clyde

3D Modeling

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Hey guys! Major 3D nerd here specializing in Maya, shoot any questions you got at me. I'd be delighted to help.

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I still use Softimage XSI ModTool, though sometimes I feel like I am the last person using it. There's a lot of problems, like you can't do animations clips, or you can't properly merge two different scenes. Still I am weirdly attached to it.

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Hey guys! Major 3D nerd here specializing in Maya, shoot any questions you got at me. I'd be delighted to help.

 

What can you tell me about xdugef, I am looking for ways to incorporate it into my Maya workflow

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Nope or at least I've not heard of one. 

 

It's an issue as old as 3D Modelling itself. Sometimes people try to disguise the issues at the top and bottom by either making it a very blank area (which works for planets with ice caps well but not many other things. I think I've heard of decals being used over the poles too but that's not a very efficient method.

Can I ask what you're trying to make?

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I've been diving back into 3D modeling after a long hiatus, and moving from Maya + Mudbox and my old university's own game engine (Nebula Trifid) to Blender and Unity has been so nice. After watching a couple of tutorials on youtube (highly recommend looking up Darrin Lile's tutorials) to reacquaint myself with the interface, I decided to build a simple box model basemesh and sculpt out a first concept for the main character of a game I'm hoping to put together in Unity:

N7FQweb.png

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Nice, work.

I can see some issues with the anatomy though, are you using reference images? 

Thank you. :)

I started out without reference (other than stuff I know from memory thanks to artistic anatomy classes), then pulled out a couple of anatomy books to do some corrections. It's nowhere near done, of course, and I'm still doing passes to touch up stuff I missed or  waited on doing for a bit. Anything in particular you were thinking of?

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I know it's work in progress so I tried to not be too nit-picky :)

 

VwOdBOY.jpg

 

I realise that the image is in perspective so it won't be exactly 8 heads but it's worth having a look at. The image below is problematically labels 'ideal' so of course take it with a pinch of salt but it Andrew Loomis so defintiely worth taking note.

prop_female.gif

From here.

 

Also a good resource: https://www.youtube.com/user/onairvideo

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I'm not one to argue with the likes of Loomis, Richer or Winslow. My anatomy teacher made sure of that (he got a t-shirt from one class that says "Do as I say and you'll become a happier human being". Very true.) Thanks! :)

 

I'm aware that she's a bit short, she's meant to be shorter than average so that's by design, but I'll take a look at the shoulders and legs. Thanks! :)

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tumblr_np1ux9kDuS1uu3zwko1_1280.png

 

This technique for lowpoly 3d art is really interesting - using a super small texture map (16x16 pixels in this case!), and then treating that diffuse map as your palette for the entire game, relying on the geometry and UV space to determine the flat color for individual elements.  Here's another example of the same workflow -

 

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I haven't watched the video, but is there any advantage to this over using vertex colors? The results looks similar to the results of using vertex colors.

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Wouldn't the blurriness of the models have more to do with the aliasing on his Graphics card than the art style? In the video he zooms in on the model to show it doesn't get blurrier, which I assume was him referencing the edges.

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Yeah the 'vector style' tagline is kind of disingenuous because of course if you're working in 3d the outlines are going to be resolution-independent, but there's no way to get the infinite zoom on curved surfaces that you get with 2d bezier curves that I'm currently aware of.  I mean unless someone's invented an engine that dynamically subdivides based on a control mesh as you zoom in.

 

I also have no idea if vertex colors are better or not, having never tried to use them mysef, so I'm also curious to know if there's any advantages to this technique over vertex coloring.

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He's talking really just about texture resolution in regards to zoom I think, of course the model is subject to limited geometry and display resolution but there's not really much you can do about that in the modelling/texturing.

 

You could achieve almost the same effect with a standard texture but it'd be hard to avoid any blur and likely it'd have to be rather large and then there's compression that engines do and other variables in that situation. As he mentions the disadvantage of this method is that you're effectively drawing the shapes in geometry (or topology as he calls it) which means you're using a lot more polys than you could be but this is probably balanced out by having tiny textures.

 

As for vertex colours, as he mentioned they are a possibility. The thing about vertex colours is that you are colouring a vertex where as this guy is colouring a face. So when you colour a vertex it creates a gradient around that vertex which blends to whatever colour is on the next vertex, so you don't get clean lines (left in the image). The solution to that is either you add another line next to it to make the blend more defined (middle in the image) and you could put it so close that it's imperceptible but at that point you may want to just separate the faces (right in the image). In the image below I've shown this as two unconnected faces and two next to each other because they're both the same, if you want to get the perfectly clean lines it's the way to do it but it does double up on verts for every vert on the division line.

 

Separating the faces will create a clean look but is not clean geometry, if the model has to deform in any way it will likely cause some issues there, import/export and engine optimisation may decide to merge the verts and then the effect is screwed so you have to be careful with it. Also whatever 3D modelling tool you're using may allow you to colour by face without separating but it's faking it, when you export the model the only way to maintain those colours is to separate them.

 

bbj2kFr.jpg

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Is there some kinda standard, sensible way of UVing a sphere?

 

I was thinking about this and one other method would be projection, if you can make a planet that looks how you want (possibly with geometry for landmass or something) then you can get a normal UV mapped sphere and project onto that to create the texture map.

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Is there some kinda standard, sensible way of UVing a sphere?

 

Quadsphere with a tennis-ball unwrap is a method I've seen advised elswhere.

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