Thanks for the suggestions guys! I gave the black hair a go and i'm much happier with it, also added in some cyborg bits and generally tuned up and saturated the skin tones, happy with where she's going.
Spent the past 3 hours trying to figure out emmisives with no luck, wanted to give her some simple glowey eyeballs. Maybe it has to do with the fact I'm using targas and not DDS's, i dunno (my photoshop doesn't accept DDS). When i use a simple material that uses the same texture for emmisive as diffuse it works, but that's the only way i've gotten these materials to work so far. If anyone knows what the issue may be it would be very appreciated. Enough beating my head against the wall today though, takin' a break.
Acemore, what you said really does make sense and for the first time since the contest i think many of us finally have some closure, thank you for going out of your way to tell us what happened with this competition.
As a side note, though the winning entries were not as "original and innovative" as blizzard led on they were looking for, they were very well polished and "fun" which is something i think we as a community haven't been putting enough stock into as we pursue our pipe dreams of creating our own custom maps.
Last Update for the night, got her in-engine and more or less fully textured:
One of the great things about working from concept for a game that isn't going for hyper realism is you don't always have to do a ton to it to get it started up... some cuts and pastes, some warps, lay out the UV's the right way and kabam, first texture pass (though you still gotta put in lots of time in the long run if you want it to be legit and polished).
Going to take a lot more polish all around, but I'm pretty happy where she is right now considering she's the prototype and it's only been about a week! Moving forward I might try to work in some Hair alphas and I'll definitely be throwing in some emmisives to give her some more pop. It's fun to think about these characters as modular. Shoulderpads are swappable, eyes can be made glowy, new weapons can be thrown on, textures can be swapped out, and doodads can be stuck all over the place for new variants.
Late update, Halloween hit harder than i thought it would but i'm still going to aim for having a first iteration done by the weekend.
Right now it's simply my goal to finish the base sorceress skin textures. LOTS of bouncing between photoshop and MAX right now, tweaking hues, tweaking UV coordinates, tweaking every damned thing you can think of, doing this stuff gets you back in the art game f*cking fast which is good since I spent the past 4 months working on gameplay in cosmic eclipse.
What looks good on the texture sheet doesn't necessarily look good on the model so tons and tons of going back and forth between the 2 programs. Each step only makes the model look slightly better, but you just peck away at it making hundereds and hundreds of changes till somehow it looks a lot better. Polycount doesn't get bigger, nor does texture size, it's all in the polishing. In fact i'm realizing the texture size we're currently using, 512 is a heck of a lot bigger than we need which is good and bad. One of the main reasons for doing this art is portfolio pieces, so it's important that the character be large enough to look good up close, but at the same time we're restricted by a 10.5 meg file restriction, so cutting corners in textures in paramount in terms of finished product. I'm thinking future models i'll just rump right into the low poly version and save TONS of time. Only thing i'm not looking forward to is learning to rig in max, though i have a feeling it's going to be a lot easier than i fear so once this model is textured it may only be a week or so till she's running around in game shooting ice bolts and fireballs! Just gotta keep up the pace.
The armor should be fun and a lot easier to impliment than the skin was since robotic crap is super easy to make and create in photoshop. The armor should have plenty of glowy emmisive goodies hanging off it and i'll be using some fast Xnormal conversions in photoshop to churn out some normals that look very nice. A lot of people try to force normals onto hair and skin, but it's really kinda overkill, especially when you have a texture size limit.
Anyway, enough blathering, here's the progress for today:
Final pic gives you an idea of how much time i'm wasting making this look "good". The odds of there ever being a very close shot of the sorceress is very small, but i'm pushin' the other team members for some cool camera tricks that might be able to bring the camera in during gameplay somewhat similar to limit breaks if you've ever played final fantasy. The small sorceress on the right is likely the largest you'll ever see the model haha.
If there are any riggers, animators, modelers, heck even concept artists out there who'd like to jump on board just reply or shoot me a PM, we'd love to have you on the team as i'm pretty f*ckin' swamped trying to churn out all these characters and animations in a reasonable time-frame.
Edit: Been told the cyborg bits on her face look like goofy makeup, might try to fix up a spec make to solve it or just remove it, we'll see how things pan out.
I dunno man, I've been pretty vocal in a lot of anti blizzard rants about how they treat their mappers, but this is actually pretty cool of blizzard to actually send you an email.
That map is full of win. Great lighting without going overboard, caputures the feel of post apocalypse very well, and interesting points of interest that don't get in the way of gameplay.
Only crit is i think you may have overdone the grungy ground texture, the blackish one. I know you're going for a dirty grungey future invironment, but i think if you scaled it back a bit and put in some more of the cleaner metalic texture it would be a little more appealing visually. As it is it looks like a barren wasteland with bits of metal kinda overtaking it rather than the reverse.
Here's where the sorceress stands right now. It can be hard to tell how a flat grey character model is progressing so I threw some flat color materials from MAX and i'm pretty happy with how well she's starting to resemble the original concept work without textures and in a flat T pose. Much of the modeling still has a ways to go, especially her armor bits above the waist, but many of these pieces will be changeable armor pieces and not part of the base model.
One of the main issues with female models is they can be flimsy and it's hard to create meaty canvases in their silhouette for interesting texture work. Because of this i've tried to expand her frame, hinting that mechanic facilities have overgrown her more slender frame. I'll probably go back in and add more "meat" to her midsection expand the base model allowing me to remove the hard polygon wires which eat up a lot of tri's. Emmisive effects and hair alphas will add further bulk once in-engine and give her some much needed "pop". No mater which angle you view her from she should be glowy and look "magical". The only alpha effects i was able to create for hair are "glowy" ones during some texture tests in SC2 using Nintoxicated's tools, but i think they could end up looking really cool if overlayed onto the existant hair, these alphas i think can also be animated to give her hair a realistic wispy bob and sway in the wind and as she moves. If we can figure out how to adjust just the color of emmisives and her hair alphas it will likely be one of the signature aspects of identifying which type of element the sorceress is. Shoulder pads and other modular armor pieces are being planned as well to create further distinctions between sub-classes.
Update:
Pretty nasty looking import but you gotta start somehwere ;). Just UV mapped and textured the flesh and hair areas figured i'd put them on 1 texture sheet, it's a 512. Gotta party the next few days but planning on having this actually looking good and more or less done with a first pass by the end of next week!
Anyone know the best file format and compression settings for Starcrat 2, or just any tricks in general for keeping file sizes down. I'm looking to get the most bang out of 10.5 megs possible!
uncheck use internal paths before you export and import your textures then save. you may want to try reloading your file after you have all the textures imported.
0
Thanks for the suggestions guys! I gave the black hair a go and i'm much happier with it, also added in some cyborg bits and generally tuned up and saturated the skin tones, happy with where she's going.
Spent the past 3 hours trying to figure out emmisives with no luck, wanted to give her some simple glowey eyeballs. Maybe it has to do with the fact I'm using targas and not DDS's, i dunno (my photoshop doesn't accept DDS). When i use a simple material that uses the same texture for emmisive as diffuse it works, but that's the only way i've gotten these materials to work so far. If anyone knows what the issue may be it would be very appreciated. Enough beating my head against the wall today though, takin' a break.
0
@Acemore: Go
Acemore, what you said really does make sense and for the first time since the contest i think many of us finally have some closure, thank you for going out of your way to tell us what happened with this competition.
As a side note, though the winning entries were not as "original and innovative" as blizzard led on they were looking for, they were very well polished and "fun" which is something i think we as a community haven't been putting enough stock into as we pursue our pipe dreams of creating our own custom maps.
0
Last Update for the night, got her in-engine and more or less fully textured:
One of the great things about working from concept for a game that isn't going for hyper realism is you don't always have to do a ton to it to get it started up... some cuts and pastes, some warps, lay out the UV's the right way and kabam, first texture pass (though you still gotta put in lots of time in the long run if you want it to be legit and polished).
Going to take a lot more polish all around, but I'm pretty happy where she is right now considering she's the prototype and it's only been about a week! Moving forward I might try to work in some Hair alphas and I'll definitely be throwing in some emmisives to give her some more pop. It's fun to think about these characters as modular. Shoulderpads are swappable, eyes can be made glowy, new weapons can be thrown on, textures can be swapped out, and doodads can be stuck all over the place for new variants.
0
Late update, Halloween hit harder than i thought it would but i'm still going to aim for having a first iteration done by the weekend.
Right now it's simply my goal to finish the base sorceress skin textures. LOTS of bouncing between photoshop and MAX right now, tweaking hues, tweaking UV coordinates, tweaking every damned thing you can think of, doing this stuff gets you back in the art game f*cking fast which is good since I spent the past 4 months working on gameplay in cosmic eclipse.
What looks good on the texture sheet doesn't necessarily look good on the model so tons and tons of going back and forth between the 2 programs. Each step only makes the model look slightly better, but you just peck away at it making hundereds and hundreds of changes till somehow it looks a lot better. Polycount doesn't get bigger, nor does texture size, it's all in the polishing. In fact i'm realizing the texture size we're currently using, 512 is a heck of a lot bigger than we need which is good and bad. One of the main reasons for doing this art is portfolio pieces, so it's important that the character be large enough to look good up close, but at the same time we're restricted by a 10.5 meg file restriction, so cutting corners in textures in paramount in terms of finished product. I'm thinking future models i'll just rump right into the low poly version and save TONS of time. Only thing i'm not looking forward to is learning to rig in max, though i have a feeling it's going to be a lot easier than i fear so once this model is textured it may only be a week or so till she's running around in game shooting ice bolts and fireballs! Just gotta keep up the pace.
The armor should be fun and a lot easier to impliment than the skin was since robotic crap is super easy to make and create in photoshop. The armor should have plenty of glowy emmisive goodies hanging off it and i'll be using some fast Xnormal conversions in photoshop to churn out some normals that look very nice. A lot of people try to force normals onto hair and skin, but it's really kinda overkill, especially when you have a texture size limit.
Anyway, enough blathering, here's the progress for today:
Final pic gives you an idea of how much time i'm wasting making this look "good". The odds of there ever being a very close shot of the sorceress is very small, but i'm pushin' the other team members for some cool camera tricks that might be able to bring the camera in during gameplay somewhat similar to limit breaks if you've ever played final fantasy. The small sorceress on the right is likely the largest you'll ever see the model haha.
If there are any riggers, animators, modelers, heck even concept artists out there who'd like to jump on board just reply or shoot me a PM, we'd love to have you on the team as i'm pretty f*ckin' swamped trying to churn out all these characters and animations in a reasonable time-frame.
Edit: Been told the cyborg bits on her face look like goofy makeup, might try to fix up a spec make to solve it or just remove it, we'll see how things pan out.
0
I dunno man, I've been pretty vocal in a lot of anti blizzard rants about how they treat their mappers, but this is actually pretty cool of blizzard to actually send you an email.
Why not just reinstall?
0
http://spec.ytmnd.com/
0
Could be as simple as the lighting in the level, try adjusting your lighting.
0
Convert it to a editable polygon and try a "weld" on it.
It would also be helpful to see a wireframe of the object. It appears you have extra geometry for such a simple object.
0
You can download GIMP, it's a free to use graphics program that has no issues with DDS files.
Gimp
0
@QMJ3: Go
That map is full of win. Great lighting without going overboard, caputures the feel of post apocalypse very well, and interesting points of interest that don't get in the way of gameplay.
Only crit is i think you may have overdone the grungy ground texture, the blackish one. I know you're going for a dirty grungey future invironment, but i think if you scaled it back a bit and put in some more of the cleaner metalic texture it would be a little more appealing visually. As it is it looks like a barren wasteland with bits of metal kinda overtaking it rather than the reverse.
0
Here's where the sorceress stands right now. It can be hard to tell how a flat grey character model is progressing so I threw some flat color materials from MAX and i'm pretty happy with how well she's starting to resemble the original concept work without textures and in a flat T pose. Much of the modeling still has a ways to go, especially her armor bits above the waist, but many of these pieces will be changeable armor pieces and not part of the base model.
One of the main issues with female models is they can be flimsy and it's hard to create meaty canvases in their silhouette for interesting texture work. Because of this i've tried to expand her frame, hinting that mechanic facilities have overgrown her more slender frame. I'll probably go back in and add more "meat" to her midsection expand the base model allowing me to remove the hard polygon wires which eat up a lot of tri's. Emmisive effects and hair alphas will add further bulk once in-engine and give her some much needed "pop". No mater which angle you view her from she should be glowy and look "magical". The only alpha effects i was able to create for hair are "glowy" ones during some texture tests in SC2 using Nintoxicated's tools, but i think they could end up looking really cool if overlayed onto the existant hair, these alphas i think can also be animated to give her hair a realistic wispy bob and sway in the wind and as she moves. If we can figure out how to adjust just the color of emmisives and her hair alphas it will likely be one of the signature aspects of identifying which type of element the sorceress is. Shoulder pads and other modular armor pieces are being planned as well to create further distinctions between sub-classes.
Update:
Pretty nasty looking import but you gotta start somehwere ;). Just UV mapped and textured the flesh and hair areas figured i'd put them on 1 texture sheet, it's a 512. Gotta party the next few days but planning on having this actually looking good and more or less done with a first pass by the end of next week!
0
Rock on thanks for the info triceron
0
It'll never happen, the Olympics are too "sacred" for a digital sport, let alone a commercial one at that.
0
Anyone know the best file format and compression settings for Starcrat 2, or just any tricks in general for keeping file sizes down. I'm looking to get the most bang out of 10.5 megs possible!
0
@canichols2: Go
uncheck use internal paths before you export and import your textures then save. you may want to try reloading your file after you have all the textures imported.