I'm actually looking for a few 3D artists and animators for a project I'm working on. The models here look fairly good too and we are looking for something around the same quality. (2500-4500 tris per model with a minimum of 1024x1024 spec,diffuse and normal maps) Before I hire anyone though I wanted to know if the techniques used here are transferable outside of SC2. We are using Unreal so 3Ds Max knowledge for modeling, texturing, rigging and animation would be necessary but the import pipeline is quite a bit different. Instead you save everything as a .FBX
Some models here are created from scratch so that's great to here. Does anyone here have any ecperience working on different pipelines or are most of the models here mods of existing models? If it's even possible to transfer these skills, I'd love to talk to interested parties about rates.
The only things that would be different is that Unreal's exporter is actually fully-functional and properly supported, while sc2 is working on a unfinished plugin that currently won't even export geometry for some people (including me). The animations systems differ in that sc2 requires keyframing everything and are baked into the model, and that with Unreal (at least with ActorX) you can "export" sequences individually to their respective animation file and then apply those animations at will independently in Unreal's editor.
Otherwise, it's a trivial process for me to export a model imported from say Lineage 2 into either sc2 or the UDK. I've only used ActorX with Unreal, though, and have no idea what kind of differences the FBX export entails.
Basically, Unreal's pipeline is an actual pipeline, as opposed to sc2, where all custom content support is sort of a last-minute rush from a few interns and the end-users have to kind of scrape up the rest. Almost all content creation is easily transferrable between games, with pipeline adapting to Unreal resulting in cleaner and easier deployment. Sc2 relies on max materials for a few things, but AFAIK all materials are done inside Unreal, so that is even less work for the modeler to worry about.
Actually ActorX isn't really supported anymore. When you create your animations in the 3D software all you do is click export and choose FBX. It bakes all the animations into the model automatically. When you reimport them into Unreal, it asks you if you want to include your animations.
Materials and UVW is still done in the 3D software. You don't need to do all of them though. If you have a diffuse teture, multi channel mask texture and a specular texture you can use the in editor material editor to change texture coordinates, multiply, desaturate, etc. Essentially anything.
Last UDK version I tried, which was only a few months ago, I could still import unreal 2 actorX stuff in without any issues. I hope they don't remove that support. :(
Not that I would ever be able to make a project in it. But one can dream, I guess.
It might still be supported at this point but it is deprecated now. It is suggested that you use FBX now as it's a built in file format for all autodesk products.
I'm actually looking for a few 3D artists and animators for a project I'm working on. The models here look fairly good too and we are looking for something around the same quality. (2500-4500 tris per model with a minimum of 1024x1024 spec,diffuse and normal maps) Before I hire anyone though I wanted to know if the techniques used here are transferable outside of SC2. We are using Unreal so 3Ds Max knowledge for modeling, texturing, rigging and animation would be necessary but the import pipeline is quite a bit different. Instead you save everything as a .FBX
Some models here are created from scratch so that's great to here. Does anyone here have any ecperience working on different pipelines or are most of the models here mods of existing models? If it's even possible to transfer these skills, I'd love to talk to interested parties about rates.
The only things that would be different is that Unreal's exporter is actually fully-functional and properly supported, while sc2 is working on a unfinished plugin that currently won't even export geometry for some people (including me). The animations systems differ in that sc2 requires keyframing everything and are baked into the model, and that with Unreal (at least with ActorX) you can "export" sequences individually to their respective animation file and then apply those animations at will independently in Unreal's editor.
Otherwise, it's a trivial process for me to export a model imported from say Lineage 2 into either sc2 or the UDK. I've only used ActorX with Unreal, though, and have no idea what kind of differences the FBX export entails.
Basically, Unreal's pipeline is an actual pipeline, as opposed to sc2, where all custom content support is sort of a last-minute rush from a few interns and the end-users have to kind of scrape up the rest. Almost all content creation is easily transferrable between games, with pipeline adapting to Unreal resulting in cleaner and easier deployment. Sc2 relies on max materials for a few things, but AFAIK all materials are done inside Unreal, so that is even less work for the modeler to worry about.
Actually ActorX isn't really supported anymore. When you create your animations in the 3D software all you do is click export and choose FBX. It bakes all the animations into the model automatically. When you reimport them into Unreal, it asks you if you want to include your animations.
Materials and UVW is still done in the 3D software. You don't need to do all of them though. If you have a diffuse teture, multi channel mask texture and a specular texture you can use the in editor material editor to change texture coordinates, multiply, desaturate, etc. Essentially anything.
Last UDK version I tried, which was only a few months ago, I could still import unreal 2 actorX stuff in without any issues. I hope they don't remove that support. :(
Not that I would ever be able to make a project in it. But one can dream, I guess.
@IskatuMesk: Go
It might still be supported at this point but it is deprecated now. It is suggested that you use FBX now as it's a built in file format for all autodesk products.
Yeah, I'd probably use FBX for all of my self modelled stuff. The old ActorX stuff is just a great convenience for porting.