PolyCount Blocking Commplete

This is the armor set blocking complete. I'm saving the weapon to do last. I have tons of ideas and I think I'll only be able to settle on one once I see everything else textured and put together.

fixed the normal issue. Went the simpler route of just poly modeling it, instead of sculpting it in 3D Coat. got much cleaner lines and smoother shapes.

PolyCount Contest.

Decided to do the PolyCount Contest for DOTA2. Love the art direction in that game, and thought it'd be fun, both to make an item set and to learn how to work with Valves system. This is the initial concept with tons of technical issues, so redesign

Next version moving forward but while I like the shoulder pad its too much like the original.

Paint over of that, thinking about edits I want to make...

Default Character looks like this BTW

Over Retopologizing

A lesson occurred to me as I drove to work today, after a morning of leisurely retopo'ing my ship, I've been over-retopo'ing. I've been making it WAY too high rez. Whats the point of baking to normals if I'm going to draw in all the details? Well at least I've been getting good at retopo in 3D Coat. Anyway, I'm going to focus on key areas to build and then bake the details in the normal as I should have already been doing. Now that I see it this way I'm not as worried about the amount of work to rebuild it.

Destroyer Class Star Ship

This is going to be in cut scenes in the next game, one of 2 ships. There are some things I will add like antennas and small bits and pieces once I retopo this beast. Its basically the ship is done with the voxel modeling and kitbashing with tinkerObjects. Anyway next step is retopo... not really even sure where to begin with this guy. If I can't figure out a nice way in 3D Coat I'll use Topogun. But I'm scared either way, LOL. But yeah another level of detailing once its back to poly's.

Reflection Fractals Tests

I did this a while ago for a potential part of a project. I was playing with something I thought was going to be boring but ended up being a lot of fun. I saw this technique first from Duncan Brinsmead but didn't think too much about it. After you get whats going on, its a great lesson in reflective surfaces. I suggest giving it a try. There are example files on Duncan's AREA blog.

I did many more tests but these are just a few selections of ones I liked for various reasons. They kinda clash when put together like this but oh well. hah.

Space Station Blocking

I did this back in march, but this is about how much concept art I'm doing. As for UV'ing I'm using Roadkill, Ninja UV, and 3D Coat. SO I have the tools to UV its just some jobs are still not easy.

UV Nightmare

I felt like I was getting good and fast at UV'ing until I went back to this space station! So freaking hard. A lot of angular cylinders and trying to get a lot of straight lines with edges. Basically needs a lot of hand UV layout and really I could have spent more than a day on it. It sucks when you want something to look great but know that the time invested to get it there isn't worth it. I'd love for all the panels on this space station to be just right, but to get things to the quality level of a production model would take too much time, well, for this project. Auto UV'ing was ok and got me... somewhere, but the other hard thing is large objects to show scale need small details. That means texture space. I'm making this with a 4k texture but bet it will be 2k in game(maybe not) either way it needs optimal UV layout to get the most out of the design. I thought I was getting pretty good and quick and UV's until I took my new understandings and re-applied them to this. Argh...