Here are couple of shots of a model that I made recently for Videocopilot. It's a dear model to me, the mighty Mig 29, a beautiful aircraft that I love!

The model is fully rigged and ready for animation!

Check out videocopilot.net if you want to get your hands on this model and many other cool aircrafts!

Primitive man quick sculpt :)

I decided to sculpt something, to break a bit from hardedge modeling. This was a fun experience. I may continue this later, maybe give it some color... who knows...

Continued the doodle head...

Saturday doodle.

Started this in the morning... I'v spend some time to get the right proportions that I had in my mind. Drifted a bit from the initial idea... but was good for exercise.

Sunday morning doodle...

Human male 2

Today I got some time to work on my personal human character study. I got some progress on his upper body. Still need a lot of work until the high poly sculpt is done... but it will get there soon... I hope.

Human Male - Game character

Today I started to study a bit some proportions for a human male character. The proportions are a bit weird because I aim to find some balance between a cartoonish character and a real life model. This one is not finished yet, now is in the base mesh phase, with some luck and inspiration, maybe tomorrow I will be able to take it to the next level.

Woodcutter

A simple axe for cutting wood made in collaboration with Delia Mihai.
This is a game ready asset.

Here is the link to the video I made for this :)

Leprechaun Sculpt

Here is the final version of the sculpt for the Leprechaun, this was in the end a good sculpting exercise :)

I am very VERY disappointed about Google changing my blog address from .com to .ro

Slowly but surely they are isolating us all one by one stepping on our privacy and gathering us in groups by country like sheep so they can CONTROL us better !!!

I wont whine about this too much I will just keep an eye open for a similar service provider like Google, but a provider that respects my privacy and choices!!!

...some changes

I made some changes to the shoes, sleeves and the legs and also added a hat. I think now is closer to the proportions I want. I am still unsure how to make his behind, is still something that I don't think is right and I don't know what.

Anyway, the next and very important step is to tweak a bit the face, now there are some good features there that I want to keep, but it needs some cleaning.

...after this I must retopologize the whole mesh... which I am not really looking forward to... but I must do it because I want to animate this and meshes with different poly count for LOD's.

Shoes and sleeves

Today I researched a bit the shoes and the sleeves and now I am starting to make the changes to the sculpt model in Zbrush.

Character sculpt

I started today to work a bit more on the character that I have made 1 year ago in Mudbox. I had an issue with Mudbox back than regarding hard edges and I decided to import it in Zbrush and polish a bit the model. After I am satisfied with the result I will have to remake the topology for the low poly model. This means that I have to scrap all the textures I made so far for this model and remap everything, so I have a lot of work ahead of me! I plan to rig the model and import it in Unreal Engine 3 and make it a playable character.

Here it is the model how I left it 1 year ago, I imported it in Zbrush and now it's ready for some improvements!

Another small 3D prop

The other days I started sculpting something simple to test it inside Unreal Engine 3.
I am still building and tweaking my own personal pipeline from high poly sculpt to a optimized usable game prop.

Hairstyle for woman

Today I made a hairstyle for the female character. Took me longer than I expected but by the end of the day I got what I wanted. Is not finished yet, it still needs a texture. Now all it got is ambient occlusion embedded in the diffuse channel and some normal and specular which will never be used by the client, but was easy to extract them after I got the high poly model.

Most of the time I spent sculpting the hair in Zbrush, was a good exercise, I've learned a lot.

Here is the progress.

First I started in Sculptrix Alpha 6 to get done the rough shape:

Than the longest part was to detail the hairstyle in Zbrush. Here is the rezult:

... than I have made a cool polygon topology, extracted the maps in Mudbox and here is the final rezult:

Next the texture needs some details on diffuse channel and this hairstyle will be ready for the game.

Arabian Outfit WIP

Today I am working a bit on an Arabian outfit. I am doing the high poly mesh using Zbrush and in the meanwhile is an exercise to understand better clothing folds.

Protest Anti ACTA.

Yesterday I protested in my hometown against ACTA. There were not too many people but, what is important is that few of us left the comfort of their homes and for few hours protested against this Anti Counterfeiting Trade that is in fact a legal way to violate our privacy. Many people around me use the internet daily and they are still ignorant about this... this ignorance will cost us our freedom in the end.

I will look forward for more protests like this and at least I will be present!

First Mobile post

This is the first mobile post on Blogger. Is ment more like a test, maybe in the future I will post more from my phone. Hmm also lets add an image to test it even further...

Nope no image at the moment... My battery is low... Like always on this phone... Every time I try to take a picture the battery is low...

Budu WIP

Today I started working in Zbrush and I made so far a head that I name it Budu.
This is work in progress, I am now working on hair.

This is the first time I am making something in Zbrush so I dont expect to be much but who knows maybe it will become a nice cartoonish character with animations, facial expressions and a body.

My first video - game asset

I like to play video - games, I studied for a long time the video - games, I spend sometimes hours just by standing in one place and staring at a very well made tree... or environment... or looking at a random... unimportant NPC how he do it's animations in a loop mode ...maybe it will do something that doesn't suppose to do... like... looking back at me?! Nahhh that never happens... Anyway... I never made an actual game asset... and one day I decided to make one... one that is made by me ... only by me and not because someone asks me to do it...just because I choose to see how game developers do it!

Was in 2007, in November,  I took my digital camera .. was a cheap one... and I started to make pictures of the houses on the streets. People started to look weird at me when they saw me taking pictures on random houses on the street... people don't do that every day... unless they want to sue someone because they build illegal or they argue over their backyard and they need evidence. I was doing research! 

.. I even had to explain myself to a lady... who got out of her home asking me why I take pictures of her house... who am I ?! ... I calm her down quickly by telling I am doing research for a project I am involved in by remaking the town in 3D... like a 3D simulation... when I brought the 3D simulation fancy stuff she quit yelling at me and got back in her house... Anyway... after many pictures taken I found my "victim"! A beautiful house with a large ground floor and a top floor with a nice balcony and a pyramid shape roof. Here is the picture of the house:

In the picture, on the balcony, you may think you see a person standing there looking at me... well is not... it is just a weird optic illusion. Here is how I explain this:

weird... isn't it?

Ok, so I got the picture of the house I was about to remake in 3D as a actual game asset, not just used for cool animations and stuff to impress people, I am going to make it a video game asset.. so I run home.

I started working on this using "Editable Mesh", back in 2007 I was using this tool a lot... I don't know why... but I just did. After some time I started the treacherous process of polygon optimisation... I have read by now why the wheel has 6 polygons and not 200 as I can do a cylinder in 3D Studio Max... Why? Because if you use tones and trillionths of polygons to make a game it will burn your PC... like I did for the past 10 years...No seriously now... it is a method of optimization that is used to make game assets... low polygon information on mesh and instead use high information stored in the texture to make the object look good. This is the short version of why they bother with poly counting and mapping methods to make game assets.

And I pulled vertexes, target weld them, remove edges, create them back again, and so on and on until a very low poly mesh stood before me.... and I thought ... HA !! That's my first game asset.... now I will just put a texture and done...

The second part started... mapping... 

I browsed fast the internet... than found out that "they" the game developers, are using the method "Unwrap UVW" to map their models. I searched fast under the modify panel... fount it... and I figure it out by myself how it works. I used this before... but I didn't give it much thought, I just used something like "UVW Map" pulled some gizmos here and there to look good. I found fast "Vertex \ Edge \ Face\ Sub-object Mode", found the move button and started to pull the UVs. After this was done I just used "Prt Scr" button on my keyboard, paste the UVW template in Photoshop (I didn't know than about the option "Render the UVW Template...") and started to draw with the mouse inside this green edged shapes. I saved the file as JPG than in 3D asigned as material to my precious mesh. Here is the result:

I still remember the thrill I had when I saw this in 3D Studio Max... I was in the 7'th heaven! Was incredible, I finally figure it out how they are doing it! I have made my first video - game asset.
Of course the first thing I did was to show it to everyone around me... talk for hours about it... was incredible... "That's how they doing it!" I said... but... sadly... no one was impressed... was just an ugly house... "You have done better houses than this" they said...

This was a conquest for me. I figure it out by myself how they are doing this assets inside the games... for years I was staring in the games at the assets... I don't know why, but only after this experience I started to read forums, watch tutorials and really use the internet to learn how they are doing it.

Now I am doing the same thing that I have started back in 2007... I am making assets for games... and I am loving it. I have found communities and people who talk about this... they are rare but they are out there. I have started this blog to talk about my past and future experiences while I am working on video game assets. There is a lot to talk about it... there are a lot of communities sites that I frequent about this subject but on this blog I want to keep track of what I am learning and the progress I make.

I choose to do this... and I am proud of  it.

Burning computers

10 years ago I started playing in 3D Studio Max... I used to impress people with my 3D rotating ... things...
I started playing in 3D Studio Max because after playing a game over and over again I got bored and had always the need to remake characters I liked in the games... At first I have made this by drawing them on the back of my school notebooks... were full of ninjas from Saboteur game or huge head Dan Dare ... or chubby Nazis from Wolfenstein3D... or cartoonish vikings from The Lost Vikings... Than in 2000 came Baldur's Gate 2 who (in my opinion) rises the video game standard to a whole new level... from now on the games focus more on the artistic side... and from this point on I started seriously to study the games more. Than when the first Neverwinter game came out... I started not only to use pen and paper to remake the characters from the games I was playing... I started to use 3D Studio Max... I didn't understood back than why people made the characters so ... low poly... why in a wheal were so few polygons?! Because I was sure I have seen with my own eyes that in 3D Studio Max I can make not only 18 sides... I can make like... 200...

The games keep pushing me to do things in 3D...  like I said... things that used to impress people around me... and ... come on... who would not think to make a living of this! So people payed me to impress them and i used to burn their computers....

In 2000 I burned my first PC... smoke got out of it while I was rendering a Jeep that drifted around boxes... camera following this mad ... Jeep... that worked around his way between boxes. I let the computer render all night... if I remember well ... was a 486 I think...120MHz and an astonishing hard drive of ... 42 Megabytes... yes megabytes... not even windows 95 fitted on that. I had to manually delete all *.inf files and help files to have space for 3D max... Around 6:00 in the morning I smelled burning plastic and ... surprise... the computer was dead in the woods.

In 2003 I crushed and burned a PC from a company that sales plastic and they had a super computer. I was asked to make a webpage for that company  I decided to make the webpage in ... 3D Studio Max... well.. was an animation made in 3D placed inside a Flash control interface.

In 2004 I burned another PC while rendering 3D animation for an office building that wasn't even build yet. But eventually I managed to save the scene from the hard drive and finished the animation... they build it exactly after my animation.

In 2006 I have burned another PC at the company I was working at that time... I was rendering an animation for 1 week... and on the last frames the computer made a weird sound ... smoke got out of it's power source and died.

Also in 2006 I managed to bring back to life a computer that I almost killed... of course by rendering in 3D Studio Max ... something... don't remember what... That particular one remain a mystery for me because after it crushed, it simply didn't want to start again... the power was ok... no smoke... no weird sound.... it wouldn't start... All I did was to remove all it's components and put them back together ... and it started again.

Few month ago I almost burned this computer I have right now. I realized something was not right because when I .... render in 3D Studio Max... the internal speaker starts to make a beep.... beep... sound... and when I checked the temperature of the CPU with a free software I saw that the temperature was over 91° Celsius witch is not good. So regarding my previous experiences with burning computers I bought a huge cooler for this one... The standard cooler of a CPU is useless when you buy a new PC...

The Mapping: Unwrap UVW

So after I set up the files management and decided that I will use only 2 channels for the texture (Diffuse and Normal) I have started the work and I have experimented a bit with this first house that I have build.

I started by creating the main mesh for this structure in 3D Studio Max and after a long process of vertex removing and welding I started the part I sometimes hate: the mapping.

This mapping step is in fact a 2D representation of all the polygons that the mesh has. This is done in 3D Studio Max with the tool called "Unwrap UVW". This tool I hated... it eats a lot of time and energy and makes you forget why and what you are doing in the first place. In the beginning when you get to use this, looks very complicated and you get a feeling of disorientation. It is a freeking 2d tool in a 3D space!! and is exactly what it does... make your 3D object 2D with all sides visible. Now the interface this tool uses hasn't change much with the versions of 3D Studio Max. Has some basic buttons (move, rotate, scale and mirror) and some presets that you will find impossible to use when you start this mapping process... I recommend reading a lot about this "Unwrap UVW" method before you even think you can just figure it out! Better spend weeks of watching video tutorials and reading about it than me that I just started to use it, I figure it out a few useful things at first, than try to apply those allover... believe me it is a nightmare if you have no training before.

Few month ago I have discovered the 2 options to verify if your mapping "Select Inverted Faces" and "Select Overlapped Faces". Back than I was working on Vlad the Impeller character, I worked on the model several days, welded / added / removed vertexes... a long process... I started with no 2D reference... started from a standard box... I wanted to be the BEST game character that was ever made... and I was about to start it in low poly. I spend a lot of time and energy only by modeling this character... I had some fun doing it... but the lack of a plan, lack of a pen and paper sketch made me work a lot and I was not efficient at all... I mean not even a bit... I have spent over 22 days working on the mesh... changing it over 12 times ... cloth... hairstyle... face... and all this by vertexes and polygons... and if you ask me now... Vlad the Impeller is not even close to be completed... I need to finish it sometime...

Anyway... back to our mapping options "Select Inverted Faces" and "Select Overlapped Faces", I decided to try this options after I mapped Vlad's mesh... after hours of moving point to point in the "Edit UVW's" working space, all the triangles were red... this means only one thing... the faces either overlap either are inverted... and I have spend another 2 hours to manually click and drag points in the "Edit UVW's" working space until I had no triangles overlapped.... but the "Select Inverted Faces" option still make my triangles red... and I realized it wasn't the "Unwrap UVW" option to blame... not even its  "Select Inverted Faces" option to blame... was my mesh... the one I worked 22 days to make the BEST game character ... was broken... had inverted faces.... vertexes that were overlapping ... a real nightmare...

I have learned this tool the hard way...

Urban environment for PC video game

I have started to work on urban buildings for a indie video game. The game takes place in the present in the suburbs.
I have started this project with a small common house with a garage in the basement, an entrance on top of the stairs and a back entrance. I started with a quick hand-sketch (the one I have posted on 3 October).

Making video game assets requires good file management because for one single object in the game you need several files (textures maps, 3d files, collision information etc.)

The employer works in Ogre 3D engine, witch in my opinion is a limited and outdated engine, but if the employer want this and is comfortable with this engine... who am I to tell him otherwise.

I am a big fan of Unreal Engine 3. Because of their free release UDK (Unreal Development Kit) I have the occasion to work with this engine and to learn how to use it by watching video tutorials that they posted.

Now back to my employer's engine... Ogre 3D... who picked that name in the first place anyway?!?!. Ogre... who likes to work with... ogres... apparently people do. Anyway... this engine doesn't support file names larger than 8 characters so I have to think on a good way to manage the files... and will be a lot of files believe me.

I am making the 3D models in 3D Studio Max 2011, I am sticking to 2011 for now, and the textures in Photoshop CS3, so I will have for beginning 1 file for the 3D object and 2 files for textures. Why 2 files for texture? Because I will need 1 file for Diffuse Channel and one for Normal Channel.

Now a little a bit about this 2 texture and what I know about diffuse and normal channels.
- Diffuse Channel is the actual texture that we see on the object... for example if I am making a brick wall ... lets say ... (it is a common example used) on the Diffuse Channel will be a picture of bricks.
- Normal Channel is for the bump information. For example my brick wall has 1 single polygon and using this normal texture makes the wall look more realistic and give the impression that the bricks are sticking out of the object... without this normal texture the wall would have a smooth surface, with no definition for bricks.


The resolution of the textures I will use will be 1024x1024 pixels. From what I have read on the forums and what I have seen in games, the developers doesn't use resolution greater than this inside their games. They rather use multiple texture and seamless textures that they tile them on the objects. So for this assets that I am building I am going to use only texture files with the maximum resolution of 1024x1024. Also I will be guiding myself from the rules that I have learned in UDK. Only square textures or this example resolutions: 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, to a maximum of 1024x1024 pixels.


I thinking to make this game assets for my employer using only Diffuse and Normal textures. He want to use as few textures files as he can get because Ogre 3D it is not a very good optimized engine and tends to hic-up when you screw with to many channels / asset.

Building Sketch

Concept Sketch done for 3D building.