WIP Small Works Art Thread

Nothing overly exciting yet but everyone loves an Xwing so just thought people might like to see it. Models have 100% not been done by me

 

Yep, under technical attributes of Skyshop they should just write: It makes assets look better. Thats all it needs to sell heh.

 

Heres a personal side drawing I've been doing when I'm not working on class assignments. Just to let off some stream and pressure.



NOTE: I think I really suck at drawing people soo....yeah, I guess this will serve as good practice on faces at least. I mean I changed his expression 4 maybe more times? Whatever....

 

HAHA Thanks man !
Not sure about the age rating either but I think, in a toonish context and a cool response from the main hero, it will be fine

Thanks and yes, I have to agree but I'm not sure, if its a bad thing. He'll just show up in a few scenes and IMO, not seeing his face clearly makes it even creepier ...and to be honest, there's not much time to do facial animations

Thanks for your kind words

The beautiful concepts were done by a friend of mine. He has a very different approach to character design. I love his work but he uses completly different shapes and proportions to build up his characters. Quite challenging and a good lesson to get out of my comfort zone and try new stuff


The design and details of some of the characters have changed a bit during devolpment. The cloaked charakter for example changed to the well dressed mysterious guy, It might have worked in a "weirder" more cartoonish environment but since the visuals became more realistic, it felt right to design him a bit more casual and grounded as well.

The shadow character is very rough scribbled. He was originally planned for just one short scene and there was this idea, that we could get away with a 2D billboard but even that looked strange in a 3D environment. It took some time but I decided to do a 3D version, because creatures are fun and he could have a bigger role, without worrying too much about facial animation etc.
He was indeed sculped very straight forward. Felt good to know that every design flaw will be hidden in particles and other fancy effects anyway

Here's a screengrab straight from mudbox...


You can also see the basemesh I started with. I'm mostly using the mudbox standard human basemesh, which comes with a good UV Layout and allows me to morph between all my other characters and creatures to find interesting in betweens or re-use/ mask parts that have already been done, like hands, ears etc.
Or just do weird stuff...


The Game mesh uses an "optimzed" triangle reduction instead of clean loops but that should be fine since clean deformations are not that needed and the polycount was good enough to get into extreme positions without triangles being overstretched. If they do...more particles and fancy effects



The shader uses a simple fresnel falloff in the alpha. I've baked inverted AO to fake a subtle sss effect in the diffuse and self illum channel.



Here's the texture I've used for the smoke particles...


and the diffuse texture


I've used a blurred version of the smoke particle to create a normal map, that uses Unitys glass refraction shader to distort the character. It uses the same particle system but instead of fading in and out (which isn't possible), they just scale

Hope I could help

Here's a beauty render and turnaround. Just for the sake of image bombing

 

Wow, thanks for all the info florian, I was particularly interested in what particle setup you had, so that's good stuff. Let's hope nobody quotes your post in a reply though It'll be a long ol' page then!

 

Here you go, janpec

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/20...Store/page35?p=1518122&viewfull=1#post1518122

 

Indeed

Here's my particle setup. It's the sub emitter for the smoke. The intial particles are just a few non visible, non moving particles, scattered on the mesh itself.

 

It's been a time since I didn't posted here, neither did I modeled. So here is a little come back work in progress : )



reference : World of warcraft's tauren.

 

Really nice to see parts of your process Florian, thanks for sharing

 

Ah, thanks for that! It was good just to see the images you were using for the particles, but that image is even more helpful Particle systems are something I should definitely try and become more confident with. Thanks again!

Oh, and by the way, are those smokey textures handpainted in photoshop, or is there a filter/effect/process you use to produce them? Sorry for being a pest But I'm a bit of a sponge when it comes to learning/information

 

A couple characters I made for a small endless runner type game I'm currently working on.

 

No problem

The smoke texture is based on a random pic I found on the net. I just filtered and blurred it a bit. Would need some more love if its for cigarette smoke but good enough for such a mess like the shadow. The picture shows the alpha. Diffuse in nearly black.
If someone wants it anyway, feel free to use it. It's still a quality compressed 512x512 jpg

 

@Florian, wow! I love that very informative post about your workflow. Everything about it from start to finish was great and your approach to creating your characters seems super efficient and awesome. Thats really cool to see how you took your short little boss guy character and morphed him into a completely different character, that evil dark smoke character. Final result is excellent and those renders look beautiful. I want your skills. In the picture with those nodes where you talk about the shader, that says pixel editor, what is that? (guessing its from that shader editor tab you have) Is that a pro feature or is that skyshop? (I dont have pro or skyshop so I wouldnt know how it looks). It looks very similar to the nodes in blender cycles render engine for creating materials/shaders, which im sure this is the same thing but in unity.

 

Glad I could help

The node graph is from "strumpy's shader editor". You can find it somewhere here in the forum. It's great and free. Unfortunatly not supported anymore and it slowly breaks appart from Unity update to update. Since the latest version, I had to change my sexy dark unity pro skin back to a free grey to get all the nodes displayed

 

Awesome breakdown post, Florian! Your friend came up with some great concepts too!


Here's a shameless cross post from my Parasol thread:

As you can see, the menu system is in place, as is the system to save progress and track what levels you have a star on. Sound effects and music now exist, and can be muted individually. I updated the UI to match the colour scheme and feel of the game, and the fonts have also been updated to be more consistent and friendly. Furthermore, I added little touches like the win text changing based on what hat you're wearing, this text and the level title scales based on how long the string is.

Currently there are 24 levels in game, the rest of the planned 40 should be done within the week. The first four levels act as a tutorial, the first of which you can see in the video.

I'll make a post about how I design levels soon, likely when I start to tackle the remaining 16.

Anyway, hope you like the update. Getting close to the home stretch now!

- Mark

 

@Florian
Thought it might be from a photograph, thanks for that info! Much appreciated!

 

Awesome!! I wanted that for long time year ago when i started on some projects.

 

@Florian: Jesus... you're insane man! Oustanding work.

Love what you did with this morph, I'd love to see how it looks in-game!

 

It doesn't Would indeed make sense to morph to asshole characters inner demon but those two guys doesn't even know each other
I did it just for fun. But yes. Should be easy to write a shader that blends a normal and morphs are possible with the latest unity update.
Would indeed be nice to see it ingame.
I simulated lowpoly morphs in 3dsMax some time ago. Again with the mudbox basemesh

 

The only way I can think about morphs is...
1) Normal map blends with a shader that takes two normal maps.
2) Vertex position morph by accessing the mesh in the script, and using Lerp for each vertex.

Not sure if it'd be fast, though. How do you do your morphs?

 

Assuming for this morphing technique each model has to have the same vertex count? (Obviously not a problem if you're always using the same base mesh). If not, that is some devilish trickery

 

Yeah! I think morphing between two meshes with different vertex order and amount, would be very hard... next to impossible have a morph function that detects which vertex belongs to what position in a completely different model.

Only way to morph vertices is that the vertex array the same size, and exactly the same order.

 

Yes, the meshes would need the same vertex count and vertex ID (Order of vertices). The morph in the video is a grab from the 3dsMax Viewport but I already morphed in Unity using blendshapes http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/177767-Blendshapes-support-in-Unity.
Shader might indeed be huge. It needs a diffuse blend, probably spec/gloss and of course normal maps. I might try it anyway
It's not that fancy. A lot of games use shaders like that to fake cloth wrinkel movement in the normals or face details (angry/relaxed etc)

 

Making a shader that blends various textures shouldn't be a problem right? Especially with Strumpy Shader Editor, or Shader Forge.

 

I had always wondered how it knew what verts morphed to the other verts, I often thought they must each have a specific ID - is it possible to change these IDs in a modelling package?

I'm sure someone much, much cleverer than me could come up with a solution to morphing models with unequal vertex counts. Say, if you had two identical models of a human, except model 2 was scaled up so it was 3 times larger. You then delete an edge loop around the right arm. These verts happened to be vertices 60 through to 80 - a total of 20 verts deleted. In the array of vertices you then fill indices 60-80 with a null/placeholder value. When the algorithm comes to morph the models, it knows it won't find vertices 60-80, so carries on without them. I'm sure you could probably do some funky stuff with the midpoints between edge loops and morphing verts to these locations, but I'm too tired to begin thinking about that

This was just a thought dump, and probably makes little sense to others, but I'm sure someone could, theoretically, do it somehow. ?


EDIT: just realised this wouldn't solve anything really, as you're still beginning from the same base mesh, just removing verts - a bit pointless
I guess you could have a system where you select a few vertices on model 1 and set their 'target vertices' (ie desired location) as a vertex on model 2, and it interpolates the positions of the surrounding verts? Like I said, I'm too tired to begin thinking about this at the moment!

 

It's a smart idea tweedie and a technique like that could work. At least visually. I guess the problem is, that most, probably all formats don't know such thing as placeholder values. As you mentioned, it wouldn't make much sense, if you started from an identical mesh anyway...unless you tend to brake stuff, like me Happend far too often, that I somehow managed to mess up the IDs

Anyway... TADAAA !

MORF WEBPLAYER

Needed ShaderModel 3. I guess Lerps produces too many instructions.
Just Diffuse and Normal for now. Diffuse is just subtle AO but it works. Both Lerps get controlled by one Range Float 0-1.
Nice and clean Blendshapes worked perfectly

The Meshes just have 5000 triangles. So there's a lot of normal lerping going on.

 

Ah yes, I hadn't thought about formats, I suppose you'd need to write your own custom one haha This has me very interested though - I may have to have a fiddle with some ideas, I won't realise any of them, but just to think of any possible alternatives.
Yes - I imagine I would break a few things, so it might be quite handy?

Awesome webplayer, very smooth transition - it'd be cool to see more human-to-creature morphs that slowly in games

 

That's some flawless morphing right there Florian! No perceivable lack of performance in my old-ish PC, but logically too many of these morph simultaneously could slow things down.

Haha, yeah! Of all morph target, Florian chose another monster! :3

 

sick! could this be used for animated muscles like the horses in red dead redemption? ;D

----

I'm working on a custom vertex blend shader (with substances for randomization) to paint dirt grime





(left without vertex colors - right painted substances)

 

nice work gotstyle. Does it blend via height map ? Looks very crisp and natural

Sure. It could be masked with animated or bone weighted vertex colors but thats getting to techy for me

 

Little update on my tauren model. I'm getting really happy with the results, but I still have not textured it, the colors you see are all from different materials and rendered.



First attempt at drawing it's fur, doesn't even look like fur....

 

Installed Windows on my Mac to use World Machine. Been a long time since I've used it, here is my terrain from today. Generated splatmaps so I'll be bringing it into Unity once I find a decent splatmap shader, anyone know any? Preferably one that works on non terrain objects.


If image doesn't show, click here

 

Thank you! Yes, the textures blends via height map (generated with substance designer). The dirt is generated using 2 different colors and a dirt variaton mask multiplied on top of the base texture.

Nice looks good!

Try http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/206516-Relief-Terrain-Pack-(RTP)-v3-on-AssetStore it's a great shader that works on non-terrain too!

 

Well I purchased Tom's Terrain Tools before seeing this post, no matter. $65 isn't that much(Installing RTP now). Here is how it looks in Unity with Tom's Terrain Tools and place holder textures.

 

Have a depressing valentines day!

​

 

Like always

 

That looks really good Khelton! Would be awesome fit for some tropical canyon with dense forest along sides. .

 

@KheltonHeadley: RTP is a great package. Surprisingly Skyshop comes with great terrain shaders and an excellent splat map importer as well

Looks good so far. I would try to add more subtle details in the texture. To match a blizzard style, handpainted fur would be best but procedural noise + directional motion blur, maybe a bit of turbulence will do as well.
Found a charming example of handpainted fur. Can't find the artist anymore but I post it anyway



edit: Jessica Dinh http://jessicadinh.blogspot.de/p/blog-page_18.html most awesome textures !

 

Feeling a bit low today.

1000tris self portrait

 

I agree, those looks pretty freaking good! And I think Tom's Terrain Tools also handle forest, right? I'm tempted to purchase it as well! Sounds like a great buy.

@TonyNowak: HAhaha! I love your humor!




↑↑↑Damn... this is such good polygon topology reference... straight to the art folder!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

 

At first glance I thought the screenshot of the scene was a drawing as well! Her texture work is very impressive

Very nice low poly Jesus model... oh, it's a self portrait

 

Would you say that this looks better? I tried doing it using a procedural texture.



But I'm having dificulties now applying the texture to him, Texturing has always been my biggest enemy, Is there a way I can texture like shown in this video( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkF1FcjEITU ) but using blender or any other free software?

 

Looks better Rafael. Maybe a bit too dark.
I can imagine its tricky to texture fur without seams. My meshes are completly unwrapped without overlapping UVs.
Less mobile friendly but I can fix all flaws without creating new ones on another part of the mesh. Unfortunatly I use Mudbox as well and have no idea if blender allows to paint directly on your mesh.
Sometimes I use Max to create procedural materials in world space and render them on my texture layout, as a base for photoshop. No seams or UV-stretching.
Maybe Blender can do something similar.

Haha ! Yeah, I get to hear that often in Real Life as well. So if Lowpoly Me looks like cheesus, fine

 

This isn't really game art, but it is something I made that I want to share
I call it Skany Cyrus! hahaha

http://tinypic.com/r/ftzt6o/8

 

(blush) I'm really stuck on what to do, the original idea was to create a Desert Canyon with a train riding along the bottom part crossing the river with a bridge and then continuing out into a flat part of the desert, but I've found myself putting green textures and making it look more forest/jungle like. Really tough decision, once I get the hand painted textures in I'll have to decide.

(blush) x2

 

Blender has a texturepaint mode, a surprisingly good one, but it has its flaws. You can paint directly onto a model, and use a texture brush etc when painting as well. If you apply a procedural texture to a model, you can bake out a diffuse texture map, which I believe is what Florian is saying you can do in Max.

Blender's baking system is quite strong actually, it's capable of baking a lot of different textures. To bake out a diffuse map, you'll want to give the character a material, assign the procedural texture to it and adjust the settings to your liking. Then UV unwrap the model, or use the hideous 'smart UV' layout if you're really low on time (I seriously wouldn't recommend that for a character, please unwrap your model properly if you want a good result). Then, go to the render tab (ie the camera button along the same bar as the modifiers panel [spanner]), go to the bottom and you'll see a 'Bake' panel. Change the bake mode to 'Texture' and providing you have your material set up properly, a UV layout, and a (new)/image for Blender to bake onto, hit the Bake button and blender will shove that procedural thingy onto the image layout for you

Please note that you'll need to select all of your UV layout, and then hit the 'New' button to make a new image, with the layout on top of it. If you're UV layout isn't using the image, then Blender will say it didn't find an image to bake to. Sorry if I sounded patronising when talking about the camera button, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know what the Render tab is



And very cool portrait Florian, I also see the Jesus thing

Lovely terrain Khelton, I'm also intrigued by the terrain tools pack now, but that's not to say your World Machine work is any less deserving of credit

 

+1 to the Blender talk, I use it everyday and I have to say it's surprisingly powerful. I don't however, use the texture paint mode so I couldn't really say. Only used it once on a old rocket I made.

Thanks so much for the comments guys

 

Blender is my only commercial product I use other than photoshop - that is to say, I have non-watermarked, educational, (and legally purchased thank you! ) copies of Autodesk products, but obviously I can't use them for anything commercial. Blender is fantastic. And that's not fanboy-ism. As far as bang-for-buck goes, Blender is insanely powerful. Granted - I don't use the texture paint system nearly enough as I should, but that's only because Photoshop is developed solely for image editing, so it's obviously much better suited to this task.

I will be very sad when I go to University (you call that college in the US right?) and they tell me they don't use Blender. I use it everyday and know it well.

That's a point actually - what's people's experience with Blender in the games industry? Obviously a lot of indies use it, but I've heard it's frowned upon in the CG industry in general, purely because it's free and therefore deemed unprofessional/not efficient/powerful. And blender's definitely efficient, hotkeys make me much quicker

 

If you ever have the chance, hit up the Blender Conference. Lots of Pros use it and they talk there. If it wasn't across the ocean I'd go. But yeah, I fear the day when they tell me I can no longer us Blender as well.

 

Going to the Blender conference is a real dream; something I'd love to do in the next couple of years, but I live in the UK, and whilst that's no ocean to cross ( ) I'm only a student and have no real way to finance that at the moment, what with Uni coming up in just over a year. But I'm making it a goal to go one day!

I hope that things will get better exponentially. Blender is becoming more powerful at a much faster rate currently, and it also seems to be getting a lot more respect from pros and the industry. I hope this continues, because it's a wonderful bit of kit