I'm going to do some small game art tutorials, any requests?

Just image and text based tutorials, please don't throwing out a bunch of niche ides like, how do I make this asset or scene that would be perfect for JUST my game.

I think the first one I'll cover is terrain. Its going to be generic, non step by step, but easy enough to follow that you should be able to do it in any app, and I'll show a iphone solution and a high end web.

here's the basic idea for my first tutorial, this is some game art from rage, but you get the idea, your basic cliffs, dirt, and path set up. I wont be using the unity terrain tool because you can get better results doing it by hand.





-I'll cover basic modeling ideas (I wont cover how to sculpt the whole thing)

-Setting up and baking lightmaps on 2 uv channels, I also sometimes like using large normal maps on my lightmaps to break up shading. Also talk about using tiling to maximize density and how to break it up

-Talk about planing out textures, (path, grass 1, grass 2, rubble, rock/cliff)

-Using vertex blending (via vertex alpha for the iphone, rbg for the computer)

 

Unity can do megatextures?

 

someone could create something similar to megatextures for unity, but its a programming thing, not an art thing.

 

its just a tutorial, so its just going to be enough to have a decent screenshot, not modular, few thousand tris. For a large open map, terrain may be the best option, but for something more linear, smaller, or has a bigger focus on art, doing it by had is a way better option.

The terrain doesn't work on the iphone, and it doesn't look that great, and there's ways to keep the draw calls low. (lod's, keeping decent size chunks to keep the draw call low, but still being able to delete it when out of view (custom culling), you can use pinches (narrow path, etc) to separate areas so you can delete everything that isn't being seen.

 

Sorry. I accidentally deleted my earlier post. lol

Do you have much experience with sculpting apps?

I've always been curious to see how a highly detailed next-gen character would look in Unity. Something in the 10,000 - 15,000 poly range with a detailed normal map baked on from a million+ poly sculpt.

 

I suppose it would look like in any other engine. Don't know about next gen, but you can take a look at current gen ones like Varga.

http://www.9jcg.com/tutorials/paul_tosca/Making_of_Varga_part_2/40.jpg

The workflow isn't really complicated but it's extremely time consuming.

 

I'd certainly like to see a tutorial on manually creating a terrain... but a generic one - not tied to a specific 3d package.

Also, the ability to do things like cliff hangs and caves would be useful for many people.

 

The goal is to make it easy to apply to other software packages, and maybe suggest some other free apps to help speed up the process. I think the main things that are going to be software specific are generating lightmaps and setting up the 2nd uv channel, but for those I'm just going to show how to set it up, not the whole process.

 

A basic how-to for character rigging/skinning would be nice, covering things like modelling joints so they skin properly, I've always found it tough to find tutorials like this, so many of them are just about the modelling phase and require you to figure out rigging/skinning yourself.

PS: Great terrain, looks superb.

 

the terrain was from RAGE, I'm just doing something similar.


@skinning/modeling for animation

http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTopology
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryAnimation#Rigging

 

Oh, ha. Best of luck then!

Thanks for the links, one of them has a ton of great examples.

 

Did you actually did this tutorial by any chance ? I'm curious