A few weeks back Autodesk Labs released Project Photofly – a free tool that uses photogrammetry to automatically construct a 3D model of your subject in the cloud and then send it back to you. Simply by taking photographs of an object from multiple angles a triangulated 3D mesh can be created, the photos are stitched into one or more textures and a rough real-time model is provided for approval and basic editing before submission to the cloud for high res mesh generation (usually a model of about 500k triangles). The resulting textured mesh can be viewed in the included Photo Scene Editor or exported to a 3D editor in numerous formats. Decent results can be obtained by using about 50 photographs and the results seem to be pretty robust. With some retopology and render to texture, this method of mesh capturing could prove useful for game art, as Joseph Drust shows here:
New dinosaurs…
•June 13, 2011 • 2 CommentsI mentioned in my intro to this blog that I would be updating an old character, something I’ve been meaning to do for literally years. This character is in fact the base model for all of the base soldiers from Dreadnought, at the time we were pretty limited in what we could pull off character wise and apps like ZBrush and Mudbox weren’t prevalent like they are today. Neither were there retopology tools or advanced normal map generators, we were using very unfriendly command line tools to generate our maps.
So, the guys in the screenie below were modelled in 3DSmax, high and low res, every fold modelled in by hand using spline cages and surface tools. The image below is a real-time screenshot from the Instinct Engine, which is now being improved and extended across hand-held devices, check out www.instinctengine.com for more info.
The low res game versions were created by hand optimising the high res version of the asset vert by vert until the target tri count of about 1200 was reached. Textures were typically 1024×1024 or lower compressed to DDS. So before I start moaning about how we had to walk to the office in our bare feet carrying a lump of coal to power the server, here’s what the base high res model looked like (without body armour and helmet)
In the course of this blog I’ll be looking at what can be kept, tweaked and dumped as I work through updating the model and textures, warts and all, hopefully ending up with something I can use in my portfolio that smacks of twenty elevenness. I’ll probably use Marmoset or Max 2012’s tasty Nitrous viewport for the final render.
Dread this…
•June 12, 2011 • Leave a CommentIn 2003 I was involved in Torc Interactive where a games engine called Instinct was developed. You can learn more about the Instinct Engine here.
It was such a fantastic learning experience for me, real deep end stuff for a recent college graduate from BCFE. I started as a Character Artist/Animator and worked my way up to Lead within 2 years.
Something I worked on back in 2005. 64bit dual core PCs were bleeding edge back then. I did all of the character stuff, normal mapping and some animation, as well as miscellaneous world objects. Some of the guys from Instinct went on to form Dark Water Studios. (I worked for Dark Water for a while as Technical Art Manager during pre-production on Dogfighter. Little of my stuff remains in the game though, except for the “allied pilot” character and some title screen art, maybe one level I worked on.)
In 2006 we tried to push what was essentially an indoor engine for corridor based games in a different direction, the world was growing tired of normal mapped sci-fi, so was born The Prospector. I did the character modelling, rigging, animation on top of whatever needed to be done for the world objects, the diffuse and specular textures on the blue Prospector were also mine, the first time I tried my hand at proper texturing.
In 2007 I started work at Brown Bag Films in Dublin where I worked on this among other things:
Edit: Someone over at Brown Bag has posted a cool breakdown
Also this:
And this!
Good intentions…
•June 12, 2011 • 4 CommentsAfter much threatening I’ve finally started a blog! I guess that’s the hard part over and now all that remains is to fill it with worthwhile posts about art, games and visual effects – easy! I plan on blogging about personal projects, look development, creative troubleshooting, interesting techniques in the field of 3D and 2D art and animation (3DSMax, Photoshop, Mudbox etc.) and anything else I’d consider half related and blogworthy. I pledge to update as often as possible and I hope you’ll come back out of curiosity.
In the near future I’ll be looking at creating some decent animated texture-based ocean waves using vector displacement in 3DSMax and Mudbox. I’ll also be updating an old character model of mine which should be a very interesting project. I’ll also post some links to work I have done in the past by means of a proper introduction.
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