Finished! (almost)

The modeling for the main structure is pretty much done, save for some adjustments, and now I'm going to have to go through the painful process of unwrapping and creating the textures, and moving toward programming the models into the unity game engine.

Progress

Here's the first screencap of my current project in Anim 130. I've finally got used to working with Autodesk Maya and making great progress as you can see. Most of the modelling is done, at least for the outside of the building.

Stoned: The End?

Oh man I hope this is good enough. This little square has been splitting my mind in two for the past two weeks!

Update tomorrow afternoon after critique.

Speed Modeling: Range Rover Classic

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The castled bonnet was a bit tricky to make, and the mesh isn't all that symmetrical. But the vehicle's basic shape was made rather quickly, being intended to be a low poly model. Unfortunately the lighting flattened the shape of the grille bars, which is in fact a modeled mesh rather than a normal map.

Shaping the rear tailgate presented it's own unique problems, but the flaws were easily covered once the taillamps were placed in. Note the Blender monkey placed as a badge in lieu of the traditional Land Rover logo.

All in all, not too bad for a two hour sit down. This was more an exercise in getting in line on working with vertices and faces, as a means of cutting back on polygons for smoother gaming. Though the roof may be a little too high, the exaggeration of it's shape with the lack of fine details, gives it an almost cartoony look while still making it recognizable as a Range Rover.

EDIT: Now that I look at it again, it looks like something you'd find in Katamari Damacy. Which I have to admit, plays off it's low graphic quality as good stylization.

Stone Wall: Update

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Just got into the animation lab, nabbed the last available computer station with a graphics tablet and added this little afterthought: if this temple has been sitting in a dense, humid jungle, wouldn't there be growth on the stone? So I dropped the file into Photoshop and added an extra layer under all the shading & highlights and put in some moss. The professor has yet to see this, so I might update this with the result of his critique and a possible updated version.

UPDATE: Prof's review.
Dimension: check.
Texture: check.
Natural looking: not so much. Some of the brushwork is too patterned and lost some of it's painterly look. Gonna have to look up some links, and go for another back-breaking evening at home adding more detail to this until it's perfected.

Glittering Prize

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You step inside the ancient temple. Looking around, the dimly lit foyer is festooned with fearsome masks of deities long forgotten by time. A silver shaft of moonlight pours in from the next room ahead of you, and as you step in, you find what you quested across the world for. A giant wood effigy sits cross-legged, his hands held out, with the box in his palms, offering it to you. You casually thank him, as you pick it up, and are eager to access it's contents; an amulet of great power. But your celebration is cut short, as the idol rises to his wooden feet, now wielding swords, and the statues in the corners step from the shadows. The doors out of the central room slam shut, as you realize that maybe there was a lesson to be learned from that Leroy Jenkins video on YouTube; stick with your guild, numnuts.

It's a bit ambitious to think I'll get this far this semester, but I've gotten into it, and starting to get deeper in developing this into something more than just some old stone building sitting in the middle of a jungle paradise.

STONED.

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Original design in Corel Painter


Redone with Corel & Photoshop

So I took my texture in to work with my professor, and he gave me lots of help with improving my texture and giving it MUCH more depth! I've been working on it all evening to get it done. Was it ever tedious! But I guess this is what you have to go through to make it in the industry. My back is bloody stiff, but the outcome of this justifies it quite well and I'm very satisfied with this.

Classwork: Textures

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Wood plank made in Photoshop

Stone wall made in Corel Painter

I've been working ahead and started to put together some textures for my class assignment and mapping to my Blender composite. I'm looking for a painted look in the way Blizzard does theirs. I've been working with my professor to try and flesh them out as they are far too flat.

Monday Vignette: The Nerve Centre

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If there's one thing I love, it's Sci-Fi stuff. Especially things like space battles. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Watching C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. Okay, enough Blade Runner references, you get my point, almost every epic sci-fi movie/game has an awesome space battle scene. Or even cooler, a shipwreck drifting about. While this little scene isn't exactly wrecked, something definitely has happened to jostle monitors, knock off communication lines, bring up alerts, and pull down the lighting fixtures. The scene was heavily inspired by the GFS Valhalla level from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, though not as heavily wrecked as the Galactic Federation's battleship. And definitely not swarming with those nasty Metroids.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption © Retrostudios & Nintendo
Bad cellphone shot © me

I especially like the outcome of the scrambled screens. Photoshop's wave filter, set to square, and repeat. Adjust settings or hit randomize until satisfied. Add some noise and horizontal grain filters, play with layer modes and opacity... voila!

Ahhhhh... reminds me when the logic board took a crap on my Mac... bad times, bad times...

Currently Project: Environment in Unity

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10 minute sketch
Traced over and details added
Pullout of surrounding environment
Composite render in Blender

The project in my environment design class is officially underway, and I've gotten a handle on Autodesk Maya. It's coming along slowly, but surely. Hopefully I'll get it done in time to code into Unity for the iPhone. Though I am mostly working in Maya now, I'll still be doing side projects in Blender, including a regular posting of vignettes.

New Idea

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I really didn't want to scrap the Polynesian aspect of the work, so I scrapped Bauhaus because it's common enough, and I'm not looking to make something that can be considered "normal", so I'm throwing Byzantine/Middle Eastern in with Polynesian, and so far it's coming out great!

First Official Classwork-SCRAPPED

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I've officially began Animation 130 last week, and the semester's project will be to combine two different forms of architecture to create an environment, and placed into the Unity game engine. I had decided on a combination of Polynesian and Bauhaus, but as you can see, the structures just start to look like beachfront hotels, and that's not what I'm really aiming for here.

Engineer: shopped version

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Character Concepts: Spaceship Engineer

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Doesn't look too pleased with what his little gauntlet computer is telling him.

Futureland (for a lack of a better title)

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Setting: Pacific Far East 2075; the whole of Asia is one sprawling megapolis, regions near costal ports, rampant with crime and crooked police. Citizens make by on homemade aircars built from derelict cars, trucks, motorcycles, and aircraft. Money is almost nonexistent, the old ways of bartering & trade being the main currency, much of the transactions being of illicit manner; hired thieves, killers and drug lords rule the towering slums. The ruling provincial government took the matter into their own hands and set the ports into a police state. For a year or so, it seemed to work, however, the protectors became a product of their environment and began policing for their own gain. In the eyes of the government, they were performing admirably, but in truth, nobody was safe, many take the sentiment that the crime lords were far more benevolent than these supposed "protectors". It is now up to the very miscreants who caused the plague to extinguish the corruption and restore order.

Yeah it's kind of a half-baked plot right now, I'll have to take some time to refine it.

UPDATE

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After much scouring the internet for some help on generating texture maps, I finally figured it out, and began to give my environment an even grittier, industrial look. I'm eventually going to implement this scene into a game using the built-in engine. The game itself is going to be a survival horror genre. Hopefully I'll have a working version sometime by the end of the summer.

New WIPs

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Pencil Sketch


Modeled and rendered with Blender

Recently, I downloaded Blender 2.49 to stay sharp on my 3D modeling skills, and to get a taste of a much more advanced programme before I just dive head-on into Autodesk Maya. After a few days of struggling, I've managed to get a feel for the interface, though there are many more things I need to learn.

Final Renderings

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These are a couple of other renderings that were a part of my final critique, along with the Nintendo games & controllers, and the container.

Sketch Dump

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I seem to have come down with an inner ear infection, and can't hold a steady line for the life of me. Managed to get these done. Photoshopped versions will arrive in a later post.

Concept Art: Farmland Patrol

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Pencil sketch
Inked & coloured in Photoshop

Part of the duties of the farmhand on Venus is to patrol the grounds of their crops. Riding atop a mammalian animal native to the planet's grasslands, they rely on special goggles to filter out the extreme amount of yellow-orange light from the atmosphere to see marauders trying to take cover under the light, as well as a long-range rifle to ensure the safety of their precious crops.

Containment Unit: Haulers and Yards

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After working on the containers, I began to build other things that may relate to it: container loaders, storage yards, & such. The textures used are either preloaded with Strata 3D CX, open license images, or made from scratch in Photoshop.

 

Containment Unit-rendering photographs

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On top of rendering homemade textures, I also experimented with using actual photographs of metal containers and using photoshop to create a greyscale texture maps to give the ribbed texture more pronounced depth and to be able to work with a changing light source

I also put my photoshop generated colour map to see how well it stacked up (lame pun) against the photograph maps.

The photographs used in this image are open license.

Containment Unit-flat texture>bump maps>model

This post will show my process in creating a texture and applying it to a 3D model. The object which I will render is a simple one, that I have been focusing and experimenting on for awhile-metal containers. After looking up some for a good idea of how they look, (you wouldn't believe the small but important details you would miss just working from your head) I went into Photoshop and created an image map:

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Afterward, I created a texture map, which uses greyscale values to determine how deep areas rise and fall, and apply the appropriate shadows when rendered:

Finally, I create a primitive rectangular prism, and apply both the colour map and texture map in Strata 3D CX, and rendered it:

Although the top and ends feature the broad side's mapping, the focus of this was simply in one area.

Class Project--Final

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This is the rendering of the final project in my basic CGI class. I constructed these to real scale, as to maintain proportions, and used the actual objects brought to class to measure. The models were constructed and rendered in Strata 3D CX .

Death Cab For Zombie

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Pencil sketch

Inked & coloured in Photoshop

Everyone loves zombie games. They're what WWII games were a few years ago. But way more fun. That being said, what better vehicle to motor around New York City in during a zombie apocalypse, than an old Marathon Checker cab? Big, roomy, 5 MPG, and built to last. Outfitted with some window armour, a few portholes to stick your guns out, and you're ready to hit Times Square!

Concept Art: Farmlands

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Some quick sketches of a small farm with harvest walkers, and a farmhand on patrol for marauders.

Formal Introductions

Hello, and welcome to my blog. My name is Raymond Amarantus. I have created this blog as an easy-to-access portfolio of my 3D environment and texture works. I am a student, currently studying video game design, focusing on environments and textures. In this blog, I will showcase all my works pertaining to my study. Models, textures, sketches, etc., as well as other related stuff like opinions. Oh those insidious opinions. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the works I will be showing here, and if you do happen to know a thing or two about 3D modeling, texturing, etc, feel free to critique.

So without further ado, my works.