Thursday, June 23, 2005

Unofficial Game Art (mini) Challenge

Ultimate crate/barrel

Soft shadows trick

"A simple setup to get correct soft shadows from lights. It's based on the spinning light trick, but a bit elaborated. Motion blur is required; it works great with Fprime, and it's good for animation....
....It gives a good circular soft shadow, like sun's one or even interior lamps.
It can be improved with sliders; you can get custom-shape shadows modifying target's path.
Just load the scene, put an object on a plane and play with it, it's fairly simple and can be improved... place here your ideas if you like."

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Invert Morphs

Swap base with another morph, and so on.
(You could do this but applying morphs at -100% and so on but this might be a quick helper under the maps tab.)

stairs

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Saturday, June 11, 2005

Low poly "photorealistic human face" tute

CGtalk teturing tute thread re: texturing for a "photorealistic low poly human face."

Probably a good starting point for high-poly photoreal face texture in terms of blocking in base colours and so on...

Lightwave Google Group

Friday, June 10, 2005

NEW PRIEST

Whoah, I approached this album with a fair amount of scepticism, as most awesome metal bands end up recording urinal cake standard material after about 4 releases.

The new Judy album is fucking gold, riffs & drums are just modern enough to make them better than if they were thin & shitty 80's sounding.

But Halford is in fucking top form. The first track says it best

JUDAS IS RISING.

damn fucking right!!!

get this & play it for your signifigant other, all of a sudden you wont have to listen to something gay in the car, she'll let you play this as you charge down the highway. If you liked the Darkness in 2002 (& you fucking well better have) this is the next best thing.

Preset Central

Kolby Jukes

Lightwave modeling video tutes

Zwave for Lightwave8 -> Zbrush2

Spinquad forum

Thursday, June 09, 2005

LW and After Effects - Newtek forum thread

Newtek thread regarding Unfold3D tutorial ...

The tute in question is HERE

On page 2 of the newtek thread (post #20) there are some tips about getting a perfectly symmetrical UV map with a few steps after those outlined in the Unfold3D tutorial.
- Mesh Reknitter plugin is used

There is also Lynx's Relax UV plugin, which, according to a post in THIS Spinquad thread,* "does a nice job with additional uv cleanup after unfolding"

*(also about using Unfold3D for ripping UV maps)

LW to Motionbuilder

Recent Newtek thread with some good tips

Monday, June 06, 2005

FI's Jointmorph

Be interested to see how this compares with JointMorph standard.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Relax UVs Modeler plugin

This plugin does NOT magically rip great UV maps.

BUT it is a good tool to use during manual "pelting" to minimise stretching.
I use it this way:

STEP 1 -
Manually rip a map, stretch tweak and tidy it a bit by hand, then run "relax UVs" to take out some of the distortion. (Check "Lock boundary" and "Quad Substructure")

Then manually fix any issues caused by "relax UV".
- it may have caused overlap around holes: eyes, mouth, ears

STEP 2 -
Set up dual window display, one side UV display and the other textured wire, perspective view.

In surface editor assign a checkered test texture to the surface using the new UV map. Select the polys where the texture has the most stretching, and run "relax UVs" again on those polys only. You may need to go back (undo) deselect some polys and rerun "relax UVs", to isolate the relax area of effect.

STEP 3 -
Now, instead of a mess of distortion, your checkered test texture is largely pretty cool, with some small areas of obvious stretching. On the textured wire perspective view you can select points where the texture is stretched, and move the points in the UV display window, to make your UV map rad in a relatively short space of time.

NOTE: when manipulating points in the UV window, transform UV map -50% on the U axis, then activate symmetry.
(Selecting a point and moving with the "T" move tool will move the other side in symmetry, the DRAG tool unfortunately doesn't work in symmetry yet in this particular context.)

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