Official OT-Creativity Thread 1

[huZba]

Not that I've heard of - the big one in the console world is renderware, and last i heard it did NOT have support for fans, but my info could easily be out of date, i have not researched this stuff reasonably for quite a while now.  I know that most 3d APIs have syntax for rendering fans, but I was under the impression that most engines (meaning the full work pipeline) were not very good at parsing them and integrating them into the render process.  I thought that most engines wanted tri strips so that it could make one display list of all the strips in the piece and then render the model insanely fast that way.  Fans are much less general purpose than strips, and would require a more complex parser and render pipeline in-game.

There was a long discussion on cgtalk about this without any clear conclusion, mostly because there's so much differences between engines and a lot of exporters do a lot of these things by themselves that a lot of people were actually told not to care about them in places other than where they're completely obvious, like floors or round windows and such. Eniveeeh, here's a good resource http://www.codesampler.com/d3dbook/chapter_05/chapter_05.htm

One psp 3D engine i've worked with had pretty effective stripping which allowed us to give floors a lot of vertices for smooth vertex shading. It also featured fan stripping which allowed for a lot of round shapes in the scene doubling the normal poly quota on screen.

I know I've seen fans used for things like tables though.  Is one more optimal than the other?  Or does it not really matter.  And Huzba, when you say keep my faces planar, do you mean just try not to let them twist much?  Treat the quads as solid quads, not as flexible quads made up of tris.

The way you changed the side is probably faster than the fan. If there was some geometry like the center of the round thing being concave or convex, then the fan would be a good choice. And yeah, treat quads as flat quads and if you have to twist it, then cut it into tris to make sure it doesn't get wonky.
Now another note is that quad next to the cockpit thingy. That might make a very small triangle when it goes to the engine, which could cause shading errors in the surface. Better cut it in half or make it more square. Keeping quads square is a good habit.

[ndchristie]

just a quick sketch of an old character of mine, Mia Pendergast.  Shes been reimagined any number of times, but has maintained more or less the same character; and orphaned girl who uses short knives/swords and a revolver in an off-fantasy steampunk world.  Shes gotten a bit older since the last time i sketched her....

In this particulr re-imagining, she is the daughter of one of the last Mechanists, who dies early in the story when Potager, the nation from fil's and my project Partisan, is conquered by the neighboring Empire of Ganymede some two or three generations after the events of that game.  She joins in a resistance movement against Ganymede, attempting to find and rescue the few who still hold the knowledge of machina, which has been outlawed by the Empire yadda yadda yadda......

for those who might have heard about this character before, the sword doesnt channel one half of the god of change anymore, it's just a piece of metal.  Alphonse, who carried the other half of the god, is also gone in this concept.

[junkboy]

Adarias: Allen St. John?! Well, I'll take either.  Although by "Schultz" I mostly refered to the human looking a lot like Jack from Xenozoic Tales.
Cool gunslinger/samurai chick by the way. You always pick excellent colors.

Helm: Do you mean his left? I can't see much wrong with his right leg, except that the upper leg appears to be a bit long (that's partly because he wears the pants high, but still).


New piece, this time it's Conan the thief getting caught (or something). Also my hand hurts. A lot.

[ptoing]

Adarias: Nice, tho big head syndrome again, she is barely 6 heads.

Junkboy: That is really nice, tho I think it would benefit from some darker full black shadows a lot.

[willfaulds]

Adarias - I as always love you color selection - i know its a quick sketch but her face feels really flat in comparison to everything else. nice stuff though.

junkboy - thats nice, though i agree with ptoing - the busy wall texture means some of the upper characters are lost.

I'm hoping for some c&c on this piece

Its a slight WIP I've rendered to about half way down with some slight exceptions.

[khorin]

So many different textures and patterns and for some reason the figure reminds of Egon Schiele's work. The arms and chest are elongated. Intentional, yes? And what's going on at the very bottom of the piece?

[Helm]

I like the Conan piece. Whatever school you're going to, it's doing a good job on making you stretch style-wise. The texturing would need to be tighter in my opinion (the thatching texture) and there would have to be pure blacks to keep it balanced. Also the burning coals lightsource would give off a cylindrical darkness effect with the opposite curve than the one you drew.

[willfaulds]

Egon Schiele meets Aubrey Beardsley is the intention - have toyed with composition on this one quite a bit hence the roughness of the bottom.

[ndchristie]

ptoing - seven by my count, but thats just the disproportionatly long legs at work >.<

[ptoing]

6 AND A HALF, MY LAST BID