4 posts tagged “3d”
Overall, the model didn't take nearly as long as I expected (half of a day's work), though I want to add a lot more detail to it, particularly the mane of the lion (though he's also missing teeth). I'm going to see if I can create some large locks of hair flowing around the edges, but not too much fine line detail since I want a good cast bronze look. Then I'll have to UVW wrap it (I hate that part of the workflow), generate normal maps, paint diffuse and specular maps, then put it all together.
I was chatting with "Kat" this afternoon. I sent him the above image with the caption, "Kat's got really big knockers!" I think he really liked that. We were talking about high polygon modeling (by high, I mean over a million polygons) and how you really have to depend on some other displacement sculpting application like zBrush. 3ds Max or Blender simply won't do for this kind of detail. Problem is, zBrush is another piece of expensive(!) software that I can't fully justify and there is another steep learning curve involved before I can even get it to do the basics of what I want to achieve. Oh, and there's also the whole import/export compatibility thing that drives people like me batty.
So Kat points me to a little secret application that he's discovered, a little beta software called Crazy Bump. It doesn't compare to zBrush by any means, it's actually a really cool height map to normal map converter. The idea is you paint a black and white height map in Photoshop or whatever and then import that in Crazy Bump and it converts it into a normal map.
"Big deal," you say... "we can already do that with the nVidia Photoshop plug-in." Aha! Aside from being ridiculously easy to use (anything with huge text and enough buttons to count on only one hand must be easy) Crazy Bump also comes with two convenient little buttons called, "Find Low Frequency Image Detail" and "Analyze Image for 3D Shapes". They could be a self destruct button for all I know, but clicking on them, it pauses to think while insulting my puny human existence, then outputs an amazing normal map in the real-time 3D preview window. Must be a little bit of black magic/fairy dust code in there somewhere. Click screenshots below to see what I'm talking about.
Next best thing since sliced bread, indeed!
It started off pretty 'meh' but around halfway through, things get really amazing. I wonder how long it takes the algorithm to reconstruct the face and what kind of hardware it needs to power it. I expect it won't be as fast as shown in the video. Audrey Hepburn looked a little spooky in that she was moving her head around rather unnaturally. Impressive nonetheless.
So, I've taken almost a year off from any serious work in the video game developer's inner circle, instead doing stuff for web and print. I guess since it's been a long time off, I'm starting to feel that little itch stronger than ever - the one that means the seeds of creativity are starting to bloom again. I wanted to do something completely different than what I am used to, so I thought I'd share what I'm working on recently.
So the idea is to find a shortcut to represent the 6500 polygons using as few as say, 40 polygons. We do this by generating something called a normal map, an image file that captures the vectors of the high polygon model and projects them onto the low polygon model. In effect, we can simulate all the details of the high polygon model that will be used exclusively within our modeling program, onto our low polygon model that will be actually used in game, resulting in some 6460 spare polygons that we can use elsewhere.
Some interesting things happen when we add lighting, the low polygon model can actually self-shadow, that is, cast virtual, dynamic shadows on itself generated from the small bumps and grooves of the high polygon model.
For the uninitiated, this probably all sounds really confusing, so as I get further down the workflow, I'll post some comparison images that will illustrate the effect. The point I'm trying to get across is that what you see in a video game, a heck of a lot more goes on behind the scene than most people realize, especially when it comes to optimizing everything so that your computer/console won't play back a slideshow.
I'm posting this from a computer running Ubuntu "Edgy" and Beryl.
Originally I was running "Dapper Drake" but found some limitations when running XGL/AIGLX software, so I torrented Ubuntu 6.10 64-bit edition in about half an hour (free open software is great). The new Edgy build has AIGLX integrated, so that made life easy. Installed, updated nVidia beta drivers (shouldn't have done that) and followed these instructions. Rebooted to find myself locked at the command line with nVidia driver conflict errors. After a few tense moments, I managed to uninstall the nVidia drivers with this command:
sudo dpkg --purge nvidia-kernel-common
Rebooted into Ubuntu and reinstalled the beta nVidia drivers again. Beryl now works with cool swishy, fading, 3D GUI effects. I like eye candy.
