The demon deer in action!

Alright, as promised in my recent Dead Demonic Deer post, I made a render of the character in an action pose. Creating the render took me two evenings of work, one creating the pose and environment and another creating the lighting and atmospherics. It’s a 3ds Max Mental Ray render with basic GI and Final Illumination settings. The Depth of Field effect was made in Photoshop based on a Z-depth render pass. Except for some color tweaks, the whole thing looks the way it came out of the renderer, which took about half an hour.

Going to bed now, it’s 3:50 and I have to go to work tomorrow morning :-P

Siege Carts

These were made for Playlogics game Fairytale Fights.

The Dead Demonic Deer

This little guy started out as a quick test after playing the game Torchlight, I felt the graphics in that game looked very appealing while being simple at the same time. All the models and environments were textured with just diffuse textures to be complimented with some nice lighting. This is pretty rare nowadays as most games sport a whole array of more advanced textures such as specular, normal, parallax and emissive maps brought together with complex shaders. The developers chose to use a much simpler and maybe even dated approach to texturing their game. Using normal and specular maps has been standard practice for almost ten years. Applying merely a diffuse texture is something that reminds me of those early 3d games which, in all honesty, looked pretty crappy. However, they took the risk, and instead of creating a game that looks dated, they managed to give it a beautiful handpainted look. To me it looks more appealing than many games that do utilize modern shader tech.

So, I set out to create a character that would look cool while being nothing more than a few triangles with some diffuse colors slapped on. In the end, I quite underestimated the amount of work that goes into creating a convincing handpainted diffuse texture. I figured I would be able to create this guy in two evenings: one modeling, one texturing. The first part worked just okay, the second… not so much. I think it must’ve taken me more than 5 or 6 evenings to get to this point. After texturing this guy I have even more appreciation for the Torchlight modelers: creating a handpainted seamless diffuse texture is difficult and hard work!

Creating seamless handpainted textures is getting easier now that many tools start to support 3d painting: 3ds Max 2011, Mudbox 2011 and Photoshop CS4 all offer the possibility to directly paint on the 3d model. Of course Maxon Bodypaint offered this functionality for a long time now. Unfortunately, whichever tool you choose, to me it always feels a bit finicky. None of the aforementioned tools offer the amount of control and options that you have when painting in just two dimensions in Photoshop. Also, painting across UV seams is never as seamless as you would hope, regardless of how good your UV’s are. For me, the tools are a good way of “roughing out” the initial diffuse, after which I will detail it in Photoshop the traditional way. That’s how I did this guy as well, it was very helpful for his muscle definition and his tattoo.

I still want to create a nice render of the deer in a cool pose, I will add that to this post later on.

Update: the render is done!

First steps into sculpting

Just finished this shield model done with Mudbox, a new tool to me.  The first two images are renders made in Mudbox.  The third is a lowpoly mesh (300 triangles) in the Unreal 3 engine. The model has a diffuse, specular, parallax and normal map on it. It took me just under 4 days to make, which included learning Mudbox. Sculpting is good fun though, I’m looking forward to do more of it in the future!

Snowqueen

Snowqueen for Fairytale Fights.

Yes, her dress is a layer cake with chocolate topping, but that wasn’t my call. I would personally have liked to design her more like my initial concept (first pic).  Not that it mattered… She was part of a level that ended up being cancelled so she didn’t make it into the game :-(

Gravestones

The tombstones shown above were all made for Fairytale Fights, although these are not the versions that made it into the game. These were made in 2007, a lot of style changes were made in the next year. I still like these old versions though.