Archive

Archive for October, 2010

“Those boards don’t work on water…

October 31st, 2010

… unless you’ve got power !”
The first of a series of BTTF props I will model.

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In : 3D, Props
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“Good news everyone !”

October 29th, 2010

This time, something completely different from what I usually do : a “cartoon-ish” scene from Futurama, a reproduction of the Planet Express building !
It’s 16,634 tris, it uses several textures from 256 to 1024 (only diffuses and one alpha -for the antenna) and is rendered with Mental Ray using the “contour” option to have a cel-shading effect.
Hope you’ll like it 😀


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In : 3D, Environments
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Kaboom !

October 22nd, 2010

To change from rocks, here’s a big old bomb !
Modeled in 3Ds Max and I painted the base texture in Mudbox to avoid apparent seams. And the rest of the texture is Photoshop as always.
2158 tris
1×2048 (diffuse, normal, specular)
Screenshots from 3Ds Max viewport with Hardware Lighting and Xoliul’s shader.

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In : 3D, Props, Weapons
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[Update] Mudbox and some rocks

October 15th, 2010

I was working on a little scene about Halloween, but I discovered Mudbox… so the scene is on standby for now.
So. Mudbox. Hmm, I already knew ZBrush but I’m not a very big fan of it. Not so user-friendly, very dark, not easy to handle for a beginner. So I tried Mudbox after having seen some good tutorials from Sascha Henrichs. First, I tried his tutorial about “procedural rocks” with 3Ds Max : the first part is about creating the rock with some modifiers, and the second part is about unwrapping and then texturing the hi-poly rock in Mudbox. Unfortunately, the third part is not yet available.
So here’s a preview of the rock in its current state (more than one million polygons…) :

I really like this technique because it’s more “random”, so more natural (because nature is totally random). It’s also very fast to get something looking good. The main drawback is the fact that you don’t entirely control the process. So if you want to create a specific stone (like for example the famous rock formation of “The Lion King” :p), you’ll have to sculpt it with ZBrush or… Mudbox !
I like Mudbox because it’s really user friendly, clearer than ZB and you can use it just by guessing how to do. So, here’s the second tutorial : this time we sculpt the stone directly in Mudbox, starting with a simple cube. When it’s done, we have to use a low level of polygons as the low-poly version because a major weakness of Mudbox is its lack of re-topology tool.
So, I unwrap this low-poly version of the stone, create the normal map in Mudbox, apply it on the low-poly model and then texture it once again directly in MB.
Eventually, I import the model into 3Ds Max, apply the textures, set-up a little lighting and use Xoliul’s Shader and here it is :

It’s not so “low-poly” (3072 tris) but I’m about to try a re-topology tool in order to get a 1000 tris or less stone.

The entire process :


Open in new tab for a better view.

UPDATE.
I have tried a software named 3D-Coat for my re-topology test. It’s very efficient and easy to use. So, now my 1 million tris stone (procedural) is only 420 tris !
I will now texture this low-poly model with Mudbox.

UPDATE 2.
Here it is, the low-poly stone is finally textured and ready to be used in a game !

UPDATE 3.
Another “procedural rock” I did this afternoon. Sharper than the first one, and more detailed (1066 tris).

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In : 3D, Props
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The sewer

October 6th, 2010

My latest scene. This is a render from 3Ds Max with default scanline.
I made several textures from 256 to 2048px, with diffuse, normals and sometimes self-illumination or alpha.
Smoke, fire and water are juste planes with alphas.
I’m not really satisfied with the appearance of the lights, but it’s always a problem for me (and with default scanline it’s hard to get something realistic).

24 900 tris.

Edit : I tried a little (a lot) retouching with Photoshop…

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