'd better believe him. There will be revisions. So many, many revisions.
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Oct 18, 2009 23:50
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What do you guys think is the best tutorial site for Maya? I'm pretty new to it right now and would like the basics then get into modeling and animating simple things. 3dBuzz has been very good to me so far. Whats your opinion on that site and any others? Thanks!
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Oct 19, 2009 00:07
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AuntJemima posted:What do you guys think is the best tutorial site for Maya? I'm pretty new to it right now and would like the basics then get into modeling and animating simple things. I'm not specifically a 3d guy, but I think maybe checking out 3d generals first is better than jumping right into a specific app; keeps it theory first, application second. Check out Guerrilla CG -- http://www.guerrillacg.org/ -- scroll down a bit, start at first and just work your way down. Good stuff.
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Oct 19, 2009 05:35
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I've been looking at those guerillacg tutes, they're really good. Here's today's speed sculpt. This took 3 hours or so. We're slow at work at the moment, usually the boss will come up with anything, no matter how pathetic or trivial to take up my time. I guess he even ran out of that stuff. No references, just made it up, which is probably not good practice 
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Oct 20, 2009 05:44
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EoinCannon: Your work is great as usual but I think that is a bit much DOF.
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Oct 20, 2009 06:42
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Yeah, I'll own up to DOF abuse I just found out how to get ZDepth renders out of Zbrush so of course I went a bit stupid with lens blur in photoshop
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Oct 20, 2009 06:54
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What kind of software do most arch viz people use? I'm still using v-ray and rhinoceros but I'm thinking I'll have a wider array of choices if I were to switch to 3dsmax.
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Oct 20, 2009 11:37
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3dsmax is pretty prevalent in arch viz I think.
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Oct 20, 2009 12:28
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Max + Vray is about as close to a universal standard in archviz as you're going to get.
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Oct 20, 2009 14:52
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All about max & vray. It's not official, but it may aswell be the industry standard. edit: right, i've been using cryengine 2 for a bit this morning (i'm converting the station scene I made a while ago into it) and i've finally figured out how to get objects in it... But whenever I rotate them, the shading changes. Those 180 degree rotated pieces are in full shade, but if I keep going they eventually look right. The normals are the same - it's invisible from the other side. Tried breaking the shader down to just the diffuse - no dice. clicked every check box I can possibly think of (2 sided, flat texture etc)and nothing either. Anyone seen this/got any ideas? This is what it looks like in the viewport: 
cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Oct 20, 2009 |
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Oct 20, 2009 15:00
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Well on the subject of 3ds Max + Vray I'm trying to learn Vray as my previous renders have been in Mental Ray. I "finished" the kitchen I was working on since I burnt a 360 movie of it to DVD and gave it to Alton Brown last week. Anyway, I figured while learning Vray I'd do an exterior. Here's what I have so far, but it looks so flat, and I don't know what to change. The red and light tan parts have a brick texture, even with bump-map, but you can't tell. I did watch this like 6hr series on Vray so I used whatever values he had as a start. 
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Oct 20, 2009 21:17
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EoinCannon posted:I've been looking at those guerillacg tutes, they're really good. Really awesome! He has a very roman look to him. Only thing that instantly bothers me is the bottom of his nose looks too prominently far forward from this angle, and perhaps a little thin. Looks like the nostrils should go back further to me, but perhaps its the render.
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Oct 20, 2009 22:28
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cubicle gangster posted:edit: right, i've been using cryengine 2 for a bit this morning (i'm converting the station scene I made a while ago into it) and i've finally figured out how to get objects in it... I have no idea if this is right or not, but I've been taking a class on UnrealEd3 and whenever we move geometry in that engine we have to rebuild the level/lighting. If you don't, in the viewport it looks off and the engine doesn't know whats going on basically. It might be the same in the cryengine, but then again I'm not sure. Good luck! My friend and I watched a short video on the cryengine 3. Looks pretty drat sexy. Ubisoft's so cool <3
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Oct 20, 2009 22:36
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I'm having a problem with this model I'm working on. I'm putting together a model of this muffin pan and every time I mesh smooth the drat thing it goes weird on me. I've made sure all the vertices are welded together and it still happens. Original:  Smoothed:  It's not a big deal really, it's just a model to show off packaging for it so most of it will be covered up and normal mapped and poo poo but I'd rather figure out what the hell is going on for my own knowledge. Speaking of all this, as a designer I actually found learning 3D stuff to be very beneficial. I mostly work with packaging, so to be able to put together a realistic representation of a package at the concept stage is pretty cool. Here's some stuff I've done:     I'm not liking the lighting on that bottle illustration but at this stage it was an urgent concept and if we get the go ahead it'll be fixed.
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Oct 21, 2009 03:46
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Georg LeBoui posted:I'm having a problem with this model I'm working on. I'm putting together a model of this muffin pan and every time I mesh smooth the drat thing it goes weird on me. I've made sure all the vertices are welded together and it still happens. That's REALLY weird because I'd swear that you have overlapping unwelded vertices there to cause them to pucker when you smooth them like that. Additionally, why aren't the cups of the trays smoothing? They seem to be at the same resolution before and after. Try grabbing one of the polygons and dragging them out to check that you've really welded all the points, and that you dont have accidental extrusions hidden inside. Try converting it to an editable poly too and smoothing that. I've usually had better smoothing results from working with polys than meshes.
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Oct 21, 2009 06:42
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SynthOrange posted:That's REALLY weird because I'd swear that you have overlapping unwelded vertices there to cause them to pucker when you smooth them like that. Additionally, why aren't the cups of the trays smoothing? They seem to be at the same resolution before and after. Try grabbing one of the polygons and dragging them out to check that you've really welded all the points, and that you dont have accidental extrusions hidden inside. Try converting it to an editable poly too and smoothing that. I've usually had better smoothing results from working with polys than meshes. The cups smooth in exactly the same that I wanted them to, since I actually started with one cup first, then extruded it upwards and outwards. Then I cloned that cup, attached them all to one mesh and connected them together to form the body. So maybe there's a fault in that, I'll do some more tests once I get back to the office.
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Oct 21, 2009 06:49
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Georg LeBoui posted:The cups smooth in exactly the same that I wanted them to, since I actually started with one cup first, then extruded it upwards and outwards. Then I cloned that cup, attached them all to one mesh and connected them together to form the body. So maybe there's a fault in that, I'll do some more tests once I get back to the office. Are you sure you welded the verts? In the unsmoothed one there are white lines for your edges that go from 1 to 2 pixels thick, indicating that there are actually multiple edges there. If you feel like posting the mesh I can take a look at it in case you've got something totally loving goofy going on. Also, try this - convert the unsmoothed mesh to a edit mesh, then back to edit poly. I've seen a mesh go loving ridiculous once or twice in edit poly (I forget how to duplicate the scenario) but basically it wasn't welding the verts but was pretending it was. Also try running an STL check (drop the modifier on the unsmoothed mesh) to look for weird poo poo.
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Oct 21, 2009 06:58
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The Merkinman posted:The red and light tan parts have a brick texture, even with bump-map, but you can't tell. This is going to be a bit heavy, mostly because i'm in a rush... Things that would help it: Theres no sky - get some clouds in there, rip a picture from the net. Same goes for the windows - they're all flat. Get some internal white boxes, fresnel reflections on the glass and some depth to them. The frames/glass looks mapped too - make sure the frames are modeled with depth to pick up some highlights and shadows. Whatever map you're using for the brick isnt well defined enough either - and use displacement instead of bump. Could also use glossy reflections on most materials at a .4-6 glossy with a fresnel reflection - adds a bit of variation to the colour around the view. The road and pavement textures need work too - go on cgtextures and get making some huge photo sourced road maps, it's essential. Le capitan - it was the normal map, for some reason. Still cant figure it out but i've got back to a standard bump for now. editing scenes at 1920x1080 and 40fps is insane, this editor is unbelievable  Need to play with the lighting settings a bit more (how good are these controls!) but these will have to do for now. tracks & tunnels to come tomorrow...
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Oct 21, 2009 17:37
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^^^ The very first 3d app I played with was Worldcraft for making HL1 levels, and god it was fun. I just sat there making environments to walk around in, putting lights in and seeing what they did etc etc. Aaaah I miss that, might look into playing around with it all again, but you know, time time.
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Oct 21, 2009 17:51
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cubicle gangster posted:Le capitan - it was the normal map, for some reason. Still cant figure it out but i've got back to a standard bump for now. If you haven't already, check out the crysis mod forums for the people doing custom time-of-day settings. They're pushing the lighting to some really incredible results. It's also a lot easier to plug the stuff they've slaved over for months into your scene instead of starting from scratch on your own
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Oct 21, 2009 18:30
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Sigma-X posted:Are you sure you welded the verts? In the unsmoothed one there are white lines for your edges that go from 1 to 2 pixels thick, indicating that there are actually multiple edges there. Yes, the reason for this is that the bottom of the mesh is slightly behind the top of the mesh, basically the front face is at an angle, not straight. I've selected all the base vertices and done a weld at about a 2mm spacing (any more and it's larger than the thickness of the mesh so it starts becoming flat) to make sure they are all definitely together, and it still doesn't fix it. Sigma-X posted:Also, try this - convert the unsmoothed mesh to a edit mesh, then back to edit poly. I've seen a mesh go loving ridiculous once or twice in edit poly (I forget how to duplicate the scenario) but basically it wasn't welding the verts but was pretending it was. Tried this, and while it changed the mesh, unfortunately it didn't fix the problem. Sigma-X posted:Also try running an STL check (drop the modifier on the unsmoothed mesh) to look for weird poo poo. Yep, the STL check found this:  That's all the multiple edge poo poo going on there, but again, actually when moving all those edges they are welded together. I've uploaded the mesh here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/467r41 I bet it's something small and stupid and easily fixed in seconds 
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Oct 21, 2009 22:11
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If you convert it to editable poly, isn't there an easy check for double polys and edges and stuff? I thought I saw something like that in the graphite tools section.
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Oct 21, 2009 22:26
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I've found the problem. You've somehow got polygons joining up the interior surfaces. Grabbed a few of the polygons on top, deleted them and there were all these polygons inside the tray. Weird. I didnt think that was possible!
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Oct 22, 2009 01:16
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I had a quick look at the mesh before work. It doesn't triangulate properly when converting from emesh to epoly. There are duplicate edges everywhere so welding it won't work. If you convert to epoly then select an edge to remove to make a tri into a quad, you'll see that it has a duplicate underneath it. I think there's scripts out there to select coplanar faces like http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/find-coinstances. It's probably more work finding all the coplanar faces manually and deleting them then rebuilding the object from scratch so see if a script can do it for you.
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Oct 22, 2009 01:22
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Thanks for the help guys, I'll check it out.
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Oct 22, 2009 01:37
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SynthOrange posted:Grabbed a few of the polygons on top, deleted them and there were all these polygons inside the tray. I've had this before, I just tend to delete the section and redo it with bridges, connects and target welds. Ends up much cleaner that way too.
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Oct 22, 2009 09:12
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