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DefMech posted:Remember Sculptris, that neat little free sculpting program from a while back? It just got bought by Pixologic. If they were smart they'd pull a "Zbrush Elements" kind of thing and just update Sculptris with some cool features and keep it free. They'll probably just forget about it, though.
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Jul 24, 2010 23:07
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When I went for an interview at Pixo and mentioned Sculptris he basically brushed it off...well well well.
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Jul 24, 2010 23:15
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ceebee posted:When I went for an interview at Pixo and mentioned Sculptris he basically brushed it off...well well well. Crosspost from the JOBS IN GAMIN' thread. Any advice for someone just getting their feet wet in character modeling? I'm currently at that all important "oh man all these tutorial sites/books/DVDs what the hell" stage. I would like to focus on the creation, texturing, and rigging of low poly characters, preferably within 3DS Max ( as that is what I own ) but with a willingness to be program flexible if it puts me in a better position. I have no idea where to start, no authority to tell me what to avoid, no idea what the game industry wants, and about a thousand different conflicting tutorials. I'd like to hear it from the pros. Where do I go to get started and in what order should I learn the character modeling process? ( Should I learn base mesh -> UV maps -> normal maps, rigging, etc or...? ) What are some warning signs of a bad lesson? Finally, what are some growing trends high end devs expect new meat to know? A free workflow tutorial that's relatively up to date, teaches good habits that aren't simply one offs, guides me through from my first polygon to my last baked in texture, and puts me on steady feet for the harder stuff would be absolutely stellar right now.
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Jul 25, 2010 02:31
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Before you get going on characters start with simple stuff. Personally, I'm a big fan of Racer445's Max tutorials available here: http://racer445.com/ His AK-47 tutorial literally goes through EVERYTHING having to do with game asset creation. All the tutorials on his site will give you a good understanding of Max, and from there you can start to research other techniques and methods. Once you have those down THEN I would explore character art. But basically if you want to be an amazing character artist the best thing is to start drawing constantly, study your anatomy and do anatomy studies constantly, as those are the two basic skills that will help you once you start learning more high resolution character skills. Once you feel you have a good foundation in 2D anatomy (and don't half rear end this part or you will be a lovely character artist), start doing 3D studies in ZBrush, Mudbox, or Sculptris. For character modelling/texturing/theory I would check out Ben Mathis' site: http://www.poopinmymouth.com/ It may not be a bunch of video tutorials, but his text/image tutorials are far more useful to somebody starting out in Max. ceebee fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jul 25, 2010 |
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Jul 25, 2010 03:53
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I second everything ceebee has to say. I also replied to your inquiry in the games job thread. Good Luck!
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Jul 25, 2010 04:17
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ceebee posted:Before you get going on characters start with simple stuff. Personally, I'm a big fan of Racer445's Max tutorials available here: http://racer445.com/ I don't think you necessarily need to be a great 2D artist to be a good 3D character artist. It can only help to be good at drawing, and drawing anatomy helps you understand it a lot but I don't think you definitely need one to succeed in the other
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Jul 26, 2010 01:01
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This is a work in progress based off of a rough concept I did the other night. About 4 or 5 hours so far.  
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Jul 26, 2010 01:44
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EoinCannon posted:I don't think you necessarily need to be a great 2D artist to be a good 3D character artist. It can only help to be good at drawing, and drawing anatomy helps you understand it a lot but I don't think you definitely need one to succeed in the other I dunno man I've seen some horrible sculpts from people with horrible 2D. They do kind of go hand in hand with each other. For somebody starting out from scratch it'd be beneficial to be able to draw your anatomy which will assist in the whole sculpting anatomy thing. Unless of course you already have a background as a sculptor and have crappy 2D but really good traditional and digital sculpts.
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Jul 26, 2010 05:17
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Most traditional sculptors have very strong 2d skills. A friend of mine was classically trained in sculpture over in Italy and his teacher had them draw anatomy for months before they were ever able to do anything three dimensionally. Working in 3D also really helps your 2D stuff. It all relates.
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Jul 26, 2010 05:27
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Geared Hub posted:Anyone doing the siggraph thing this year? I'm hoping that they let me take a day off to check it out. Not sure which day it would be yet, though.
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Jul 26, 2010 06:41
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Okay, so I just recently got Maya and I'm ready to end life as I know it out of frustration. I've been picking up the program really well and I think I'm learning how to use it efficiently, I can't for the life of me figure out how to use different renderers other than the ones in the program. For example, if I got Pixar's Renderman or the opensource Pixie or anything like that, where the hell do I put them so that I can render with them in Maya? Any help would be much much much appreciated.
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Jul 26, 2010 07:22
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I can't imagine being able to make anything character related in 3D without 2D art skills. Edit: I suppose that's not fair, but it is true that one greatly improves the other. I wouldn't separate the 2 of them at all, personally, but I've never seen any blog or portfolio of an amazing sculptor who really stood out who didn't also have some at least competent 2d studies. mutata fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Jul 26, 2010 |
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Jul 26, 2010 07:40
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EoinCannon is just one of those gifted colorblind 3d sculptors who are innately good at it :P
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Jul 26, 2010 07:59
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Posting from Siggraph! First time going and I'm pretty blown away by some of the tech demonstrations they have (gesture controlled robots, meta-cookies that change their taste, voice-activated animated holograms). Anyone else here?
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Jul 26, 2010 21:54
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Gonna be there all day bright and early muthafuckaz.
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Jul 27, 2010 10:56
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 Trying to understand the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of tangent space normal maps, and it's frustrating. How they render out, how they appear in a viewport, how they appear in-game, and how each engine, viewport shader, and renderer apparently does it similarly enough, but with small differences that can translate into big problems. This is compounded by the fact that I am doing work for an engine that is off-site, and the viewport shader that the studio provided me with suffers from the same tangent problems that the default max viewport does. It's not reliable. I'm basically left with no real way of checking whether or not the stuff that I'm going to turn in will look correct in the engine, and I can't get them to understand that this is a problem.
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Jul 27, 2010 18:46
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Woop, Houdini 11 is out. http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1774&Itemid=66
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Jul 27, 2010 19:48
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SVU Fan posted:Okay, so I just recently got Maya and I'm ready to end life as I know it out of frustration. I've been picking up the program really well and I think I'm learning how to use it efficiently, I can't for the life of me figure out how to use different renderers other than the ones in the program. If you don't have Mental Ray as an renderer option, make sure you have Mayatomr.mll set to auto load under Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager. To be able to export to Renderman compliant renderers, it looks like you'll need to enable ribExport.mll in the Plug-in Manager as well. Pixie's wiki suggests Liquid for Maya for converting your Maya scene into something Pixie can use. Take everything I just said with a grain of salt because I've only been messing around with Maya for about six weeks and really just googled for it all. Here's a watch I'm working on. It needs work. 
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Jul 28, 2010 00:56
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SVU Fan posted:Okay, so I just recently got Maya and I'm ready to end life as I know it out of frustration. I've been picking up the program really well and I think I'm learning how to use it efficiently, I can't for the life of me figure out how to use different renderers other than the ones in the program. http://www.3delight.com/en/ Your welcome
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Jul 28, 2010 01:04
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Here's a boar spear with two wheel-lock pistols. Click here for the full 1680x1050 image. I kind of hate posting things for critique when they're in this state (most of it's in a layout phase, some temp textures like the wood, the bright parts of the blade are the only areas at first pass) but hey, at least the basic design is final. It's based off a real-world weapon, by the way. Some pretty crazy and impractical stuff was made around the 15th-16th centuries. Edit: Getting there.  Click here for the full 1680x1050 image. ThreeHams fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Jul 28, 2010 |
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Jul 28, 2010 01:52
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Here's a WIP, C&C welcome.
Odddzy fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jul 28, 2010 |
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Jul 28, 2010 05:04
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The wear and tear looks really wierd, like the concrete melted away before getting chipped apart.
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Jul 28, 2010 05:32
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SynthOrange posted:The wear and tear looks really wierd, like the concrete melted away before getting chipped apart. I think it's the fact i've got a hard time doing hard edges inside zbrush, Some details will be brought back through crazybump but the ''rocky'' aspect of the pillar is a bit lost, any tips so that I could make it look better? A comment I got was ''it kind of looks like cheese.'' Edit - with a crazybumped noisy rock texture and specular map, would it look better or more like a polished turd? (A turd i'm proud of mind you!) Is the 2000 tris limit a bit too much for next gen consoles? Odddzy fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jul 28, 2010 |
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Jul 28, 2010 05:41
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Did you mask off areas before cutting the edges down in zbrush? It's not that hard to get good edges that way. You can also add edgeloops. Did you build this straight from a low poly? If so, you can set the low poly as a low-res morph target and get the pillar back into shape. Synthbuttrange fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Jul 28, 2010 |
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Jul 28, 2010 05:58
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If you want harder corners add an edge to each side. Closer edges will give more definition. At the end you can just delete those from the low poly.
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Jul 28, 2010 05:58
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I have been playing around with the new Blender 2.5 beta version, and I made a clothespin model: Click here for the full 1616x952 image.
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Jul 30, 2010 05:19
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I'm having a strange problem with importing .obj files into 3DS Max 2010. So say I bring in this little truck obj. It has a texture, but for some reason it's really washed out when I render.  This seems to happen with every .obj I import. Does anyone know what's going on?
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Jul 31, 2010 04:08
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Probably your texture filtering. Not sure where it is in Max but Maya often has it left on by default when importing textures.
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Jul 31, 2010 04:36
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You were pretty close. Fixed it by setting Alpha Source to "none" under Bitmap Parameters. Still not sure why it was happening, but at least I can deal with it now. Thanks!
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Jul 31, 2010 23:25
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Morton Haynice posted:You were pretty close. Oh yeah, I've seen this before. Were your source textures some kind of format that supports an alpha channel - TIF, PNG, TGA, etc? Max sometimes likes to automatically include the alpha channel when you do that. It's pretty annoying.
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Aug 1, 2010 02:37
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Yup. Targas.
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Aug 1, 2010 04:29
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Odddzy posted:Here's a WIP, C&C welcome. It’s not really my place to offer advice as I have only vaguely dabbled in modelling, but because I’m feeling a bit  and I like realistic scenes I thought I'd chip in a few thoughts.As has been mentioned, the concrete damage looks a little off. A particularly bad mix of concrete might suffer from sulphate(?) attack or an equivalent and look melty (leftmost image, 2/3rds up is good) but would probably be more uniform across all surfaces. This form of damage is usually only found in foundations, motorway bridges, etc. Fire damage, if that was your aim, is more cracking and occasional spalling until you get to the point where entrapped pockets of air cause ‘explosions’. You do have decent major damage - the "pock marks" where individual clumps of concrete have come away are nice and distinct. You should still think about how the damage was done. Unless the damage was all done one hand at a time, you’d have a greater variation in their size and probably also some flatter/sharper areas where existing cracks or faults have been exposed. You should also add lots of cracks and small fractures on the surface of the column. Concrete cracks even under ordinary service loads. Your re(inforcing)bar looks too thick (16mm diam @ 100 mm centres is typical) and might lack sufficient evenly spaced horizontal loops (I'd use ~8 total, but only 8mm diam). The slight buckling you have is good, but should be more pronounced given the amount of concrete cross section lost. You probably want a half to a full sine wave between entry points to the concrete rather than the three to four you have now. The rebar is also surprisingly undamaged. Whatever damaged the concrete would damage the bars, and they would probably also buckle a bit more given the huge reduction in concrete cross section around the middle. You've got some buckling going on already though, so I approve. The undamaged concrete texture looks a bit like paint to me; could be a lighting issue or just my eyes. You'll also get darker, less uniformly textured concrete in the civil works where you'd get the sulphate attack problem. The bottom left corner of the fuse box looks strange as well - corners are the stiffer areas and it looks like you've simply pushed it in with a sphere. There would be local buckling around the area and your corner should be a bit less sharp. The pipe work goes into nowhere, for no reason and is just a valve? Engineers hate putting services through structural members. Valves control flows, this one is just there. Perhaps also continue the pipe downwards beyond this a little? There are also no attachment brackets against the concrete although there are connectors for each individual length of pipe. Stick a plate and a few screws behind each one and you’ll be golden. You might also want to look at the lighting / materials as the edges of the four collars appear to be a bit glassy. Also, the pipe looks completely undamaged and straight. If the column is deforming, the pipe will detach or deform with it. From a modelling point of view, I'd guess that the number of triangles is too high? If you're looking to learn how to generate maps from a high poly model or just getting used to tools then that's fine, but it doesn't seem like portfolio work unless you’re doing a reference/final comparison? Overall, though, I’m pleasantly surprised to see the amount of effort and attention to detail you’ve put into something so ubiquitous. Hopefully this will help a little and not just come across as  MY BEAMS.le capitan posted:This is a work in progress based off of a rough concept I did the other night. About 4 or 5 hours so far. For some reason I really like this. Make the hinges on the outer plates a bit larger. They're tiny in comparison to the solid block of material they have to support. The connections to the central plate are also small and easily damaged. You appear to be allowing them to rotate side to side as well as up and down - intentional? If not, I'd continue the arms to just past the pins as well as slightly increasing the size of said pins.
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Aug 1, 2010 19:29
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Interviewing at a new studio tomorrow morning, and I'm definitely feeling some nervousness creep in. I've been a lead for a few years now, but I've never interviewed for lead position before. It's gonna be less "Hi, you might be working for me, let's chat" and more "hey, you might be our new boss, let's pick your brain." I keep combing over my portfolio with the same feeling that I get when I look through my suitcase before going on vacation. Is everything that I need there? Does it look good? Am I prepared? I've already been told that the current lead has given his blessing for me, this should be a pretty smooth interview, but what if they think I'm a d-bag, oh God...
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Aug 3, 2010 06:49
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Can we see your current portfolio? I'm an character artist still in training and it'd be cool to see a lead's stuff. Also, you allowed to say what studio you're moving over to?
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Aug 3, 2010 09:07
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I really need to post here more. I have a huge art dump of high res sculpts recently finished for the Halo Reach line of toys for Mcfarlane I need to get permission to post. Toy modeling is a bit more demanding than high res for normal maps, as no floaters allowed, and everything has to be watertight.
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Aug 3, 2010 11:14
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Weird. Most places don't usually hire leads fresh unless they are a smaller studio or a start up, too much political drama, as most companies would rather higher non-leadership in TD's ie. Junior-Journeyman or Senior, see how they work out on a few shows first and then place them in a lead position. The quickest way to piss off your existing employee base is to hire an outsider and put them in an leadership position instead of a guy whos been there for 5 years or whatever. I was on one major production that hired about 400 people in one and a half years and.. man what a train wreck. You had supervisors whose secret weapon was stealing all the plug ins, shaders, source code and scripts from their previous employer which backfired since the new job doesn't use the same software for anything they expected. Oops. Unless it's one of *those* places that dangle titles and credits in lieu of stuff that matters. You know, good pay and benefits. Watch out. poopinmymouth posted:I really need to post here more. I have a huge art dump of high res sculpts recently finished for the Halo Reach line of toys for Mcfarlane I need to get permission to post. Toy modeling is a bit more demanding than high res for normal maps, as no floaters allowed, and everything has to be watertight. They're all digital now? I talked to a co-worker who used to work for them back 8 years ago, and then they had to sculpt everything manually, and redo it over and over again before it got approved. Oddly enough it drove him away from doing make up prosthetics and toy design, and pushed him into z-brush. Big K of Justice fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Aug 3, 2010 |
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Aug 3, 2010 18:17
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Geared Hub posted:They're all digital now? I talked to a co-worker who used to work for them back 8 years ago, and then they had to sculpt everything manually, and redo it over and over again before it got approved. Oddly enough it drove him away from doing make up prosthetics and toy design, and pushed him into z-brush. I have no connection to that industry and thus no real knowledge, but I would assume that they were all done physically in the past because they need an original to cast a mold on. The advantage of zbrush nowadays is that you can do all your iterations digitally until a final is approved and then just 3d-print an original to cast. I would bet that it's the preference of the various companies at this point, though. I've seen some recent sculptors' websites where they're working on contemporary action figures in clay and such.
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Aug 3, 2010 18:44
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poopinmymouth posted:I really need to post here more. I have a huge art dump of high res sculpts recently finished for the Halo Reach line of toys for Mcfarlane I need to get permission to post. Toy modeling is a bit more demanding than high res for normal maps, as no floaters allowed, and everything has to be watertight. You still working for CCP? Looking forward to seeing your stuff from Mcfarlane.
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Aug 3, 2010 21:51
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Geared Hub posted:Weird. Ceebee, I'll mention the studio if everything goes through. Otherwise it might be awkward. Just got back from the interview though and it went well. Went really well. I didn't know what to expect at first, but I really like this place. I hope it goes through.
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Aug 4, 2010 00:33
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Glad to hear that you're still doing 3D, Poop. I thought you had given it up entirely for photography.
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Aug 4, 2010 01:16
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