The 3DCG Thread: Revenge of the NURBS

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The 3DCG Thread: Revenge of the NURBS

ElecHeadMatt: May 27, 2003; I HATE PHANTOM SPACE MAN

Holy gently caress, been off the grid for a while now (moved out to San Francisco and started the new job :hellyeah:

) and this thread is like the supercharged full tilt cokehead older brother of the old one and I thoroughly enjoy it.

Also, redesigned the portfolio site and am always looking for feedback (it is a continuous work in progress of course)

http://mattburdette.com

Those who have started new jobs, how are people digging it so far? I am loving loving the hell out of mine.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2008 18:41

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 15:37

ElecHeadMatt: May 27, 2003; I HATE PHANTOM SPACE MAN

BonoMan posted:

Where'd you get a job?

Awesome reel by the way, but two small crits.

Ditch the plane shot. I know you're proud of it (as you should be) and it's a nice shot, but I feel that the quality of the end result is below everything else on the reel. And that's a compliment, because you have set a very high bar for yourself with the quality of your work!

I know it would hurt, and I know you want to show off your comp skills, but it just seems kind of off. Don't hit me!

Also that blue ball logo thingy...I'd ditch the breakdown of that because it doesn't really show anything other than "this thing had several pieces on several layers" which is kind of a given in any piece. There's no "ohhhh that's how he did it!" moment with the breakdown.

Other than that absolutely fantastic work. Extremely high quality!

Whoops. Three pages later.

Working as an environment artist at LucasArts. Say what you will about the company as of late, but its been a blast working here. Its insanely casual, the people I work with are both awesomely cool people plus talented as all hell, and I'm getting to see and work on some seriously cool poo poo.

As for the reel, I highly appreciate the compliments from you and everyone else. Don't even worry about the plane crash thing, I'm really not at all that proud of it. The vision I had of the final project was far more epic, the plane scorching directly overhead only 100 feet or so off the ground, casting a shadow over the ground and girl, better quality of smoke trail, plane destruction, resulting explosion, plus practical effects like ground dust, camera shake, and maybe some debris like metal panels falling in the road and whatnot. So yeah, the final thats in my reel is not representative of what I had in mind, but I think it holds up "okay" and I'd be pretty pissed if I did a bunch of work on that for several months just to not stick it on there (but then again, the industry doesn't give a poo poo how long I worked on it.)

Again, I'm totally glad you guys like it. I wish I had my computer here in town, because I'd still be doing hobby poo poo off hours. I've learned a crapton of technique in a very short amount of time while being at Lucas, far more than anything I've learned in school.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2008 20:36

ElecHeadMatt: May 27, 2003; I HATE PHANTOM SPACE MAN

sigma 6 posted:

stuckeys:
I have never heard of normal mapping the bulge in an eyeball before. Certainly if it is a subtle effect, I am sure it doesn't matter so much. Looks a little extreme in the normal map to me and I doubt it is really necessary.

I would actually recommend this. Its currently whats being done on a project I'm with and it looks fantastic. It can be overdone, but if its done subtly it really makes things stand out.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2008 21:03

ElecHeadMatt: May 27, 2003; I HATE PHANTOM SPACE MAN

Here are a few shots of the regions I was responsible for on our latest project, DLC for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The extra special bonus "Ultimate Sith Edition" came out back in November, so I think I'm safe in posting these. I did the Command Center areas for the Hoth level.

edit: Thumbnailified 'em. Didn't realize they were breaking tables, sorry.

ElecHeadMatt fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Jan 10, 2010

# ¿ Jan 9, 2010 04:59

ElecHeadMatt: May 27, 2003; I HATE PHANTOM SPACE MAN

SVU Fan posted:

Do I just have to suck it up and merge each vert individually, or is there a more accepted better way to do it?

Also, is it common practice to split polys and get triangles and then fix those later, as opposed to trying to always just have quads? It happened a lot in the tutorial but I figured it might just be an outdated method.

You have to do a Combine on both halves and yeah, merge all the verts. You don't have to do them all individually though, you can select all the verts on the edge loop you wanna merge, set a low merging tolerance (so they only know to merge to the closest verts and not all condense into one vert.) and hit Merge. The big seam is because the border edges are always "hard." You can fix it by selecting the edge loop and going to Normals -> Soften Edge (this is for Maya 2009 though, there's a similar function in previous versions but I cant remember where it lives.)

As far as fixing quads/triangles, you can do whatever you want really. Quads are recommended just because its easier to work with full edge loops and triangles will break up continuous loops like that, as well as your normals will shade correctly and not get weirdo artifacts and whatnot (and it makes character animators jobs way easier.) If you're not seeing any weirdness I wouldn't worry about it that much.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2011 02:18

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 15:37

ElecHeadMatt: May 27, 2003; I HATE PHANTOM SPACE MAN

Captain Spoon posted:

Anyway, to get to the point, I have a few questions for the pros.

1. What problems will I run into if I have geometry colliding? For example, the cylinders attached to the wings in my screenshot above are just sort of clipping through the main body.

2. On that note, is it inadvisable to use multiple separate objects in one model, or am I supposed to attach them somehow?

I'll get back to experimenting tomorrow and maybe try to actually tackle some tutorials, so I'll try not to waste everyone's time with noob questions.

I'm relating this all from my Maya experience, so take from it what you will:

1) Depends what you wanna do with the model once its done, but if you're just modeling for the sake of modeling, no problems. I intersect crap into each other all the time, its way easier than trying to triangulate awkward shapes for the sake of welding it together. Its very rare that I (personally) have to make something watertight.

2) Up to you, again depends on what your intentions are. I tend to merge together large chunks with their details just because it makes it easier to deal with in the Outliner (in Maya) as opposed to having this crazy hierarchy of groups and obtusely named pieces of geo, and if I need to I can just split it back up again.

I'm pretty anal about organization in my Outliner :gay:

Hope this helps, its lookin' mighty fine so far.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2011 02:32

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