Recently I was given Client work from a gaming group that goes by the name “Outbreak gaming” The channel admin who goes by the alias “CombatMedic02” came to me and asked if I was able to create him an animated watermark for his channel.
He gave me a small list of things he wanted to be featured in the watermark.
– Must contain deference to our logo (biohazard sign)
– Must contain the name
– Must be very simple
He then gave me a references to how he imagined it to look.
It was quite broad so I had a lot of comfort when crating the watermark.
I created a few simple sketches, mostly to see how it could work
I handed the first batch of designs to my client as we actively spoke and he very much fell in love with the final two designs and said if I could merge the two together.
The final design was created and sent to my client who thought it would be perfect!
My client sent me an attempt he did and asked me to use it if it helped, he also asked if I could fix the lighting for him.
Bellow is my attempt at fixing what he tried, however I just couldn’t get the lighting correct, there wasn’t enough frames to make it fluid and it was simply just too fast, also animating the text around this gif was just too hard. So I scrapped it.
So I decided to make the animation in 3ds max and here is what I got.
When making the model in 3DSmax I found it was much easier then having to do frame by frame like I was in Photoshop. Not only that but i noticed I had much more freedom to try different angles and show to my client.
Once I was happy I sent it to my client who asked for a full front view, animating it as suggested in my sketches.
Animating it, this is what I came up with.
I gave it to my client however he didn’t like the colors and neither did he like how the text and sign wasn’t continues, so I had to go back to the drawing board and created this gif instead.
Sending it to my client he was very happy with it and began using it on his video!
There was a lot of tweaking and testing involved during the making of the final piece and bellow is a video of myself and my client testing and trying different things until we both where happy.
and bellow is him using the watermark on one of his latest videos
When it comes to 3D modeling I find it fairly easy to create the initial 3D model, however its when I get to the UV unwrapping where I have my downfall and in most cases its the 3D model which makes the model! So I decided that I document some of my biggest issues and also mention weather or not Iv found a way around the issues I was having or not and possible how I could solve them.
My first issue was the models tapology. The model its self needs to be clean with no engons or tri polygons and certainly no polygons intersecting each other which would create something called Z fighting. I first came to terms with Z fighting when I had a building for my Client project and when it was placed into the world and two faces, clearly visible would flash. I had to go back into the 3D modeler and sort these issues by deleting faced and rebuilding parts again. If only I was more careful when I was building the model at the first stage, there wouldn’t be no such issue.
Above is an example of missing poly’s and upon revisiting I simply had to delete and recreate the two by capping and bridging the poly’s
Above you can see two edges intersecting one another. This was the issue I mentioned above with the Z fighting issue.
I soon learned better topology as I decided to undertake my own personal project of creating a car where I took it on myself to learn and focus more on the topology and to really think about things like Z fighting as well as thinking about the final unwrap for when it comes to texturing my models..
As you can see above after some time, thought and some advice from multiple students in the room I was able to create a much more complex model with more complex shapes with a much more complex topology to deal with. With this small project underway and talking to multiple students I feel like I have improved dramatically in my 3d modeling skills to create much more accurate models at much faster rate. This will become very Crucial when coming to creating the hundreds of assets we have listed for our Client project.
Another issue I had was simply creating specific shapes that didn’t look “Boxy” and had a bit more shape to them. In the past I used to create a large box with many height and length segments and I would imagine it almost as a piece of clay, molding the shape I wanted. I soon realized how unpractical this was and Moved onto how I could create the shapes with other simple shapes like building a bullet from a cylinder for the shell and then making a cone to be the actual bullet’s head. However once I was given the client project and having to dive into some of the options and played with different methods of modeling and observing others modeling, I tried to recreate there methods to which I found very successful as I was able to finally freely create what I could of drawn concepts for and create what I envisioned
Above is a very recent work in progress for my self initiated project and the peak of my modeling skills as of right now. As you can see, much improvement with more organic like shapes and curves.
Also another thing that’s seriously improved my work flow that I didn’t do before was building in parts and simply attaching the parts together at the end. Like mentioned before I
When it came to UV unwrapping and texturing, that’s where I have been mostly having issues when it came to 3D modeling. Mostly how to aline the textures correctly so the textures don’t seem out of place or in general strange, like a brick wall being offset when its a corner of a wall and so on. I watched a few tutorials like the one bellow and with a lot of talking to my other colleague’s who mentioned about more advanced Uv unwrapping and even simple shortcuts to make life just a little easier.
Above is pictures of a rather messy UV and the beginning of Stitching textures. With this building I learned the importance of stitching the uv while having to deal with corners of buildings needing to be alined like bricks and the likes.
A colleague also mentioned how you are able to create your own shortcuts by heading to (Customize > Customize use interface > Category > Scroll to Uv unwrap > Stitch selected > enter a hotkey of your choosing then click assign)
Above you can see a nicely stitched uv from what iv learned and the results inside the game engine.
I have also learned while unwrapping that you should unpack the UV and place them in separate places amongst the grid to allow you to organize the uv’s and allow you to determine weather or not they should be large or small when compressing them into the viewing box. Like above I have separated the windows.
Another Issue I had was copying and pasting UV’s. Doing as I would usually do and highlight one of the following module parts and paste the altered uv to it didn’t work however learning that you can Unwrap a single item and if that object copy and past it and it will automatically unwrap it exactly the same for you.
This software allows the user to effectively make 3D models to be used for there games they might be designing.
When creating a model the mesh for that model will consist of 4 things, Vertex, edge, tri Polly and Quad Polly.
The more polygons you have in your model the larger the file will be when rendering as well as the time taken to fully render your model, also the more polygons you have will also determine the amount of power needed to process all the individual faces. A simple character from gears of war, like Markus takes around 15,000 polygons, think, that’s the character without the surroundings around him which would have many more polygons for the device your playing on to process.
Most devices have some thing called a “Polly count” a term which means the available polygons your allowed for a device to make the game run smooth and efficient as well as looking nice. over the years the Polly count goes up as games get better in quality thus needing a better faster machine to run it.
Xbox360 Maximum polygon count: 500 million triangles per second
PS3 Maximum polygon count: 333.3 million polygons per second (1 billion vertices per second / 3 vertices per triangle)NOT OFFICAL BY SONY
Xbox Maximum polygon count: 100 million polygons per sec
Wii Maximum polygon count: No Info I think between 60/75 million polygons per sec
PS2 Maximum polygon count : 66 million polygons per sec
Gamecube Maximum polygon count : 12 million per sec
This is the amount of polygons available to you while making your game, it might seem a lot but from the highly detailed models to bitmaps, textures and the likes, it soon adds up quickly.
We was given the task during this lesson which was to first play with some functions and see if we could get our head around the program.
This is the first object I created using 3DS max, here I figured out with help from some other peers how to extrude and insert, move and add a plain.
Then we was given the task to create a box and apply a texture to it.
Here is the outcome. I created the shape with a measurement of 50 x 50 and I used a tool called “insert” this inserted another face within the face, I set the measurement to 5.00 Last but not least I extruded the newly formed shapes by -2 which pushed the shapes inside of the square as shown above. Finally I added a texture of bamboo to my box as well as a plain for my box to stand on.
Wolfie Work Shop 