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.