I took some time over the last few months to rework a scene I had modeled last year. I've redone all the lighting and materials in Vray as opposed to Mental Ray. A big part of this project was crushing render times down while retaining quality in...
The models for everything in the scene were taken from 3DRender.com as part of their Lighting Challenge #1. I wanted to visit this challenge once more as a test of the free Renderman render plugin for Maya. The challenge is that you are given the...
Food is something I've wanted to render for a while. It seemed like a good rendering challenge given how familiar people are with the look of food. When I think of what really sells an object in a scene as "real" it's the surface detail. I could...
The couch was the focus in this scene for me. It was part of a small contract for Wayfair. Their 3D Generalist broke his arm while on vacation and they needed a CG model made of their Novagratz Brittany Sofa. I was given photos of the couch and...
I've started a new piece to ring in the new year and with it comes some fun stuff to learn. I was searching for a nice scene to model when I came across a shot (bottom of post) on Pinterest courtesy of https://ruffledblog.com/. Below are shots of...
I've completed a cycad as well as a test for ground cover. I'm aware that there was no grass in the Jurassic period, these grasses are just place holders for ferns cards. The real test was to see if dynamic raytraced lighting shadows the individual...
Work has been interesting lately as you may or may not know Mortal Kombat X has been canceled on last gen and I had been working on that for the last 7 months, so that was a bit of a blow. I'm on to a new project though and a publisher I've never...
Mountains and terrain in general is something that I've wanted to experiment with more for quite some time. A project came up at work recently and I decided to try my hand at creating some custom terrain in World Machine. Typically my process for...
I took a look at the realistic rendering demo that Epic Games posted. It has fairly nice soft shadowing and pays close attention to how your eyes behave in light. I think the gap between pre-rendered and real time visuals is staring to get close...
As a lot of you may know Epic Games announced that they are working on a new Unreal Tournament title. They've been doing weekly updates through twitch to keep the development community involved. You can check them out here:...
After a bit of a later night I've finished my submission for work. Most of the chains are ran along a CV curve, with a few being placed in post. I rendered out each element so that if needed I could rearrange the composition. I tried to keep the...
I'm a sucker for gothic and macabre games. When the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 came out last month I new I had to play it. Lords of Shadow 2 is a lot of fun in it's own right, but I really missed the awesome whip animations in the original...
I don't do digital painting that often, but I've been drawing more and I thought it would be fun to take a sketch from my pad and see it through digitally. Photoshop CS4 was terribly slow through about half the process. I couldn't even paint in...
This post is a continuation of my last post here. In the first post I explained that I was trying to create a strand of chain that was dynamic, but pinned at both ends like a strand of Christmas garland. At the time I wasn't able to find any...
Rigging... It's not my favorite aspect of 3D, but that's probably because It's also my least practiced. What better way to learn though than to jump right into nHair and IK Splines, right 😀 ? My end goal with this rig is to have several strands of...
After finishing the fire effect for my project it's time to move onto the wind portion. To create a tornado the first thing I did was jump into Maya and start setting up emitters in a fluid container. Good lord was that a bad idea. The particle...
I've started a new project involving Maya and Zbrush and a big part of it is going to use simulation data from Maya. There are three parts, smoke, water, and fire. I haven't created a fluid effects fire in a while so I thought I would spend the...
I decided to attend the Montreal International Game Summit and wow what a blast. I didnt meet anyone else from Winnipeg there, but that's OK becuase I meet some really nice people who made me feel at home instantly. There were a lot of nice...
Another day and another piece done 🙂 I had a great time putting together this snowy turn table and trying out all sorts of different methods in ZBrush for creating snowy surfaces. For some extra fun I even threw in some "Matinee" animations using...
Here is an update on my snowy turn table I've been putting togeather. I've added some animated lighting and given most of the meshes another iteration of detailing and fixes. The next thing I have to do is finish the snowy bushes and make the ice...
Hi guys and girls I just thought I would post a quick update on a collection of assets I'm creating for an upcoming iOS title. It's a snowy scene and there are more meshes to come. I haven't worked on cube map reflections yet, but I will soon. All...
After my work establishing a Phong model shader I wanted to incorporate cubemaps. Everything went fairly well. The next step is to combine this shader with my normal map shader. If all goes well I can get that done tonight. I'm having a lot of fun...
I've put if off for a while, but today I decided to jump into writing shaders. It took a while and a lot of wikipedia searches, but I finished tonight after having started this morning. It's a Phong shader based on a Lambert model. It has an added...
I've finished the UDK graveyard scene I was working on and started another 🙂 This scene was fun to work on and it gave me a better understanding of the Unreal Engine as a whole. The most interesting part of the entire process was learning the UDK...
Just before I left for Montreal I was able to snap some pics of my graveyard scene. I've got most of the modeling done, as well as the sky and rain systems. The Ivy on the foreground grave still needs to be skin weighted for wind movement, whereas...
Hey dudes, and dudettes. Here's a few tips on dealing with Maya fur as it can be a little hairy... get it?! Seriously though, Maya fur can be confusing and a little tricky to work with, so if you don't have cash to blow on some fancy plugin here...
Whaa, hugh? What the heck is it? Well grey packing refers to creating textures in photoshop that in and of themselves are not particularly useful, but each channel of colour, and possibly even an extra alpha channel contain useful grey-scale...
Making grass move in the UDK isn't overly complex but it does requite a decent handle on Maya and the Unreal Development Kit's material editor. The concept at it's core is to use the Material Property "world offset position" to make your grass...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSrcfr3f9c The above video is a slide show of viewport renders from a few evenings ago. I am working on a project that needs clouds and I thought I would give fluid container clouds a spin. Playing with clouds...
I'm creating a cemetery scene so you can imagine that I'm going to need some tombstones. I have sculpted another since my last WIP and thought I would share it. As I was breaking down the scene I was trying to think of ways I could maximize my work...
I've been watching people model trees all at work over the past few days and it's driving me crazy. I must make a tree! So in keeping with my current project I'm going to sculpt an evergreen tree in the with snow on it for import into the Unreal...
Since my last update I've added a cloth skeletal mesh to the scene. Cloth inside the Unreal Development Kit is something I've always wanted to take a look at. After watching a quick tutorial over at 3D Buzz I was ready to start setting up my cloth...
Over the past few years I have really started to feel dependent on Maya as my 3D application of choice. It's an amazing piece of software, but when it comes to creating game assets ZBrush eventually came impossible to ignore. This is my first...
Yeah that's right... I've decided to finally check out VRay and I have to say that so far it's been a lot of fun to work with. I haven't gone through all the settings yet, but I'm trying to get through working on a piece while learning the suite....
I have wanted to try a late night render for some time and I got an excuse to do so recently. A lot of the time went into getting the final gather and global illumination to behave correctly. There are two area lights outside the windows lighting...
I've wanted to try this tutorial for a while and now that I have I thought I would share it with you guys. Creating seamless textures is one thing, but tiling mesh surfaces isn't always as easy as it may seem. Osart has posted a tutorial on his...
I find the ear pretty tricky to model in a standard program like Maya, but in ZBrush.. wow. It's so much easier. Being able to just push into a surface makes all the contour changes in the ear less scary. In Maya you're playing with curves and...
This is the first in a series of weekly posts dedicated to quick sculpts made in Zbrush. I'll be posting one a week over the next several months. The subject is handed out by my Instructor and the goal of the assignment is to get us as students...
D&D style attribute rolling for character modeling... WTF? Yes that's right, our latest assignment involved rolling character attributes to create out next sculpt. After our attributes were fleshed out we had to do a portrait of the character....
Hey everyone, just posting some final shots of my crow sculpt after several long evenings. The major change you'll notice from the previous update is the feather treatment. On the old sculpt I used the snake hook tool to pull geometry out for the...
Say hello to "Crow Man", my first Zbrush sculpt. On Monday we started learning Zbrush in class and it's been a lot of fun. When I start learning a new program I usually have this insane drive to do everything the "proper" way. Zbrush has so many...
This image was created for my rendering class in college. We were given the objects and asked to properly light and render them. The style of render was left up to us. The challenge with this assignment is to get the glass looking right. Most of...
In our lighting and rendering class we are going through the basics of mental ray lighting with linear work flow. I've done a bit of this on my own as you might know if you keep up with this blog. I'm learning a lot about the different tools you...
Posted these shortcuts a while ago at Eat3D. I though I would repost them here to share with anyone who doesn't frequent that site. If you aren't though you should. They have amazing video tutorials. Material Editor Shortcut Keys Num Key 1 1...
After digging into the 2DPlatformerStarterKit I began thinking about how I should go about creating my 2D test level. This level would be a staging ground for all sorts of pre-production tests. Things like lightning, particle systems, and mesh...
I was checking out the Unreal Developer Network last night and found out they've released what is essentially a template for a 2D platformer. My brain just about exploded when I saw this. I've been trying to code my own bare bones 2D platform...
Introduction You will have to recalculate the BSP every time you want to see the changes you have made. This lesson will cover the use of geometry mode to transform a brush's shape, or create an entirely new brush. There are several different ways...
Pretty self explanitory. This diagram labels all the components in the Unreal Development Kit user interface. This version isn't taken from the newest release of the UDK, but I will be updating this to the June beta release soon.
Introduction This lesson will cover the very basics of the interface while manipulating the “builder brush” with transform tools. For those of you who don't have it yet the UDK can be downloaded here from Epic Games. To enhance your transition into...
Here's a scale chart to help you visualize things when you're moving around in the Unreal Development Kit. Its set against assets from the Unreal Tournament III Game. The white numbers are Unreal grid dimensions. An average character is ~96...
I had problems. I talked to people. I now have less problems. This is generally how I like my troubleshooting to go. The last problem I had with my project was getting the animation deformers at the top of the flower to follow the stem when I bent...
So everything was going as expected. All was well in the land of flowers and Maya... well almost. I've run into a snag when it comes to bending the flower. My non-linear bend modifier controlling the stem don't seem to be moving the rest of the...
Hello. There's been a little bit of a transition lately as I've moved to a new apartment and wow am I happy to be back in Osbourne Village. If you don't have a car this is the best place to live in the entire city IMO. There are so many shops and...
For now I'm finished with this apartment render. I've learned a lot, but it's time to move on to another project. I will definitely revisit this in the future as I learn more about Mental Ray. I think the most challenging part for this project was...
I'm just about 70% done my apartment render so I thought I would post an update. This is a to scale model of my old apartment. I had some previous renders, but the scale was off (really off) and it was causing all my lightning to be blown out....
Just a quick post here. I took my apartment scene from earlier and rendered it out with a range of light temperatures. The chart below will show you 10 separate renders at varying colour ranges. I just changed the mib_blackbody value in each of the...
So, I've decided to take a better look at using a proper linear workflow within Mental Ray and part of that seems to be learning Global Illumination and Final Gather. These lightning systems have always seemed scary and complicated to me, but after...
In our past lesson we created 3 different sprites and a gradient mask. Then we put them all into one texture using channels. This lesson will use that texture as a base for a material network. This material network will let us create instances of our base material that will have variables we can change. We will be able to change the inside colour, outside colour, saturation, core brightness, and sprite textures themselves.
Magic effects in video games are sweet, but do you know what’s even sweeter? Knowing how they work so you can make your own. That’s what we’re going to do here. We are going to learn how to make awesome looking sprites in Maya so we can bring them into the Unreal Development Kit for our own special effects.
Hi, thanks for stopping in. This lesson will be a basic introduction to creating a material for use inside the Unreal Development Kit. If you’ve never created a material from scratch before than this is a good place to start. Our final texture will be an ice sheet with a nice smooth finish. The base for our material will be a photo we found off the internet.
Creating seamless textures is an important skill if you want to make your textures cover a large area and tile. Luckily for you the process is actually quite simple. From within Photoshop we’ll look at the Offset function and how to create custom brushes that are unique to the texture we’re working on. Well also be using the tried and true method of clone stamp to get rid of the seams the Offset filter creates.
Here are a few good sites I frequently stalk to help you in your Unreal endeavors.
