Blogs - dinky

So lately I've had quite a bit of time to do stuff! I've been creating a rig for Doom 3's main player skeleton, and let me just say it's a bitch. I'm doing it for a team that already has a ton of animations with that skeleton, so that means I have to make a rig that surrounds the current skeleton.

I have to admit, the Doom 3 player skeleton is the worst piece of trash I've ever seen. There's joints where there shouldn't be (useless joints), and there aren't any joints in places where there should be, like there are only 2 joints connecting from the chest to the head... No neck joint!

Also, definitely the most irritating thing, is that the .md5mesh importers fuck up the Joint Orientation axis of a bunch of the joints when you import it...

Anyway, I'm having a hell of a time getting my IK/FK switch to work on the arms. Sure, I can make the IK/FK switch no problem - but I've also written a script that matches the location of the FK for the IK, and the IK for the FK. This way, if the animator switches between IK and FK, it animates SEAMLESSLY - and that's key.

Welp! Time to stop whining about that. I've got a really ugly render of a texture I did really quickly in Photoshop for my side project. Check it out:

That's the low-polygon model with mostly normal maps on it. Although, not all of the models have normal maps. Specifically, in this image, the goggles on his head. It's just a quick rough in - but notice what the logo is!!! :)

Wooot! I finally finished school! Now I can concentrate on working on my personal projects and mods until I'm off to film school! Huzzah!

Right now I'm working on super secret animations for the mod Ruiner for Doom 3. Ssssshhhh!!! Don't tell anyone! But you can expect news from the Ruiner team maybe in a few weeks, but don't expect news tomorrow! We have to do the work first, after all! But the news will be big!

So! I decided that I would give xNormal, the texture generation software, another chance. I tried to figure this software out about a year or so ago, mind you I was rushing for a result - I never got one, so I just used Nvidia's Melody, which is somewhat simpler.

But now that I'm working on the new character (Anath), I decided to give it a shot and test it out on the low-poly model that I made and UV Wrapped. And boy what fun did I have!!!

(No goggles.)

xNormal test:
Img410.imageshack.us

I just tweaked around with the cage tools in the SBM format and tested out some standard settings. That's a normal map on top of a low-polygon model that I made in Maya. And the low-polygon model without the normal map you can see here:

Img5.imageshack.us

xNormal was able to provide me with very satisfactory results without me even tinkering with it that much. There are actually a few places I'm going to re-work, but overall, I'm happy with the normal map. I can't wait to texture the rest of him!

I'm going to be busy now, though. :(

Oh, and you can downoad xNormal for free at: Xnormal.net

Just as an update, I'd like to note that I'm modeling the low-poly for Anath now. I'm actually just going to model the head/goggles in low-poly then I'm going to try and get some decent normal maps out of that. I think I'm going to play around with texturing the head before I model the rest of him. I'm in no rush, just doing this for fun.

Stay tuned for updates!

Well, as the title suggests, my modding computer is back! I managed to get a GTX 280 for my gaming computer, and I put the old video card into this computer, which is an 8800 GTX. Now all this comp needs is a significant CPU upgrade! I've still got some old AMD dual core in here. I've been thinking about saving some money and getting a Mobo/CPU combo deal over at Newegg.com, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

But, since I finally got this computer running, I just couldn't resist getting back on my art stuff. Among other things, I've started again on my Anath project. Being off of my art computer was just driving me nuts! All I was doing on my gaming machine was browsing the internet, and of course, playing games. I spent a couple of weeks just playing Quake Live, Left 4 Dead, Crysis, Counter-Strike, and others. It really showed me that I can't just play games like when I was younger. When I was 13 I would play for so many hours in one day, but now I have to occupy most of my time with my hobbies/ambitions (art stuff), just because that's what I love.

Well anyway, here's what I managed to do in a few minutes with Anath. I didn't mean to do work on him, I just wanted to load him up to take a look again; since it was 4 am when I loaded him up, I figure I would take a look and just go to bed, but I wound up adding a 3D layer and sculpting on some skin pours. OMG I LOVE ZBRUSH!!!!

Well, my modding computer's video card, which is a few years old, has burned out! It's totally my fault. After I started getting some serious looking problems on my screen, I opened up the PC to see what the problem might be. I kept thinking to myself that I needed to clean it, but I never got around to it. And now, I open up the fan cover on my old 7800 GTX and see that there is HUGE amounts of lent inside of it. Cleaning it out didn't do any good, it's permanently broken!

So, I'm going to upgrade my gaming computer, and give my modding computer the video card in that machine. In my gaming PC right now, I have an 8800 GTX; I'm going to upgrade it to a GTX 280, so my modding computer will get the 8800 GTX. At least now I can consider trying to get static models into the CryEngine, although I still need a better CPU in that old modding comp.

On that note, I wish the CryEngine had animation support for something OTHER than 3dsmax. Something that I've loved about Doom 3 is that John Carmack from id software released the source code for their exporters, so exporters could be made for any and all modeling/animation software, and as a result, you can get models and animations into Doom 3 pretty much no matter what software you're using.

With Crysis, all us non-3dsmax users get is nothing. Unless you use Maya or Blender, in which case you can only export/import static models!!! I would love to mod Crysis, but I'm a character artist, and it won't let me!!!

More Media Added

I hadn't actually planned on doing much in ZBrush with this model right away. I created the base mesh in Maya 2008 as something I can use over and over again to start off character models. I took it into ZBrush to test a few things, specifically Transpose, because I'd never used transpose before.

But, like usual, I just had too much fun in ZBrush. I got carried away and just continued to sculpt. I wasn't aiming to get anything 100% realistic, I didn't use any anatomy reference, I just sculpted what I've practiced for so long! This model was just for fun, nothing to compete with realism.

The original base mesh that I mentioned is not complete. It would be, if I had the time to do this stuff (I hate school). In fact, you can see holes in the bottom of the geometry because it had n-sided polygons when I exported it to ZBrush, and ZBrush is only capable of dividing meshes with triangles and quads, so when ZBrush imported the OBJ, it just dumped those polygons.

Anyway, you can see them in my gallery and by clicking the thumbnails below!

Media Added

I added some more media to my images page. They're some screenshots of some older work I did, maybe in 2006, beginning of 2007 or something.

The model's base mesh was created in Maya 6.5, then exported to .obj and sent to ZBrush 3.1 so I could test out the new tools there. This includes, poly-painting, HD-Geometry, some of the new brushes, and to see how far I could get without having to use the projection master.

It was based on the beautiful actress Summer Glau who starred in Firefly, Serenity, and more recently, as Cameron Phillips (a Terminator) in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I'm only somewhat upset by the images that I've uploaded, because back then when I rendered the images, I did not know that ZBrush had a "Perspective" camera option (this feature was added in 3.1), to make the image look less "Flat" and more realistic. I may - sometime in the future - dig up the old model in ZBrush and take some new renders. But the renders I have uploaded don't really look all that bad since the model was pretty well done.

So, I think that's all I have for this blog post...