Her left eye freaks me out tremendiously, that one needs to be redone.
It is however, loads of fun painting this kind of characters. The incredible fidelity in the female face is just amazing! As a sculptor you have this nasty tendency of overdoing it in the detail and forms department (and I plead guilty for doing that on this girl as well), but female faces are so delicate that they hardly need detail to look appealing.

Interesting stuff to study I’d say!

click me!

Hi guys ‘n gals!

I’ve just recently built a fairly adequite re-useable basemesh for female characters. And I decided to share her for you to use!

She’s been optimized for digital sculpting and as such, she’s made up out of evenly spaced quads. There are a few triangles in the mesh, but these are located between the individual fingers and on the bottom of the feet. So they shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.

She’s about 1.72 meters in height in relation to Modo’s coordinate system. It is possible that when you import this mesh in other DCC applications such as XSI, Max, Maya, etc… that it will not read 1.71 meters so you’ll need to manually scale her up or down accordingly.
Tongue and eyes are included, but teeth are not. You can find a good set of teeth on gnomonlogy.com by Alex Alveraz .

Feel free to use this mesh for any kind of project or sculpting exercise you see fit.

goblin sculpt

goblin marmoset

A quicky sculpt of a hellgoblin. And as well a screengrab of how the fella looks in marmoset toolbag with a diffuse, normal and detail map.

Apoc Mutie

Allright, I’ve been working on this little guy for the latest sculpting challenge over at gameArtisans.org, Post Apocalyptic Muties.

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything purely asymmetrical, but it’s loads of fun!
The guy weighs in at about 13 million polygons and is rendered in Zbrush using Ralf Stumpf’s Red Wax material.

And Scarecrow ended up in the top 20! Which by itself is a huge honor, considering the awesome amount of work done by many artists in both 2D and 3D. Suffice to say, I’m very happy I made it that far, and although I didn’t end up in the final top 10 list, the memories and experience of joining this competition was one to remember!

In any case, my full and honest congratulations to Comicon 2009’s final champions!
Comicon 2009 Grand Champions

Check out the other finalists as well!
Comicon 2009 Top 20

Last but not least, scarecrow received some very nice judges comments all round. I took the liberty to quote a few here as well.

Jeremy Gritton (Blizzard Entertainment) said

Probably the highest quality beauty render of the competition. Great lighting, pose, colors, and framing. It created a lasting first impression and is the main reason I chose this piece. I really enjoy the fun, stylized take on Scarecrow and the silhouette is fantastic. Nice touch with the Hangman’s Knot being used as a necklace. This one has a fun Jack Skellington type of feel. Overall a great piece and easily one of my favorites.

Tony Tsang (8th place Dominance War IV) said:

This is another excellent portrayal of a well-established character.  The stylization and the execution of Scarecrow are excellent.  Maph did a beautiful job with both the model and the texture of the character.  There is a great attention to detail and everything is exactly where its need to be. This Nightmare Before Christmas take on Scarecrow adds so much fun and character to this infamous comic book villain.

See you at Dominance War V and Comicon 2010!

When applied to a character, you can simulate your character getting scanned, have glowing animated parts. Cheap simulations of running water and smoke/gas/fumes FX can be done using this method as well.
The possibilities are endless imho, and I tend to use this technique a lot at work for simulating all sorts of specialized FX that can’t be done with particles, or that are not important enough to do with particles.

Keep in mind though, that is just one of many techniques to achieve a SGG-effect. It may, or may not not suit your needs at all.

But, let’s get this show on the road. Below is what the effect looks like with a top to bottom scroll on a simple ring shaped object. And we can also see that the glow is masked out by the vents.

First, let’s dissect the ring. This object is a simple ring made out of polygons, with each seperate polygon mapped from 0 to 1  in it’s UV’s (fig 1.). That way we create overlapping UV’s, but by doing so we can use one small tileable texture to color the entire ring.
The texture I’m using for this is a very simple vent with an alpha channel (fig 2.a and fig 2.b) representing the holes in the vent. As you could see from the image above, the animated bar is masked out by these vents. So you guessed it, we’ll be using this alpha to mask out our animation, but first we need to have our bar moving!

(fig 1. UV set used for the diffuse color)

(fig 2.a diffuse color image)

(fig 2.b diffuse alpha image)

So let’s get it moving then! To have a glowing bar scroll from top to bottom, we need two things.
First, a texture that is black with a single colored bar on it. You can make this as thick or thin as you want. This is where artistic freedom comes to play.
Why black? Because in the end we will add (and add is the key-word here) the scrolling texture over our diffuse texture.
Because something + black = something and something+ somethingElse = aWholeNewWorldOfFun.

And second, we need another set of UV’s that we will use to scroll the texture over.

In our case, we want to scroll from top to bottom, so our object needs to be projected as such in the new UV set. And since we’re dealing with a very simple shape, we can just do a front planar projection of our ring (fig 3).
This way when we scroll from top to bottom, the first UV coordinates we’ll encounter are those of the most top vertices of the ring.

(fig 3. UV set used by the glowing bar)

But how do we animate our bar-texture using these UV’s? Well, this is where a bit of black magic is needed.

In this particular example I’ve writting a short realtime shader to use inside of XSI (which you can find at the bottom of the post) that offsets the second set of UV coordinates using an input value. Other software may have built in features to do this, but I haven’t found one in XSI. If you do know a way on how to do this in XSI without specialized shaders and UV projection handles, please let me know! I’d love to know about it.

If you do have an option to animate the UV coordinates (because that’s what you actually need to do) be sure to animate in the negative V direction so our bar moves from top to bottom (fig 4).

(fig 4.  Glowing bar scroll direction)

And that’s a moving bar! Hoozah!

The only thing that is left is to add the sample from our bar texture on the scrolling UV’s to our result from sampling the diffuse texture using the first UV set.

If you want to mask out the scrolling bar by the vents, all you need to do is to multiply the sampled color from the bar texture (using UV set 2) with the sampled alpha value from the diffuse texture (using UV set 1) before you add the two colors together.

And there’s nothing more to it than that!

Here you can see the same effect applied as a scanning line to a character. The second UV set I used for this is just a front projection from the character.

I hope you enjoyed this little tut, and be sure let me know if you don’t understand something. I’ll try my best to answer.

For all you XSI users, here’s the GLSL shader to use in the OpenGL viewport.

//vertex program
varying vec2 diffuse_uv; //UV SET 1
varying vec2 glow_uv; //UV SET 2

void main(void){

diffuse_uv = gl_MultiTexCoord0.xy; //diffuse texture coordinates
glow_uv = gl_MultiTexCoord1.xy; //glow texture coordinates
gl_Vertex = ftransform(); //transform the vertex to screen space

}

//fragment program
varying vec2 diffuse_uv; //UV SET 1
varying vec2 glow_uv; //UV SET 2
uniform sampler2D diffuse; //DIFFUSE MAP WITH ALPHA CHANNEL
uniform sampler2D glow; //GLOW MAP
uniform float glow_anim; //SCROLLING PARAMETER

void main(void){

vec4 diffuse = texture2D(diffuse, diffuse_uv); //sample diffuse texture

//first offset the UV coordinates from the glowmap in Y (scrolling effect)
glow_uv.y = glow_uv.y + glow_anim;
//use this offsetted UV for sampling the glow texture
vec4 glow = texture2D(glow, glow_uv); //sample glow texture
vec4 FinalColor = diffuse; //final color mixdown

glow = glow * diffuse.a; //Multiply every channel (r, g, b, a) with the alpha value from the diffuse map

//final color mixdown, add the glowmap to the diffuse color
FinalColor = FinalColor + glow;

gl_FragColor = FinalColor; //Output pixel color and alpha

}

I have to say, kudos to wordpress for releasing such a brilliant framework! Theming this site didn’t even take a day and it all just works seamlessly together. Love it, every bit of it.

Why a blog you ask? Well, as I’m getting started with indie games, I might as well start posting my progress throughout this wonderfull world so that you and others may read on my experiences. Who knows? Maybe some of my experiments can be food for thought or discussion.
On the other hand, I’m in dire need of training my art skills beyond what I do at work, so what better way to practice my work and post my experience with that given piece at the same time.

I am also hoping to share tutorials and workflow tips&tricks with you, as well as providing some downloads that some of you may find usefull. Such as shader writing tuts, UV tips, texturing tips, basemeshes, stamps, stencils, etc…

And last, but not least; those of you who are using Internet Explorer will encounter some big issues with this site. I am using a fair amount of transparent png’s, and Internet Explorer tends to dislike those; as it tends to dislike anything conforming to a certain set of rules…
Plus, I whipped this theme together in a day, so bear with me here.
I’ll do my utter best to make this site work just as well on Internet Explorer as it does on FireFox, I can only hope it goes smoothly. My past experiences with IE + CSS + png haven’t been all that fun to be honest…
If you’re experiencing heavy problems in other browsers, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

We’ll see how the wind blows!

Greetings,

Kristof