Posts by Acumen

mh, so my current mod project was pretty much put on hold cause my friend just has no more time to work on it for a while and now I'm tryin to find a mod project (hl2 preferred ) I could do some modeling work for. I'd like to do mostly static modeling because I simply can't be motivated to do player modeling for now

So this is some stuff I did in the last year or so, startin with the most current one. It would be cool to get some answers

So basically I don't really wanna work for such things like realistic teamplay mods but I'm more into sci-fi or "fantasy"-mods where I get some cool concept art and have to make a 3d model out of it.

Due to my old computer I don't own hl2 or any of the following products so i can't compile any of the models. So my "work" would only be modeling and if its needed uvmapping of the objects. Unfortunately that's all I can do

Well and hi-poly-modeling for normal mapping purposes is also not possible since my computer can only handle a certain amount of polygons

But if you still want to give it a try you could give me a test assignment or something like that. Well and I wouldn't want to work for a mod that goes like "oh we gots the superbe idea but still have to gather a huge team to realise it and we all have no clue of how things work". I just want to help out a nice team, that progresses just fine but could need some help in doing such small prop models

Thanks for your time and I hope it was ok to put this in the classifieds board, though i'm not recruiting but tryin to be recruited

So if you should be interested you can send me a mail to [email protected] or reply in this thread or pm me or whatever

Futuristic room after concept art:

[Blocked Image: http://www.acumen-design.de/model_pics/con…st/a290b347.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.acumen-design.de/model_pics/con…est_render2.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/con…est_render3.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/con…est_render5.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/con…est_render6.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/con…st_render10.gif]

Some standard prop models:

http://www.acumen-design.de/model_pics/ ... ender1.jpg

http://www.acumen-design.de/model_pics/ ... ender1.jpg

[Blocked Image: http://www.acumen-design.de/model_pics/sta…er2_render1.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.acumen-design.de/gallery/enviro…air_render1.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.acumen-design.de/model_pics/con…/bike_full1.jpg]

mh one thing that also bugged me on many parts of the beretta model is that you seem to have polygons that have like 10 sides. So while this is only on flat surfaces I still dont think its too useful in the end to not have at least make quads out of it. Cause I remember max doing some pretty weird triangulation after I didn't tell it where to put the edges. Apart from that it just looks weird on the wire render

I would definately keep those bolts but just pull them outwards a little bit. That will definately contribute to the model. Don't know why everyone is sooo crazy about the use of normal maps on this model

This is all fine but keepin it will definately make the model look better, cause it adds to the overall silhouette. And its not like you're saving tons of polies. This knife will do no harm polygon-wise anyways, so keepin the bolts is just fine. Considering that you probably would see only one bolt ingame and the rest will be covered by the hand model it's all just mighty fine \o/

looks like it was made after one of the first modeling tutorials for max which you used for lightwave

but i really don't know what you learned with that 30-polygon-piece or what you wanted to learn ? Looks like a box that was extruded outwards and inwards a few times. I mean, no offense, but I don't see what kind of serious crits you want on that model piece ?

If you did some supercool texturs for that, that would be great but the ship itself isn't anything that great, in my opinion, sry

zbrush works a bit like a paint tool. imagine sculpting terrain in one of these sim city games, where you can lower and higher the terrain with the tools. so you're not actually doing it in 3d on the model. you are moving the perspective around and however you place the model in it you can deform it accordingly with different brushes (size, shape - even custom brushes are possible)

mh that sounds weird, i guess

you should try it or watch one of these crazy video tutorials on the zbrush site (the awesome fish explains many things), it becomes very clear after watching these videos, how this programm works.

i think his nasal bone is too thin, looks very feminine, almost doll-like. it should be quite a bit wider, imo.

when i saw the first wip with no mouth and ears i kinda thought what it would look like once further progressed

it was really clean and all and now with the mouth area it got kinda "messy" with some tris here and there. It's nothing bad in the end you just have to work around the model to improve the polyflow a bit. The chin area could be cleaned up a bit with taking away one edge row. Well and again for the polyflow you could move some vertices to get rid of some zigzag edges

anyways, a very solid start so far \o/

lol, that model has way too many polies for you to use it in a remake of whatever map you're tryin to make ;D

was about time cyberjunkie ! now im excited to see what you come up with next and how long it'll take you

looks really nice, though

maybe something that would fit into some ingame purposes ?

(omg that emoticon is sooo cool)

hehe thanks for the replies, guys

here's some links to some of the wip shots we collected in the original thread:

laber:

http://www.rubenmueller.de/temp/trendtredl_konzept.jpg

http://www.rubenmueller.de/temp/trendtr ... shot01.jpg

http://www.rubenmueller.de/temp/trendtr ... shot03.jpg

http://www.rubenmueller.de/temp/trendtr ... shot05.jpg (you can see how you're supposed to use the trendtredl on there )

http://www.milkshape3d.de/portfolio/tem ... er01_b.jpg (wire shot

acumen:

http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/mod ... sheet1.gif

http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/mod ... t_wip1.jpg

http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/mod ... t_wip3.jpg

http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/mod ... _wire1.jpg (wire shot

alpha textures could be used for the spokes, but the "contest" was all about doing the concept and the model. No textures involved

But the next duel is on its way, and I'm forced to do some textures there

thought I could post the results of a little contest me and a friend of mine had in the past week over in a forum (german one - so sry for some of the writings on the concept - couldn't really translate that ^^) and so I thought I could share the results with you guys

the goal was to model anything that fits in a "bicyle" theme with a polygon budget of 2750.

labers concept:

[Blocked Image: http://www.rubenmueller.de/temp/trendtredl_linework.jpg]

acumen (tahts me) concept:

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/contests/bike/bike_concept1.gif]

so we had 2 days to do the concepting and modeling and I can tell you this was a lot of fun

this is what we came up with in the end:

laber's model (2478 triangles):

[Blocked Image: http://www.rubenmueller.de/temp/trendtredl_render01_s.jpg]

acumen's (tahts me again) model (2750 triangles):

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/contests/bike/bike_full1.jpg]

that is an awesome improvement.

if your compare the beginnings of this model and now you got a pretty dense mesh. great work you did there !

i mean you got the budget of 5000 and as far as I can tell from the concept, there wasn't much detail you could add, so your only goal was to achieve a nice and smooth mesh. and the result is soo much better than what you got on the start. It's consistent now and I think you became a lot more conscious of how to place and distribute these polies so that you get a dense mesh in the end.

I'm really looking forward to your next model

The 2 rows of the upper leg could be rotated cause they face against the structure of the leg again.

The chest looks very wide in the side view, yes (because the arms are so skinny) but that takes 3 minutes to fix this, right ? Move the back in a bit, move the chest in a bit and fiddle around the ass as well and it's done.

Well I just think it's not quite balanced out, yet. For example you have all those wrinkles on the face going on but then again on the back and the chest area you save your polies as if this is gonna be a 1000 polygon model. It needs to be more consistent.

here's an example of how the shoulders could wrap around, though of course it uses much more polygons than you should end up having on your model but I think it's a good example for the whole shoulder area. The nice thing is, that you can take this as a guidline and cut off entire polyrows in order to achieve your budget:

http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/tem ... r_body.jpg

And here i painted in, what I was talking about before. If you add those extra polies on the back and the chest it will look much smoother. I mean those are really visible areas. If you have 10 rows on hand wrinkle this is something you won't really notice, but the torso is such a huge object, why would you want to save polies there, when you have 5000 polygons overall to spend on the entire model

http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/tem ... rpaint.jpg

I just think you have many hard edges, where the edgeflow changes drastically and goes in another direction and your model is not benefiting from it at all.

yup looks much better now. especially with the torso underneath

the wrinkles are not necessary, though. You said you got a 5000ish budget, so you just don't need that. Same goes for these tiny tiny splits on the ripcage. You need to spend your polies a bit better, like instead on those splits you could use these polygons much better on the shoulder area, which is just a simple extrusion right now.

You should have much more rings in this region in order to make animating that easy. Have a look at that model:

http://www.bobotheseal.com/portfolio/Co ... monk01.jpg

You should have at least 3 rings for animation issues, when you workin in such a high polygon range.

You can it on the red concept how the shoulder should wrap around instead of being just a simple straight extrusion. It will not only make your model look better but also make animating a lot easier. With 5000 polygons you need to worry pretty much about the right anatomy or at least get the shapes a more dynamic look..

maybe one of these heads in here can help you improve your edgeflow:

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.ph ... n=0&page=3

I'd suggest you really study some head model renders in forums like cgchat or cgtalk. This can really help alot. It just doesn't look right, right now ,sry Especially the nose and mouth areas can be improved a lot.

The biggest problem i see, is that you haven't really decided whether you'll go for a complete hipoly head or keep it lowpoly in the end. Because at this point I think the wrinkles you put here and there really giving you a hard time making this into a clean head mesh. I'd add the important features first and get those right. Afterwards you can go all crazy on the wrinkles.

maybe this overpaint helps ? I don't even know if that makes any sense

All I can say is that I hate modeling heads. It takes me so long do one and I'm never satisfied with the results. So I was just trying to explain the way how I'm trying to improve on this issue. I really hate modeling heads - wasted so many hours and still quite figured it out. I guess no video tutorial on earth can help you there. It's just practise, practise, practise

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/temp/delete_overpaint1.jpg]

mh, you should really try sitting down and work on your edgeflow and the overall poly distribution. all throughout your last models the faces have been quite messy and now on this closeup it becomes really clear. it starts on the forehead, that von*ferret mentioned, goes on to the eyes/nose area. You can tell by the smoothing around the nose that the transition is way to harsh. You should really look at some other heads and try to improve on this, cause this will contribute to 300% better models. Cause animating, uvmapping, skinning and whatnot will become much easier. Redirecting edges and stuff will be really helpful.

woot \o/

bestest day in a long time

pretty graphics everywhere. I'm so glad this is finally back. Bestest forum to browse and sometimes even post in

nope, didn't start this guy, but actually he really IS next on my model list

Cause this tankbuster guy has such a bad perspective, that'll take more time to do. I hope the next concepts have a more fabi-friendly pose and actually have some feet

I have to do the uv for signurai first, though

hate it

(i really need to get my name changed here think I'll mail mikezilla again for this)

you really have used 1000 triangles for this head ? If so, thats really not well distributed. head should be like 500 regarding the polycount and sometimes edgy look of the body. thats really a bit over the top. If you wouldn't have told that, I'd have said "nice model and texture, whats the poycount". You can't really see 1000 triangles in the entire face O_O

Thats really too much and I can't imagine where you put all these polies, so thats quite a point to crit for me, sry

polyt distribution could be a lot better then...

alright, postman said I could post here as well.

These are 2 models I did for Wasteland HL2. The first one is a sniper (that's what they told me) and the second one is some weird guy, didn't really figure out what his armor was in the first place, until postman told me

Anyways, hope you like them

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/whl2_sniper1.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://v091259.dd2110.kasserver.com/model_pics/whl2_signurai1.jpg]

hehe, alright. Though I didn't really customize Max that much.

If I should ever be bored again, I'll try to copy&paste my old settings back and forth to see, what was wrong but I don't think that'll happen in this decade

I don't know why I'm always messing things up like that in Max.

Some weird talent or something.

But thank god, your tip with deleting the ini-file worked. \o/

Thank you sooo much. On the next start the render dialog was totally on the right side but I could grab it and re-center it to the screen. Now I can continue working. *wuhu*

thanks again

so yesterday another genius thing happened to me. I was just about to render this character model but I couldn't "find" the render menu. It's sooo weird. I can access all the other menus like "Materials" and stuff. So no matter whether I click the F10 key or just click on "Render" in the menu I cannot see the render dialog. I resetted the UI and it's still not there. So right now I think I either clicked a key that somehow "locked" this render dialog or made it somewhat "invisible"

Or another thing that I could imagine, that I somehow managed to simply move this menu out of the screen.

So I really hope that someone can help me out there, it's really weird to not being able to render anymore, except from the F9 Quick Render function.

Really weird to not have this menu on the screen. Maybe there really is some weird shortcut that can reset the menu position or anything. I don't know