i don't like horses....

[moose o death]

yeah did AO, just not enough pixels in a 1024x1024 to catch it all. i've only mapped one side so that doubled my detail. but still falls short. the AO has been used for the texture though, i like to use it twice, one for a colour burn layer to addsome pseudo SSS and once as a multiply blend to add the ambient occlusion effect

it's all being rendered by XSi for now. torque has some math problems for calculating the tangents for normalmaps in my release. the fix was posted in the torque forums but it requires compiling. visual studio scares me, so i'll wait for the next release.

nice portfolio as well, you make my stuff look as pathetic as i keep telling people it is.

the original purpose was to be the worlds pack animal, for a fantasy themed fps, however the game design may be changing. if that does happen the creature will probably become an enemy.

[Mask]

Strange that the normals baked so well and the AO didn't. If you baked the normals to a 2048 map you should perhaps do that with the occlusion too and just scale it down and then play with the curves a bit. Which program do you use to bake? Personally I like to use xnormal for speed, and with Occlusions they tend to catch most things. If all else fails you could perhaps do a cavity map in photoshop using the NormalsToCavity nvidia filter? It's not a pretty solution, but it'd probably work well enough for a quick specular mapand game art is mor or less 50% hard work and 50% cheating in order to get stuff actually finished.

Anyways, I think most of the loss in texture on the skin could be fixed with a good, highly-contrasted specular map. Could you post some texture flats?

Oh, and I'm glad you liked my stuff.

[Emaria]

ha, if you gave it a big slimy tongue, it'd look a bit like a hairless version of that yak creature in stargate (the movie). Also: sweet portfolio Mask, that looks like some top notch stuff.

[moose o death]

Strange that the normals baked so well and the AO didn't. If you baked the normals to a 2048 map you should perhaps do that with the occlusion too and just scale it down and then play with the curves a bit. Which program do you use to bake? Personally I like to use xnormal for speed, and with Occlusions they tend to catch most things. If all else fails you could perhaps do a cavity map in photoshop using the NormalsToCavity nvidia filter? It's not a pretty solution, but it'd probably work well enough for a quick specular mapand game art is mor or less 50% hard work and 50% cheating in order to get stuff actually finished.

Anyways, I think most of the loss in texture on the skin could be fixed with a good, highly-contrasted specular map. Could you post some texture flats?

Oh, and I'm glad you liked my stuff.

oh i'm using the ultimapper AO. the AO you're mentioning would build from the normal map. the AO i've used is built from the 3d shape so it's darker in the armpits and mouth etc.

game art is mor or less 50% hard work and 50% cheating

don't have to to tell me twice. using model based AO is an excellent cheat, and reexporting the uvmapped model to zbrush to make the colourmap so you don't have to mess around texturing and trying to make everything seamless is a good trick. photoshop layer effects are also an exellent cheat and help ensure all your world models are the same colour. i even bought photoshop cs4 advanced in the hopes i could texture on the model. but i can never get models into the thing.

[Mask]

Yes, I meant the Nomals-to-cavity thing more as a last resort if baking the occlcusion from the highpoly didn't give the results you wanted, but the normalmap looks nice. I sometimes use both if I don't get great results from one bake and toy around with layer masks to bring out respective strong points. Although if you have the time it's always better to spend that extra bit of effort on getting a bake good.

I haven't really used Zbrush since my school had Mudbox. Although I have to learn the diffrences in the upcoming two weeks, 'cause they use Zbrush at the place of my internship. The texturing tool in Mudbox was always rather unpredicable and didn't blend colors well. Usually I just fixed seams with the clone stamp in Maya the last thing I do.
I've heard good things about a program called Bodypaint that apparently is supposed to be "like photoshop, but for 3d models". Haven't gotten the chance to try it yet, though.

xNormal bakes from the model, it just has a stupid name.

[moose o death]

oh i remember that now. i used it a few years back but it wasn't very good back then. xsi has a decent tool built in to generate the heightmap ambocc normals colourmap all at once. it can een use the materials applied to both objects while it bakes them together so i can texture a wooden cart's high poly and get both the high poly detail and it's texture detail baked into one final normalmap. so unless xnormal does especially awesome now i'll stick with my built in toolset.

the normal map and ambocc renders were taken at low quality. i tried again at higher but the memory leaked out of control and froze my pc (ati driver issues) i did however mess aorund with the autosmoothing option on my hi-res and managed to sharpen the source mesh which improved things. i'm not happy with the eye atm so i'm going to fix that.

[Mask]

xNormal is not awsome now either(Don't know how good/bad it was before a year ago), but it's functional. I think you can bake pretty much all maps at once in it, but I seldom use the option as I like to do things step-by-step. The strength is really that I haven't had it crash yet and is a lot faster than Maya's equivalents. Some things it makes a bit less pretty, but when I've been sitting at some weaker machines it has sometimes meant the diffrence between being able to bake that 2k texture and only getting crashes. I've never used XSI so I have no idea how that is in comparison.

I usually never do the eye in the highpoly, just a blank eyeball. I tend to fix that directly in the texture with a height2nomals map. Works great as long as there's no streching, which I learned the hard way on the Pilot bust I did. :/

Do you plan on making some sort of harness for it or other loose bits? Perhaps you could give him something like this(made by a guy in my class): http://www.jimmyfrost.se/RhinoDino.html

On that note, the Marmoset toolbag released by 8Monkey Labs is a great way to show off your stuff in an engine render.

[moose o death]

there will be a harness if it stays as a pack animal and armour if it changes to an enemy. so for now i need to talk to the programmer and see where we want to go in the future.

edit: i'm at work right now with little to do, i brought my old tablet in a while back and installed gimp so i could sketch idea onto stuff like this. i hate gimp, it's all the sensible ideas from photoshop implemented wrong