Another painting test...

Not enough energy to work on my light this evening, so i did a quick trumpet vine study to continue my texturing techniques:

Things I learned:

1. work BIG!

2. check perspective!

3. organize layers!

Normal, AO, and Emissive maps, Oh My!

Next on the UDK to do list - making a light! (Hopefully this post will get me motivated!)

First - baking my high to low poly normal map (exhaustive normal map article HERE), texturing (and baking AO), and creating the glow map.

After the light is done I plan to tackle THIS, but I have to get the light done first!

Quick preview of what I plan to make:

Painting practice

OK - been a bit slow as I've been recovering from a gnarly staph infection. If you've never had one before, my suggestion is that you keep it that way.

Anyhoo, a bit of a different update this week. I'm brushing up on my PS skills :) as I'm preparing to begin some texture work on my scene. This little guy is the result of random doodling and trying various techniques:

his name is Sumthin, and he kept me laughing the whole process...

QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote

Great new 3D engine technology coming our way from id. Always the inovator, this time the company does away with traditional texture mapping (no complaints here).

Hear about it all in this youbube vid.

First comment sums it all up:

(about JC) Dude taught himself aerospace engineering for fun. AMD, NVIDIA, INTEL design drivers and hardware to suit his code. Wrote a game engine on his honeymoon.

UDK - Transparent Materials

Got my first transparencies working today thanks to this excellent video tutorial:

Creating transparent materials and fractured meshes.

Just remember to make objects with transparency selectable!

And a great article on various Transparency Maps.

and here's the result:

Next I'll be tackling something I ran across today - Soft Shadows.

Edit: or triggerable animated meshes - sounds more fun :)

FBX - no edge direction support

When exporting FBX from 3DS Max I kept getting a warning message (which I chose to ignore):

I decided it was worth investingating and came upon the following article on the AREA forums:

FBX doesn't support edge directions

FBX has always been my preferred exporting format but isn't always the best for low poly meshes where edge direction is a concern.

UDK Level - Begin!

Quick update on my UDK level as I test importing geometry and getting the hang of proper lighting in a scene. My goal is to get the basics down and then import a portion of our BIM projects for some real time snazziness!!

(i know it's basic right now...)