In an effort to focus hardcore on some personal work, I am going to say goodbye to Pixels and Polys and quit pretending that I’ll make those tutorials I previously posted about. It’s been fun! Thanks to anyone who reads this and I hope this blog has a fruitful and bright future ahead. I guess I’ll leave y’all with a quote from a fortune cookie.
Success won’t taste as good without failure as appetizers.
farewell!
sulz
sulz.cgsociety.org
I use PolyBoost religiously and I’m happy to hear, and to let you all know, that version 4 is out, free to existing users, and at it’s usual price of $154 for new purchases. There is also a demo available, which i think is for 10 days or something. It has been totally converted to C++ which speeds up performance and now all the tools work at the speed of native max tools. There seem to be a lot of texture enhancements in this rev as well as symmetry enhancements. Enough babble from me, here’s the video explaining all this:
http://www.cmlcreative.com/Videos/PolyBoost4_video.avi
I would recommend turning the sound off since there is no speaking and the music is annoying and choppy. I’ve dealt with the creator a number of times transferring my personal license and all of our work licenses to and from different versions of max. He is an incredibly nice guy and really quick to help you out. He even modified the script for me when it broke our internal .DDS exporter. What a guy!
Anyway, if you are a modeler and you want to have a much deeper tool set than what max alone gives you, I can’t recommend PolyBoost enough. Go buy it. Now. GO!!
Thanks,
Sulz.
Okay, things may look a little odd for the next few days. I’m in the process of transferring my blog to another server. To say I am not qualified to do this is the understatement of the year. It’s taking a bit more time than I had hoped, but I’m making progress.
I expect to be back up and running sometime next week, but the server may be down while the transfer is taking place. I also lost most of my database settings, but I’m hopeful that my backup will work on the new server once the site is pointing to the new location (which can take up to 72 hours).
Also, I’m going to have to change my theme since the new version of wordpress doesn’t seem to be cooperating with me. I did do a lot of questionable changes to the theme so I’m not surprised.
Brian
Ryan Kingslien, a product manager at Pixologic, now has a nice learning blog out there called Sculpt. Paint. Create. There’s a decent amount of tips and tricks for ZBrush on it as well as other links to ZBrush related things on the web. I’ve been looking at it for a few days and have picked up some really good tricks to bring into my work. Here’s the link for you to check out:
http://www.pixologic.com/blogs/ryan/
Enjoy!
Sulz.
I ran across a very interesting paper about Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2 a few days ago. It’s refreshing to read an article that talks about art techniques that aren’t tech heavy. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the idea of using megatextures and other new technologies as much as any other artist, but I think they really have something special with this sequel. Their approach to character design, environments, textures, and shaders yields some fantastic results.
Well worth the read!
Latest Trailer: The Soldier
Okay, so I haven’t had time to post a huge tutorial, but I’m going to try to be more realistic about my time until we get closer to the end of our development cycle with Revolution. I just need to scale things back a little for the time being.
If you’re a terrain or level artist, there’s a very cool program that you should check out called World Machine. I ran across this program some time ago when scouring the internet for anything that was even remotely related to terrain generation. It is a very powerful procedural terrain generator that has some spectacular erosion features. It uses a graph based user interface that is actually very easy to use once you get the hang of it. If you’ve ever seen the interface for Unreal’s shader editor, then you know what I’m talking about. It’s very easy to add modifiers, noise, or masks to your render.
At first glance, the program does look a little intimidating, but trust me. You’ll be up and running in less than a day. It’s free to try the basic version which limits your render to 512. However, the standard version is not going to break your bank account.
I hope you find this program as useful as we did.
Brian
Well, the reason I’ve been away for so long is finally here!
I’m glad to be able to announce Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution! (now that the press releases have been sent out)
Lots of high res images can be found at:
joystiq
We’ll be talking about some of the art generation process soon, probably after E3.
Sorry for the long time between updates. We may be announcing our next project soon, so I’ve been a little busy with work. I’ll try to keep the blog up to date with less ambitious posts (Tutorials take a bit longer to prepare). I’m learning a lot about HDRI, so I should have some good information to share in the next month.
I just wanted to point out a great book for facial modeling and animation. It’s called Stop Starring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right by Jason Osipa. This is a fantastic book and offers some great advice on facial edgeloop modeling. It’s been a valuable resource for myself and others at work. If you’re a character modeler or animator, this book is a must have resource.
Brian
My GDC experience overall was a great one. After going to all the keynotes, tutorials, and sessions that were on my list, I’ve put together the top three themes that were present (granted, the only design talk I went to was Miyamoto’s keynote, so I’m coming at this with the mentality of “how can I make the best art possible?”
1. Programmer support is a must - I saw the Creating HD Environments talk made by the Crytek fellas and I was surprised at how similar their pipelines and ideas are to ours at Firaxis, they just have such a dedicated team of programmers and tech artists there to make their art shine. That is not a knock on the Firaxis way, because where they have the best looking realistic game coming out, the demo of it I saw on the show floor was all about shooting trees and watching them fall, so there’s not much game there where conversely, we’ve mostly got game. The same happened when I saw both of the Lair talks by the Factor 5 guys, a talk on creating a better pipeline which I think was by some Ubisoft fella, the Crytek character pipeline talk, and an excellent excellent talk on creating hair by a programmer at Bioware. They all had (what it seemed like) so much programmer support to create the art they did. For example, in Crysis, it is mostly lush jungle. There is a point in the game where all of that lush jungle environment gets frozen over with ice, frost, and snow. They were talking about whether or not they should create new assets for the ice covered landscapes and in the end, vetoed it and had their programmers write a super complex shader that froze everything with a pass. The consistency between all the art, tech, and pipeline talks that I went to was that their tools needed to be artist driven, real-world behaving tools in order to get the best result, whether it be ultra-realistic or ultra stylized. After all, creating believable stylized art is strongly rooted in reality.
2. Great games are not just about design - Great games are about the full experience that the player goes through during his or her time with said game. I don’t think any aspect of game creation is more important than the other. Gears of War would not have gone triple platinum in 3 months if it were spheres shooting at cubes. The marriage of design, art, and tech made that game the hit that it is. The big guns at the show (Crtyek, Ubisoft, and others) made it sound that in each of their disciplines internally, the leads trust each other to work out whats best for the game as a whole. They set goals for the gameplay, art, and tech and then meet to see how they can marriage those components together into a wholly immersing experience. Sometimes they hit, other times they don’t but it’s usually pretty and innovative. Blizzard looks at it differently. They look at the design of the game first and decide whether or not a certain technological or artistic innovation will enhance the experience. Take WoW for example. That game will run on any computer. Why not flex their muscle and show that they can make the hottest art out there? If they did, they wouldn’t be able to call it World of Warcraft. This was an excellent move on their part because they didn’t want anyone without an internet connection to be left out. This is a prime example of where the focus was on art direction rather than art innovation. I believe when a player turns off the PC or Console on which they’ve played your game, they should leave saying, “Man! Everything about that game rocked!” They should leave with the experience.
3. Enjoy the people around you - This one isn’t really about GDC as a whole, or art, or tech, it is about enjoying your coworkers. If you put it into perspective, when you get out of school and you get a job, you spend 8-10 hours at work. You sleep around 5-8 hours a night, and that leave the other 8-ish hours in the day to be with your family and friends. Roughly 1/3 of your life will be spent at the office. If you’re not happy at the office with the people you’re with, you should re-evaluate your situation. I’m at a place that I love to be, with people that I love collaborating with, making a product that will be played by millions of people. Being able to have such a good time at GDC just drove that point home.
That’s my GDC rant. Please, if you have any comments or counter points or anything, leave a comment or e mail me. I’m definitely interested in hearing what you may have to say.
Thanks for reading,
Sulz
Hey Everybody!
My name is Chris Sulzbach, or Sulz if you’d like and I’m the new contributor to the pixelsandpolys blog/forum dedicated to video game art and technology. I’d like to first thank Brian for putting together this excellent forum/blog and I hope that it catches on amongst the local MD/DC/VA game community (and then the world!) and that we can all share some tips and tricks to make each of us more productive and stronger artists. My short-term goals for contributions to the blog are reviewing the top 3 things I picked up at GDC. These will include not only talks and tips, but also some general observations about the industry itself from a first-time GDC attendee and speaker. I’d also like to show some of the work I did for Sid Meier’s Railroads! on which I worked as a locomotive modeler. I’d like to also give a tutorial on my methods of creating one of the locomotives in Railroads! I’m currently working on characters for an unannounced project at Firaxis, lead by our very own Brian Busatti. If anyone has any questions or comments, please post them in the comments section as usual or feel free to e mail me at csulzbach@firaxis.com
Thanks for reading!
Sulz
