HFIL textures and FB shield updates

As I settled into my site supervisor position for the security company I work for, a pattern of time began to emerge that I was able to use to get some real work done ... well .. at least when I wasn't sleeping at the keyboard again. :)

HFIL - terrain:
After finally having a teamspeak chat with one of the members, I was able to use their 3ds max blender material that allowed me to paint out the terrain textures in an rgb format. This is how it turned out.

All my textures on a single blendmap for the terrain.

It turned out I'll need to make some more terrain textures to make everyone happy, I guess they had assumed I had made more. So I set off to make at least one more dirt and grass texture. It was also brought to my attention that the blood in the bloody pond wasn't bloody water as I had assumed, so I got rid of the alpha channel I was using.

I started the dirt texture with the two dirt colors I had set up with the previous dirt texture, and I used a noise filter. Then I used the oil paint filter and played with the until it started to look remotely like rough dirt or something ... vaguely. Then I made another layer with the noise filter again, this time with black and white, and used a crystalize filter to give myself some smaller chunky bits to help break up the oil painting pattern. I set the crystalized layer over the oil painting layer and this is how it turned out! Later I offset it so that it would repeat nicely.

I created a new grass blades texture for the cards I had in my grass baking maya scene, I made it a bit lighter around the edges than the other two blade textures. Once it rendered out [about 4 hours] this is how it turned out. I haven't yet offset it for repeating, so if you're taking my textures for your own personal use be advised that this one isn't repeatable yet! :) I'm also not sure if I'm happy with how bright it turned out, we'll see how it works blended next to the other two grass textures.

FB - shield:
I started getting impatient to get back to working on my shield update I posted for last month, so while the car was in the shop I sat down in maya and started deleting edges. The model went from a high poly count of 19626 to a low poly count of 3733 with basically no change in silhouette and minor changes to the textures.

high poly

low poly

Then I noticed that the marmoset toolbag was on sale for $25, and so decided to do the final render in there as I had never used it before .. but I have heard a lot of good things about it. This is my first time using the program, and was able to come up with a pretty nice render.

Low poly mesh render in marmoset toolbag.

It might be a bit before I get to plunge into my own projects again, as I received a request for help on another unlisted project. I accepted the unpaid offer, and unfortunately will be unable to post my work from that project until it's completed and posted by the actual owner of the project. I only hope I can keep up with the demands of the project and maintain the technical level they require for it.
Thanks for staying tuned, and I'll keep you posted.

HFIL - Texture Time 3

This month came and went fast, but I managed to find time to really look at some textures as well as add some variety textures for blend mapping in the environment once it makes it to the game engine .. though as I don't have the game engine I don't really know how all of this will look until the group I'm with can get me started in the engine.

First though, let me show you what I did while waiting for critiques. This is a "little" side project I have been working on in my free time. I made one of the vehicles already as posted a few months ago, so this is vehicle two. Don't have official names or anything yet, but I like the look of it.

Here's a quick sample of the new grass and a little area of fallen rocks/blood water for the HFIL environment.

I wasn't happy with the grass, so I looked around and found a new technique .. let's render some grass cards! I simply made some blades of grass as shown below.

 Then I duplicated the cards out across a plane and rendered it at high quality and even lighting, took that to photoshop to make it repeatable and ended up with this:

 Once I had the cards in place, I could replace the grass blades texture and simply re-render and get an entirely different section of grass.

 Then I wanted to break up the dirt texture with some pebble .. rock .. things, so I found a photo of some nice pebbles and made it repeatable. Then I selected by color all the pebbles and masked them out, keeping the dirt stuff in between them. Then I made my own painted rocky pebble texture and that's what you see here:

Moving along with rocks, I wanted to try my hand at another rock texture for the large cliff surface. I'm not happy with how different the colors turned out from the other rock texture, but I think the rough heavy grooves will go good with the other texture.

Still working with rocks, but now back to the grassy areas, I wanted to add some rocks kind of poking out of the grass. So I found a nice photo of some rocks doing exactly that, and used their shapes and then filled it in with my own rocks. The flat color you see is just to help get rid of the white line in the transparency.

In other news, my one year anniversary for graduating from Full Sail University was the 1st of July ... it's been a year and 311 applications and still I can't get anyone to pay any attention to me long enough to hire me. The pay off never came, and now I'm stuck footing the bill on a paycheck that isn't adequate to pay it. Fun times ....
Stay tuned and I'll consider not giving up completely.

HFIL - Texture Time 2

This month went by quickly with the flurry of work at different security sites and game art taking up my free time. Career status is still on hold, but I managed to get a couple of [negative]replies .. so at least someone out there is seeing my applications. As of today, I have 296 applications out since graduation last year. On a side note I saved up and spent my entire 2 weeks' pay check on Photoshop CS6 pro-license so I'm having fun trying to learn the new stuff in it.[and I can finally try to sell some stuff on turbosquid] Enough of all that, on to the work!

To start where I left off last month, here's the light post:

Then I made a repeating concrete texture for the fountain, using the colors I had used while making the base pillar for the lamp post. In hindsight it might have been better to just use this material for the base pole as well, but I guess that's what happens when you can't just sit down and focus on your environments as a whole. :)

The water texture was something I wasn't sure how to tackle, but since the ESF crew seemed determined to make it look as real as possible with hand painted textures I knew this had to be my goal. I ended up finding an old tutorial from another blogspot user: James. Though because of the age of the tutorial I've noticed some of the images/info seems to be missing. Below this image I'll outline the steps used just in case his tutorial dies.

Step 1: Create a blank canvas, I used 512x512px
Step 2: Choose your highlight and shadow colors as your 2 colors for your brush pallet.
Step 3: goto: filter - render - clouds
Step 4: goto: filter - distort - ripple [setting: 999, large]
Step 5: goto: filter - distort - ripple [setting: 999, medium]
Step 6: paint out your alpha channel as necessary for realism.
Some tips that helped me was to use as big a cloud as possible when using the cloud filter, and for the bloody water I used a dark red and a white/almost red color.

The metal was pretty simple, I wanted it to be black paint with a lot of simple scratches that would be highly repeatable. So I went with a smaller texture and went through lightly applying some of my grunge brushes. I think it turned out pretty decent.

I needed a repeatable wood texture for the benches and the park sign, so I used a technique I picked up while at full sail. I used the fibers filter [filter - render - fibers. settings: 16, 4], and some bevel/emboss while tracing the fibers at a low opacity and a dark brush. Going back to add some cracks in the wood and then playing with the highlights go a long way.

Then I took that texture and added some basic text for the park signage, I ended up liking the way the "bulkyRefuse Type" turned out, though I tried to add some small cracks and a slight bevel/emboss to the letters.

Here's how they turned out in the scene in maya, later on I worked on making normal and specular maps using photoshop and crazybump, and then moving all my files over to 3ds max so that I could work alongside the methods of the ESF crew.

Lastly I came up with a theme for the sky dome, but after I finished it and showed it off to the ESF crew they promptly informed me of the dynamic sky technology they have for their game engine .. and that my texture wasn't necessary. So .. oh well .. here it is anyways :p

I was able to play with the slate material editor in max as well as trying to figure out how max handles two materials on the same mesh. Not a big fan of the extra steps, but in the end I was able to get the same results maya gave me. I'm really glad this is all coming together as I have a few "weekend" personal projects just begging for me to get to them. Speaking of work though .. I need to head to my "day job".
Stay tuned!