Wednesday 25 April 2012

Client Brief - CGFX Aberdeen

It's the last brief of the 3D animation college course and it involves an outside coming in and delivering a brief base on what required in the industry. Given that CGFX is predominantly and oil and gas visualisation company, it was no surprise that when we were given the options of modeling and (realistically) rendering either a helicopter, an ROV or a vessel. We were put into teams of four and so we all came to the collective decision to model the helicopter because we thought it would be easiest to split the modelling job four ways; I was in chrage of doing the helicopter body which I think is coming along quite nicely. There are lots of small details which would be impractical to model or even place on top of the surface as seperate objects, so I think I'm going to experiment with Mudbox a little and use a comination of its curve objects and its ability to paint bump maps in 3D and see what I get.




Playing With Normal Maps



It's been a while since I've posted anything, but I've been quite busy recently getting application forms filled in and sent of with regards to the Master's course I'll be doing after Summer.  But anyway, before Easter I saw that a few of my class mates were creating some pretty cool looking rifles for computer games in Max and so, inspired by this, I thought I'd give it a go myself and hopefully improve my understanding of baking out normal maps in Max.  I found some really nice AK-47 image planes at http://the-blueprints.com/ and while modelling an AK-47 is certainly nothing new, I've always quite like the look of them since using them in Counter-Strike  1.6 (that's right!  No Source for me!).  So I started by modelling the high poly object before doing a little normal test render on the magazine clip and, considering this was my first attempt and I wasn't following a tutorial series or anything, I was pretty happy with what I ended up with.