Update: modeling

This is just an update to show you how my modeling is coming along. I think its going good I have realised that I have designed my enviroment with a lot of detail so It will take time to model. here are a few pictures of my enviroment so far:

As you can see I have also started UV mapping, and texturing my models. I am doing UV mapping as well as modeling so that I can see what it will look like and what style I want to use. I may change some of the UV maps if they do not suit the enviroment.
In my previous blogs I show that I want to create a very Wild west feel so most of the buildings will be made of wood. Im my next blog I wont to show you more pictures of my modeling and then I will talk about Texturing.

thanks for reading
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Cave City: Rope Problem

I have started my Cave City Model. I have imported my layout in to Maya so I can use as a reference so I know what to model and where it needs to go.

It looks ok so far until I can across modeling the rope. In my layout I have a lot of rope. Its used to hold the buildings together and hoist goods to the top level. I wanted to make my rope look realistic and I was unsure how I was going to do this. I tried just using a cylinder but it didn't look like realistic rope.

 Image is from Google

From this image you can see that rope is made out of more than one strand. I want to show this in my model so it looks realistic. So looking through you tube I found this very useful tutorial on how to model rope and how to animate it:

Video from YouTube

This is a very useful video. To make the rope your own you can add as many strands as you wont to give the rope thickness. 

This is my rope after I followed the tutorial

My rope before .

My rope now looks to much more realistic now thanks to this tutorial.

I now know in future that if I take time on my models they will look a lot nicer and more realistic 

I will keep posting on my modeling process and If I find any more useful tutorials and websites I will be sure to post them on my blog

thanks for reading 

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Cave city progress

Hey this is just an update of my layout. I have finished drawing the city around the caves. I can start modeling this layout now.

Sorry if you can't see the outline very good. Since I really need to start modeling I have left my layout like this. In my own time I will try and colour it all in so you can see how the light will effect the buildings.

thanks for reading
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Rocks rocks everywhere! - Cave city progress

As I have showed in my blog I am creating a Cave city, which i will model in maya. I am at the point where I have nearly finished painting most of it in photo shop, I just need to add the city.

Here is my cave city so far:

As you can see i need to outline the city and I need to sort out the lighting. The reason to why I am putting so much effort in to a piece that I will be making in to maya is because some of this layout will be used in my 3d layout. this saves me time and I need to make it as realistic as possible so it will go with my 3D models. 

Inspiration for the buildings:

 Since I am starting to draw the buildings I thought this would be a good opportunity to start to gather ideas together, as I am running low and I need more buildings to fill out this cave. I want it to look like people can live very happily in a cave. I don't wont it to look futuristic as I think it wouldn't suit the cave it self and i was looking for something different. I have a look on google and have a look at some old houses.

A lot of them are made of wood, they have balconies and are a solid structure. This would be great material to have my buildings made out of. I think wooden buildings would be great as it would give the sense of a new city on new ground almost like the wild west.  

This would be a good thing to look in to. I am going to look at the different building designs they used in the wild west and add that to my cave city. 

I also looked in too tree houses.

Looking at tree house can help me with how I am going to position my buildings. Tree houses are built around the tree and thats what i should keep in mind when drawing my houses in my environment.

In my next blog I will be showing my progress on my cave city 

thanks for reading

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Creating A 3D environment and Polygon count

Since I have finished with my skilling on Maya I can now start to create an environment and a Character all in 3D.
Before we rush in to Maya and start modeling we have to draw my environment in photo shop and do some research. I really wanted to create A sci-fi environment thats set in the future. looking at films such as 5th Element and looking at TV shows such as Futurama. It was basically hover cars and tall building and I wonted to create some unique so I started to think up and idea of a city underground. I did some research and started to look at caves and look at how they form.

I wont my underground city to have a light source so I looked at pictures of caves that have light in some way or another. The red and blue scribbles on the research pictures indicate the dark areas of the cave and the light areas. This will be really good to model as it could show of my lighting skills on maya.

Once I decide how my cave was going to look like I stared adding buildings in to the rock and adding a bean of light coming in to the cave.
here is a ruff sketch of my idea:

I wonted to make it look as thought people could live very happily in a cave so I added water and the trees and plants. The plants only grow in the sunlight which I tried to show in my drawing. To improve this sketch I will add more buildings and then I will start to add colour to it.

Looking at this know you may think it looks too much to model it all. I need to model the rocks and houses and that will take time and i need to make sure it looks right. To save time I came up with the idea of doing a matte painting and importing it in to maya, I wont be painting it all, just the background. This is the same technique they use in Lord of the Rings, where they model half and the rest is a painting. This also gives me a chance to improve my photo shop skills. It will be great to see how this will turn out.

Polygon Count

In this blog I also want to talk about Polygon count. Polygon count is very important when it comes to modeling as most companies will give you a limit on how many polygons you are allowed. In my proposal I said I want to create a game environment so I must do some research in to how many polygons are used in a game environment. I think this is the perfect time to start looking in to polygon count as this might effect how much detail I can put in to my environment.

Since I am doing more of a game environment rather than a film environment I will have less polygons to work with. when they create a 3D film they try a go for a very realistic look and they have so much money to spend on time to create a realistic look. on the other hand when you look at games now they try to make them as realistic as possible but the game has to run off an engine which can limit the detail so the polygon count will be slightly lower due to this engine. This may be the case now but when the technology gets better, the graphics will get better allowing game company's to have a larger polygon count.

here is a list of games and the characters in the games and how many polygons are used to make these characters.

  Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006
Wretch - 10,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Boomer - 11,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Marcus - 15,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004 
Characters - 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture
NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256×128 8bit texture
Gant bridge - 16,000 polygons, includes LOD

Halflife 2, PC, 2004 
Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons
Barney - 5922 polygons
Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons
Classic Headcrab - 1690 polygons
SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)
Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001 
Masterchief - 2,000 polygons

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Gamecube, 2005 (Small mistake here, it's not on GC but PS2)
Snake - 4,000 polygons

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005 
Leon - 10,000 polygons

Jak & Daxter, PS2, 2001
Jak - 4000 polygons

for more information:  http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=126802

as you can see by looking at the numbers the later the game the lower the polygons. The polygons are really low in Halo only using 2,000 polygons but if you look at Resident Evil's Leon they use 10,000 polygons for his character. There is only a year between the two games yet the numbers of polygons are very different.

looking at a game environment the polygons a very high.

Lair, PS3, 2007
Main dragon plus its rider - 150,000 polygons
16x16KM scene - 134M polygons (streamed into memory, not loaded at run time)

 Project Gotham Racing 3, X360, 2005
Cars - 80,000-100,000 polygons (interior + exterior), damages add between 10,000 and 20,000 more polygons per car
Brooklyn Bridge - 600,000 polygons (LOD might be included)
Manhattan Bridge - 1 million polygons (LOD might be included)


http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975


Looking at these figures shows you just how much detail are in these games. The Manhattan bridge in the Gotham racing game is 1 million polygons alone.


In conclusion looking at these figures I should think about trying to create my character will less polygons as possible or keep the polygons between 10,000 - 20,000 as that what characters are ruffly today. for the environment its a complete guess as they range depending on the game they are making but I would say around 600,000 or more polygons would be needed to make my enviroment. I really need to be thinking about how i will texture the enviroment so that is something to think about when i model.


In my next blog I will be showing my progress on my cave!
thanks for reading
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