Elk animation

Here's a video of some animation tests for the game Witanlore: Dreamtime

Ursa Cub update

Here's an update to the Dota2 courier I've been working on. This is the high-res model which will be sculpted on to add more detail and then baked into the normal map. I also created on of the three Fat Birds that will be holding him in the air for the flying version.

See more on my Polycount thread

New project: Ursa Cub Courier

Beginnings of a courier:

Based of the concept by Agito666 on Polycount: Workshop thread

The Homerun Slicer: Dota2 Item

After a lot of frustration with the weapon being at 90 degrees from the expected orientation and realising I made a silly mistake we finally finished it!

The model and concept were inspired by a Digital Tutors tutorial, and made by Kejayarts (https://www.youtube.com/user/KSAJoHn) while I produced the textures.

It was entirely painted in Blender.

Dota2 Raccoon Courier

This is the culmination of months of on/off work. The process was similar to my last character. The main difference this time, was that the rigging and animating was offloaded to an animator friend of mine.

Also, notice the DIY Hero shader made with BI nodes. I tried to replicate the in-game shader. It's not quite there, for one there's no normal map, or most of the other maps used by the real Hero shader, but I think it's a start.

The texture still needs a bit of work but it's almost there.

Dota2 Weapon Model

My friend asked me to produce the texture for his first Dota2 item. Naturally I accepted. 

I decided I would use the Blender painting tools exclusively as I wanted to try out a new workflow.

With a Wacom tablet, Blender's texture painting tools are simple and surprisingly fun to use. The following pictures are work in progress.

Videos!

Lately I've been working on some things for my portfolio. To that end I produced some small videos showing off some of what I can do.

Car model update

Another update. Still refining the shape while slowly adding details like the wheels and lights. Next up: More refining... (apologies for the weird image format. I don't know what happened)

Tesla S model update

Further refined the shape and started defining panels.

Tesla S modelling

As another practise session. I'm currently modelling a Tesla Model S. The advantage of doing a scene like that is I can practise both realistic modelling from reference and realistic rendering in Cycles.

Pistachios!

My first Cycles render! Textures are procedural (same material as in my previous post) and it all renders fairly quickly with one large light to light the background plane and 3 more light planes to produce the reflections and add some sky light.
Some basic noise reduction was applied afterwards to clean up the image and the bokeh blur was simply a tick box in the render settings (interesting feature!).

Hope you like.

My adventures in Cycles

I was reading the latest post of World of Level Design (check it out!) post about practising your skills at level design it really made me stop and think I should do more than "projects". To that end I decided to a series of studio renders in Cycles, where the goal would be to improve my rendering skills in a controlled environment (Studio render).

So here goes:

Unearthly challenge Day 3&4

Update: I refined the connection between engine and hull sections as well as added various other details.

5 simple steps to making a clean cut in Blender

In this post I will outline the method I use to making smooth cuts (or spaces) in my meshes. It's pretty basic and I'm sure you'll find examples of this elsewhere.

While I admit its not completely perfect because of the introduction of ngons and triangles, the result seems to be quite good and the amount of polygons required is quite low which is great.

The following images show what I'm talking about. The second image uses the same method to achieve the opposite shape.

The following steps assume you have a mesh with a Subsurf modifier.

Step 1 Position where you want the cut/space in your mesh to be.
I usually use the Edge loop tool (ctrl+R) to set where I want the loops to define where the sides the thole will be. It helps reduce unwanted distortions. If your mesh happens to have edge loops already there, use those.

Step 2 Make some lines 
Draw an edge using the Knife tool (K) around the area that you want to become a hole. Ensure that when you change direction you leave a triangle between the edges as shown in the picture. Make sure the edge you are drawing is close to the existing edges you defined earlier.

Step 2 Make some space
Delete the polygons where you want the space to be. Notice how the mesh is being smoothed. This will be fixed later.

Step 3 Extrude
Select the edges around the polygons you just deleted and extrude downwards (or whatever direction you want). Again, notice how the mesh is smoothed. The next step will resolve that.

Step 4 Add lines
Creating these lines will make the corners sharp. Use the Knife tool and cut from the outer edge of the mesh up to the corresponding vertex of the triangle mentioned in step 3 making sure to cut as close to the corner as possible.

Step 5 Add sharpening line
The purpose of this line is to make the edge sharper as well as producing smoother geometry where the triangles are.

Done. I hope someone found this useful.

Lester Animation Project

I'm currently playing around with my rat character with the goal of making a short animation with it.

This is just a WIP shot from the viewport. I will post something more interesting soon. I am experimenting with different looks for the final look of the animation. To do this I will be doing some renders of various poses of the character along with props.

Soon I will also post some (bad) story board of various shot ideas along with some plot stuff.

Anyhow. More to come.

The Time Device

Today I did some texturing of a game prop. I made the high poly model and from that produced a low poly model. A normal map was then made from the high poly model.

I will detail how I did the normal mapping in another post, but I've found Blender to require a little bit of hacking to get going, but once you get the idea its pretty simple and relatively fast.

Anyway here's some screenshots.

Unwrapping woes

Quick tip for people who happen to hit the same problems I did with UV unwrapping.
This is what I used to do:

When you have a cylindrical object with a continuous perfectly vertical side, select the top and bottom edge loops of the perfectly vertical side (this is important) and make a seam. Make sure you make your seams are on polygons that are facing the same way. e.g. If you have a bevelled edge, select the edge loop at the end of the bevel when the next polygon is exactly (or as close as it gets to) vertical.

Next make a vertical seam, but only between those two seams you created earlier and not between other seams where the geometry is not perfectly vertical or you will end up with bent strips of UVs (see above). This ensures the middle strip is  opened and flattened out evenly and remains straight while the top and bottom parts are flattened into circles/rings (see below).

I found this produced a much cleaner looking UV map with little extra clean up work.

One disadvantage I can see is that you end up with thin rings of UVs which may end up wasting texture space. However this can be easily countered by nesting other parts within the rings.

Sorry if this seems trivial. I'm sure most of you already know this but while modelling a prop it suddenly hit me and I realised I maybe someone else might have been in the same situation. I hope someone found it helpful.

Anyway, 'till next time.

Risen from the ashes

This is a new start for my blog. I will be documenting my personal projects in 3D modelling, animation and game design.
For my first post I would like to show you some of my recent work.

Lester (as in Red Leicester, you know because rats like cheese.. I'll let myself out..)
The character was designed as a courier for the game DOTA2. It was uploaded on the steam workshop.

My initial sketch of the character:

Based on the sketch I proceeded to create the mesh. I ended up having to remove a ton of detail such as ropes, potions and equipment which so heavily affected the poly count.
Fortunately, this allowed me to focus and simplify the design and in the end, stripping a lot of superfluous detail was a good thing.

Next the textures were produced. My process was influenced by the documents on texturing released by Valve however I had to make it up as I went along  for a lot of the process because I wanted to experiment with various colours and multiple layers easily.
I first started with a an ambient occlusion pass which was then heavily modified to eventually become a "Value pass". Essentially I put down all the values I wanted on the character to make sure it read as well as possible.



Blender makes this process very easy by providing 3D painting tools. I simply painted in black and white , using a soft low opacity brush, where I wanted light and dark colours to be while every so often zooming out to check how well it reads. Painting directly over the ambient occlusion I produced a gradient where the darkest part was near the legs and the lightest part near the top of the body. This directs the viewers eyes to the interesting parts of the character.

Here's the result of the first part:

Next it was simply a matter of overlaying colours as described by Valve.
This is the result after much painting and tweaking:

The nice thing about this method is that the value pass gives you a good start for the shading. After that you can collapse layers and painting some more.










The model was then animated as required by the engine. The result can be seen in the following video. Unfortunately I forgot to record the special idle animation, so you'll have to wait until Valve adds it to the game to see it ;)

And here is the final beauty renders of Lester in both ground and flying versions.

Hope you like him!