Official OT-Creativity Thread 1

[Locrian]

loc - when i see the piece, i cant help but wonder if the environment says all that you need it to, without the people there.  they dont seem to add much to the piece, which is already very good.

Yeah I dunno for some reason I always feel like there has to be a person in an image.  So I tack em on.  Unfortunately I can't draw people without reference so they tend to bring things down.

My first 3D model, still working on it:

I know there are some modelers here.  What are the requirements to make a clean mesh for import into a game?  I know video games use tris.  But I've seen people model in quads.  You can have the program convert to tris when you're done.  At the moment I'm mixing tris and quads.  Is this ok?  Are there rules for how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex?  etc...  Haven't even begun to look into the process for UV mapping.  Sigh.  Daunting.

[huZba]

I know there are some modelers here.  What are the requirements to make a clean mesh for import into a game?  I know video games use tris.  But I've seen people model in quads.  You can have the program convert to tris when you're done.  At the moment I'm mixing tris and quads.  Is this ok?  Are there rules for how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex?  etc...  Haven't even begun to look into the process for UV mapping.  Sigh.  Daunting.

Well, the most basic things you have to look out for are polygons with more than 4 edges. Everything is always in tris, even the model you have there, but the modeling software is displaying it in quads and so forth. Since you're using 3dsmax, you can set it to show the tris in the model.

For your model, there's that one polygon with a gazillion edeges, so that's going to get messed up for sure, so you better cut it to quads. Then there's things like polystrips, fans and such that make processing of the model/texture faster, but you probably don't need to think about those atm.

You should check that most quads are almost planar to make sure there wont be any shading errors in the engine due to weird normals. Another thing to be aware of is very long quads, cause they're going to be cut in half to make two tris which can cause weird shading in places.

[junkboy]

Schultz inspired drawing. And yes, the amphibian monstrousity is a diligent southpaw masturbator. 

[ndchristie]

gotta admit, that feels more Allen St. John than it does Marc Schultz, but its is still extremely badass.  Would be nice to see a scene that involved less than one plane, but this is nice work

[zeid]

Loving this stuff you guys are showing.

this is pretty old it was my first go using photo shop to colour a sketch, (and my only one to date). I'm fairly happy with the actual colours i could achieve but i majorly skrewed up my line work when shading etc. I abandoned the piece ages ago so i only 'finished' colouring the face. Anyone who could give me some advice or some good tutes on this stuff it would be much appreciated as no doubt i will have a go at it again sometime. (I think doing a lot of pixel work for a while has improved my art skills in general regarding such things as lighting anatomy and colour theory  )

[Helm]

junkboy, very nice, pay attention to the right ( ours ) leg on the human in the piece, it's in a very odd position

[AdamAtomic]

I know there are some modelers here.  What are the requirements to make a clean mesh for import into a game?  I know video games use tris.  But I've seen people model in quads.  You can have the program convert to tris when you're done.  At the moment I'm mixing tris and quads.  Is this ok?  Are there rules for how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex?  etc...  Haven't even begun to look into the process for UV mapping.  Sigh.  Daunting.

Mixing tris and quads is fine, unless you plan to use what are called "subdivision surfaces" but these are not used THAT often for gaming purposes.  There aren't really broad rules about how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex, but it is good practice to avoid these so-called "fans", as engines that are capable of tri-stripping will be stumped by them.  If you divide your circular areas with parallel lines instead, the auto-tri-stripping algorithms will have a much easier time, and your model will render faster.


FAN

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Yeah non-fixed length ascii   hope it makes sense anyways!

[huZba]

I know there are some modelers here.  What are the requirements to make a clean mesh for import into a game?  I know video games use tris.  But I've seen people model in quads.  You can have the program convert to tris when you're done.  At the moment I'm mixing tris and quads.  Is this ok?  Are there rules for how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex?  etc...  Haven't even begun to look into the process for UV mapping.  Sigh.  Daunting.

Mixing tris and quads is fine, unless you plan to use what are called "subdivision surfaces" but these are not used THAT often for gaming purposes.  There aren't really broad rules about how many edges are allowed to radiate from a single vertex, but it is good practice to avoid these so-called "fans", as engines that are capable of tri-stripping will be stumped by them.  If you divide your circular areas with parallel lines instead, the auto-tri-stripping algorithms will have a much easier time, and your model will render faster.


FAN

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PARALLEL LINES
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/___
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/___

Yeah non-fixed length ascii   hope it makes sense anyways!

uh, actually, most 3D engines that incorporate tri stripping also do it for fans. It's about calculating new tris by adding just one new vertex. So proper fans are no problem, like the one on the side of the ship, as long as the engine understands that it's a tri-fan.

[Locrian]

doh I just got rid of the fan:


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.

Also, is this not a good thing to do:


hmmm.  I need to rip out the more organic ship models from Eve Online and check them out in Maya.  Would probably be a good way to learn.  *downloads 14-day trial*

[AdamAtomic]

uh, actually, most 3D engines that incorporate tri stripping also do it for fans. It's about calculating new tris by adding just one new vertex. So proper fans are no problem, like the one on the side of the ship, as long as the engine understands that it's a tri-fan.

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.