Tuesday 23 February 2010

BMW

So to start this off i thought id go on about my futile attempt to do my first ever mesh bake with a pair of binoculars.

My first ever attempt to mesh bake pretty much went tits up due to the fact my models ended up being a bit dodgy, but it has had its benefits. Ive learnt to mesh bake in the process but in future can only do it successfully if i have good efficient models to do it with. So with that my binocular mesh baking project reached its limit.

the past few days ive been entertaining myself with the BMW brief, and I feel this has really helped me get work done.

This is because apart from the obvious work of the group project where ive been given specific tasks to do when im trying to do my own work in my own time ive ended up sitting down infront of the computer and going right lets model something, but then drawing a blank. Unless you actually sit down with an idea of what you want to specifically model already drilled into your head i find it quite difficult to just model something. I mean in terms of modeling assets for games there literally isnt anything that you cant model, so i end up not knowing what the hell to do. So BMW brief has helped me a lot because it means BMW has put the idea in my head for me, im going to model a car.

Plus this brief is for an opportunity to go to munich and work for BMW themselves for a while, which could be a great experience, and has kind of motivated me into getting it done. im pretty skeptical about doing anything like actually sending my model to them, im just really using their brief as a reason to get a car modelled, but you never know



My WIP in goin half decent at the moment, ive got the car in at 3,00ish tris currently, but the wheels are at 1,000 each at the moment due to me goin and putting a bit extra detail into making the alloys, so thats where most the polys are. Hopefully ill get it done in the not too distant future to have finished models to post up here


Sunday 7 February 2010

Trash


Again with the tutorials, and this time i got one that helped me show how to render and present my 3d work a bit more professionally for the sakes of portfolios and what not. With it being internet tutorials im learning all this from and some of my work getting better from it and some just failing im starting to believe tutorials arent the law of the land and that some out there are genuinely good and help you and others are just shit in all honesty. But for the most part this one was actually good. So i used it to present my bin, and im happy with the result, so more where this came from i guess.

Mesh Baking Failure

OK so as part of second year stuff ive started learning a few extra things in max, one of them being mesh baking. Mesh baking is where u can 'bake' the detail of a high poly object onto a low poly object so it creates the illusion of that low poly object having better detail and a higher tri count than it actually does have. So i got my hands on a rather useful tutorial on how to do this, and first off to do this you need a low poly model of what you want the detail baked onto and the high poly model containing all the detail. This in fact i learned is the longest part, mesh baking itself takes next to no time, modelling the to things is what takes all the time in this. So after all this i had my 2 models, and you can see the diference between the high and the loe quite clearly.



So from here i started following the tutorial up to rendering the normal map which is where it all went wrong, and this pissed me off cus i dont know where ive went wrong. All the normals where either bearly visible or extremely pixelated and in the wrong place. I guess experience at this is defenitely what is needed to make this work and look good




So after all this yeah im back to the drawing board, hopefully Ill be back on here soon with a (finally) successfully done and working baked pair of binoculars