A Weekend Warrior

This weekend I kept up work on my building, being ever vigilant to get this done!

I finished up all of the high poly details, now it's time to block out the low poly, layout some UV's, and get to baking!

Before I get to all that though, I wanted to show off some of the stuff I've been hard at work to create, enjoy!

The base of the building without the HP details added in

Huge pic, please click

A few varied bricks that will be placed and tiled

The mortar that will be placed between the bricks, bricks have been tiled as a guide but are lower poly versions

Some detail work above the side door

 

Detail medallion on the very top of the building's trim

Goes between columns on some levels

A tileable garland for baking

On my polycount thread it was suggested that my previous detail pieces looked a little shaky.  While I couldn't start over entirely since I wasn't using any alphas (hand sculpting) I cleaned it up a good bit and felt it was worth reshowing.

Modularity

My latest project in my effort to become gainfully employed, is this building that is located in Cincinnati.

 

My blockout is a mix of high poly along with blockout pieces, this is going to be imported and presented in UDK

The wires aren't final whatsoever but here they are anyways

Now for some of the good stuff - my sculpts for the detail pieces so far (click for larger)

Follow thread on polycount here.

Druid Pillars WIP

Still looking for a good title on this piece, it's my latest WIP.  I am following the philosophy of work on pieces that are similar to where you would like to get a job - well my dreamjob would be at Bethesda working on the elder scrolls series, so hopefully this piece would make them proud, or at least be put in game haha.

Earlier Shots

Latest

Crits welcome, considering changing the color of the glow.

Cheytac M-200 Intervention Finished!

Hi again everyone, finished up the Intervention this last weekend, presentation can take so long to get it ready and update the site - anyways it's up now so go check it out and let me know what you think please!

Cheytac M200 Intervention

This is my next piece for Next Gen Reality Pty. Ltd. - the Intervention.  This is the longest range sniper rifle in the world to date and is .408 Caliber.  Finished up the high poly and starting out on the low poly next, C&C welcome!

Ref -

Glock 18 with Flashlight/Laser Attachment

Was limited to 1000 tri's for this one, ended up with 1314, CC welcome!

This was accepted by the company and I was told that it looked "absolutely excellent" - Next Gen Reality Pty. Ltd.
Click to enlarge

Droppin a bomb

Hey everyone, I haven't mentioned this throughout it's WIP stages, it's all been in this thread, so to anyone who may not know about this I'd say it's a bomb since I'm finished with it...for now. This is a commission/spec project so I did not choose what to model. Comments and Critique welcome.

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

I have been working on this for the last 2 months with a client and am finally able to show it off!

C&C Welcome

Medieval Update for Team Fortress 2

(please be sure click the arrows at the top right of the page, there are 3 pages total.)

More of the stank tree!

For those of you who don't know, the female Ginkgo tree drops pods with a sticky, smelly goop, that gets all over the place, people say they smell vomit and or trash when they notice the stench.  Also rarely the male tree undergoes a metamorphosis and then begins dropping stink pods since it is now a female tree as well, just imagine if humans could do that without surgery, what a wacky world it would be.

Anyways I got a crit over at polycount that my branches looked disconnected and that there wasn't enough medium level detail, too much hyper detail, so I gave it some more medium detail and smoothed out the branches.  I finished up my high res and began retopoing, 2100 hand placed vertices later I had my low.  I definitely need a better way to retopo trees in the future, to have to circle around each branch 8 or more times in order to get the loops in there just took absolutely forever, and then of course figuring in the complicated splits.

Please click for fullview

High Mesh

Baked Low - 4553 Tri's

 

 

 Tree Normal Map at 512 (Original 2048)

Some wires

Once I finished up the low I was excited to bake out my normal maps, after an auto unwrap for testing purposes the results looked ominous, little did I know they would eat up an entire day.  After a proper unwrap and hoping the problems would be fixed, the branches close to the trees were being projected onto the trunk of the tree.  I did not think xNormal had a  ray distance function since I did not see it under the normal map projection settings.  After trying multiple techniques such as splitting up the mesh, baking in maya (which took about 3 hours whereas xNormal takes about 30 seconds) and importing my retopoed into zBrush for a normal bake from there (which destroyed my mesh in some areas) I realized I should search google to see if it had a ray distance function. -- Low and behold IT DOES! It was hidden (at least to me) under the low mesh options which I had never noticed before! So for anyone having a problem such as that just increase it until you get the desired results, you might want to uncheck "closest hit if ray fails" for debugging purposes until everything seems about spot on, then recheck it to make sure all goes well.  A lot of text but hopefully worth the read!

Tree of the Ginkgo Update

I started out my sculpt on my tree first using curves in maya, then extruding cylinders along the curves using polygons as a guide, then used that to export to zBrush and created my base out of zSpheres.  Once happy with that base I began sculpting, this is what i've gotten so far and am about to start texturing, I am looking for critiques or suggestions for improvements.


Some of my reference

This one was shot by my lovely girlfriend Emily

Now for the goods

Placed a box for the ground ref of where the roots will cut off

 Some detail shots

Once again C&C are welcome!