Posts by Steppenwolf

  • terror hits norway in 2 places

    Quote from Pericolos0

    My girlfriend was at a coffeeshop in Oslo when it happened, about 100m from the explosion . She's okay but it's fucking crazy, last thing you would expect to happen on a trip to Norway O__O.

    This is really crazy. First the bombing in Stockholm 100m away from the former Grin office (which thankfully didnt work out as planed by the terrorists) and now your girlfriend so close too. Guillaume and his girlfriend were only 25m meters away from the Stockholm explosion as far as i remember. Mapcore entourage is dodging bombs.

  • Portland/Eugene/Seattle

    Your portfolio needs a lot of work if you want to find a job in the industry. There are pretty much no finished, game ready assets or levels on it. If you want to be a 3d artist or level designer in the industry you have to proof that you got what it takes to finish a project. Only posting those clay renders gets the complete opposite message across.

    Finish some of these assets, create textures and materials for them, get them in a game. Then make an ingame screenshot and post your texture sheets also. If you want to be a level designer make levels! Noone will hire you as a level designer when all you've done so far is placing a dozen assets in UDK. At the very minimum create a good looking multiplayer map with stock assets for a game.

    Going by your portfolio you don't posess these skills yet so focuss on that over the next 2-3 years. Imo it will take that long before you can even think of a job or an internship.

    The cover designs, while looking nice shouldn't be on your portfolio if you didn't do the artwork for them. It's misleading, almost a fraud because people will assume you did it and get in touch with you under this wrong assumption.

    In the pixel art category you should also post some texture sheets, sprites etc. if you want to convince.

    Moving to Portland will not do the trick for you. And in times of internet it's not important where you live. Companies will invite you and pay for the trip if they deem your portfolio worthy. My advice: get a shitty job at McDonalds, or as a dish washer or something for the time being and in your freetime work your ass off to improve your game art and design skills. Then join a mod team or help someone on his indie game for free to get some practical experience in game making. Only then you're ready to apply for jobs and internships at real game studios.

    I know these words sound harsh but it is a harsh reality out there. There are plenty of unemployed games people out there with better portfolios and a track record of released games/mods. So in order for games companies to consider you over them you have to step up your game considerably.

  • Black Mesa Source

    What Rick wrote. When i use a photo source/diffuse for my normal map i remove shadows and highlights first, then greyscale it, denoise it if necessary, then i paint over additional height info (brighten the areas that i want to pop out, darken the areas that i want to look pressed in). For technical stuff with lots of hard edges or for some details i paint a heightmap from scratch.

    I disagree that there are no useful alternatives to crazybump tho. In my opinion nDo > crazybump. Gives me more control and the normals have more fidelity.

  • What have you watched recently?

    Quote

    ":1dbsmumy]First good Ridley Scott movie apparently, any good?

    It's one of the best looking films ever. Every frame a painting. Hence it makes a good companion piece to Barry Lyndon. Also has a cool story, great actors and amazing sense for accurate historical details (uniforms, haircuts, social norms etc.). Scott made three cinematic masterpieces between 1977 and 1982. The Duellists, Alien and Blade Runner. Unfortunately the first one is almost forgotten since it was only after Alien that he became a popular director.

  • How do you furnish your levels? Techniques? Philosophy?

    I place all available props (or at least the ones that i intend to use) next to the map. Then i copy paste stuff around. Usualy i do this step by step and layer by layer during the development in no hurry between doing other stuff. Only late in development when i do the art pass i go really in detail with it and focuss on it for a couple days.

    One thing that prefer to do in general, not just prop placing is to finish the map from the outskirts to the center. That way it's easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

  • [Tutorial]Modeling a tree crown with ease

    In this little tutorial i want to explain some simple steps of how to create a convincing and lod friendly tree crown with ease. I will not explain how to create the textures or the trunk. There are plenty tutorials around for that. I will focus on the crown only because in my own research i always found it hard to find good tutorials for that and i'm sure the workflow i came up with will help the on or the other artist.

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/eDgLo.jpg]

    Step 1) You start with a simple plane and apply your leaves texture to it. Then add a couple of lines and move the vertices around so that you don't waste any space outside of the leaves (check "preserve UVs" in 3dsmax to avoid ugly texture stretching when doing this). This is important to reduce unnecessary overdraw in the engine.

    I chose 3x3 lines because it's friendly for the lod's that come later and allows a reasonable amount of geometry detail. It's also important to keep everything quads. Again it's easier for when you start doing your lod's and it's also better if your engine allows for vertex animation and stuff like that.

    Step 2) uncheck "preserve UV's" and give the plane a little depth and profile when looking from different sides. When you're done place the pivot roughly at the base of the branch.

    Step 3) Now rotate copy the mesh three times and attach the copies to the original.

    Step 4) Again copy the mesh once and rotate the copy around a bit in different directions. Ideally the profile of the leaves should look a bit different from different sides. Try to avoid too obvious repetition. If you feel like it you can add more uniqueness to the shape during any of the steps above. But for this tutorial i will keep it simple.

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/f0zQL.jpg]

    Step 5) As you see on the left i already modelled a trunk with branches and added a couple more branches via alpha texture. this is important because it will break up the repetition in the leaves and creates the illusion that they actualy are attached to them.

    What you do now is very simple. Create a couple of instances of your leaves mesh from step 4 and place and rotate them around the branches as you wish. In the past when making trees i always found this step very time consuming and often i wasn't happy with the result. But when you follow this technique it shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes.

    It is very important for what comes next that you keep a copy of that tree with the instanced leaves. But of course for your compile you can attach the leaves to the trunk.

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/8DOYQ.jpg]

    Step 6) Now to making the first lod. Simply select every second loop on your original leaves mesh from step 4 and remove them including the vertices (little trick: hold down control when removing the loops in 3dsmax and the vertices will get removed automatically). After that all your instances will have a lot less polys too.

    Step 7) For the next lod step just select the remaining inner loops and remove them. You don't have to follow this exactly. If you want to make more lod steps just remove less loops per step.

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/kDUMQ.jpg]

    As you can see in the last picture the profile and leaves density looks fairly intact in the lod steps. This is hard to achieve and extremely time consuming when you edit your leaves one by one directly in the tree.

    With this tutorial you should be able to achieve in minutes what can take hours with different approaches.

    I hope this was helpful to some people. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions.

  • What have you watched recently?

    That's one of the things that i love so much about Mad Men the contrast between the past and today. I thought it might be a bit over the top but then i talked to my parents about it and they told me that heavy drinking and smoking actualy was accepted at work back then and in some jobs jobs it was a must if you wanted to be part of the team.

    Also it's just so extremely stylish. I always look with awe at the suits and ties that Don Draper wears.

  • totally random texture thread

    I will redo the background following one of philk's tutorials when i find the time. The problem was that i worked on the background in wrong order. should have started with the normal map first instead of the diffuse. Shouldn't be too hard to combine a new background with the gold thingy because i generated the normal for this on a different layer with a clean background.

  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

    Quote from Bunglo

    I'm trying to get through Morrowind and Oblivion before Skyrim comes out. Morrowind looks absolutely awful and I always exit before I manage to deliver that package to that guy in that town because some worm/leech thing or giant rat kills me.

    My tip: hang around in the start village for a while and do the quests there before starting to explore thw world. It will provide you with some basic skills and gear as preparation for your big adventures. Also when you have the Tribunal expansion installed some assassin will try to kill you the first or second time you sleep. When you kill him you can loot pretty decent light armor from his corpse that will make your survival easier.