Matthew Mills: Digital Artist » Capstone

Delorean WIP 1

mcubed13 — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:55:00 +0000

Hey everyone. Speaking of works in progress. Here is the low poly Delorean I have been working on for this summer’s Capstone project. It’s only a piece of the project, but I’ll talk more about that later.

I finished modeling him yesterday, and just finished some final tweaks and did a couple test renders. I squeezed him into 2490 polygons, which is under my 2500 limit I set for myself. I’m pretty sure this is at least close to industry standard as far as counts go, but if you have a better idea let me know.

Texturing is next for him, and I hope it goes well. Of course I have to UV map first, which is always fun.

As always, comments are welcome.

Delorean WIP 2

mcubed13 — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:18:00 +0000

Hello again. Thought you’d like to see how the delorean is doing. Just finished the color part of the texture. I still have a bump map, specular map, and transparency map to do, but they shouldn’t take me very long.

Delorean WIP Final

mcubed13 — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:59:00 +0000

It’s done! Finished all the texture maps I needed to make. Here are some final renders for your viewing pleasure, and a composite I did for a little fun. Enjoy!

Final Specs:
2490 Tri’s
1×2048 Color Texture Map
1×2048 Bump Map
1×2048 Transparency Map
1×2048 Specular Map
Maya 2008
12 hours – est.

Prop 1 – Clock

mcubed13 — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:08:00 +0000

Made a clock today. Yup. Sure did. And here it is. The first of three props for my capstone project that go along with the Delorean. Clock makes sense, it was a time travel movie.

593 polygons ( Might be a little high for a prop but I went nuts on the details.)
1×1024 color map
1×1024 specular map
1×1024 transparency map ( for the glass front )

Prop 2 – Guitar

mcubed13 — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:01:00 +0000

Just finished my Guitar prop here. It’s a replica of the one Marty plays near the end of Back to the Future, keeping with my theme again. It’s a Custom Made Bigsby ES-355.

1363 Polygons (Way high for a prop, but I did put in all the little pieces with geometry as opposed to just in the texture like I could have. I wanted it to be as accurate as possible, but I kept the poly count as low as possible.)
1X1024 Texture Map

Prop 3 – Skateboard

mcubed13 — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:01:00 +0000

Just finished my last prop, and thus my last model for the capstone project. This one was the skateboard. It isn’t modeled after any one skateboard from Back to the Future, but I did design the bottom decal with that theme in mind.

908 polys
1X1024 texture map

I still have some other little things to finish up for Capstone. Need to finish my normal mapping research. I redid the UV map for the Hydral, and I’ll be doing a quick high res version to make the normal map from tonight probably. Will only spend a couple hours on it, and then will just try a few ways to actually make the normal map. You’ll probably see how that comes out tomorrow, as I’ll post my results.

After all that, and some residual forms, Capstone is done! After taking a few days to rest up, catch up on some video games, and figuring out my work schedule, I’ll be picking up my Scissor Sisters project again. Expects posts on that in the future.

Normal Mapping Artifacts Explained

mcubed13 — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:35:00 +0000

Hey guys. Some of you I already showed how to do normal mapping, but I was struggling to figure out why I was getting little artifacts. Well I finally figured it out. It’s all in the UV map.

I’ve been watching a video tutorial from digital tutors that covers the whole maya to zbrush to maya pipeline, and they mentioned how important a clean UV map is. So I went back to my hydral and looked at the UV map with a little trick they used in the tutorial. They used a checker pattern to give a visual representation of the uv on the 3D model, and low and behold, there were my artifacts. Have a look:

On the left is the model with the normal map, and on the right is the corresponding UV map distortion.

I am now cleaning the uv map, and will be trying Zbrush again. The normal map won’t be very detailed, as I’m just trying to get the process down right now. I’m also going to try another program I found, called Xnormal, and see how that works.