Animation

The Video below is the first animation test for the character Marcus. The timing on this one is a bit off but the model seems to be moving fairly cleanly.

Testing

When the new model for Marcus was completed I decided to test the render time, to render the new model in the scene took about 10 seconds compared just over 3 minutes for the original model. You can see the difference in the image below.

This is the model of Marcus with the texture added, this was more of a texture test to see whether the colours work and to make sure every seam was colours correctly. The next stage will be doing the texture in photoshop with a bit more detail.

After creating all the models and preparing for animation testing has begun. The first tests were on the character model for Marcus. The original model has proved difficult to animate. It looks exactly as I wanted but the mesh with subsurf is taking about 2 minutes a frame to render at low quality. The first test was to render the model in the scene. I changed the terrain to test whether this was the problem but after the terrain was changed to a very simple mesh of about 20 polygons it still took 2 minutes to render so the model had to be re-built.

The image below shows the new model. It still needs to be textured but the model render takes about 5 seconds now. The final model of the 3 shows the subsurf, its complicated the model mesh and as you can see doesn't actually benefit the model. The model will be textured with no smoothing at first and if this looks bad the smoothing will be added which would change the model mesh.

The image below shows the model mesh with the smoothing / solid set and also with the subsurf set. You can see how the poly count increases with the subsurf.

After completed the low poly version of the main character I decided to do the alien model again. the first version of the alien character at the start of the blog was around 4,500 polygons, the new model is just under 1,200 polygons. This should make future use of this model in games a lot more reliable.

The next stage with the remaining models will be to texture them and get some animation tests started.

The image below shows the developement of the alien model into a potential game asset. The new model has less mesh detail but still holds a similar appearence.

Scene Terrain

The image below shows the first render test of a character on the terrain, it looks okay but will need buildings and tree's to be added. This will be the next step.

Below are a render of the terrain so far. more detail needs to be added in the foreground and mid ground, possibly some flat ground and and tree's.

This is the final texture for the terrain.

This is the terrain light map, it shows the areas of the terrain which will have light sections and areas slightly hidden from the sun.

This is the attributes map, which says where all the pretty ground textures will go when the texture map is generated.

This is the water map. The dark-blue bits are ocean, the lighter-blue bits are lakes, and the wispy white / aqua / yellow / green / blue bits are the water table.

The image below is the height field, this shows the areas with more depth, water or hight altitude areas.

I decided for the terrain to download L3DT as its a very powerful terrain generator. Here is the design map. The display is a little complex, but basically blue bits are water, light coloured bits are at high altitude, and darker bits at low altitude.

This is a simple terrain for the scene. the blue areas are see, the lighter areas are high altertude, and the green areas are the land.

For this the character rigging tutorial from the link below was used.

Rig tutorial

The character still has some crimping issues, the weight on some bones needs to be set around the joints at about 0.5, but so far its heading in the right direction. The next stage is rigging the legs so far there is only armature in the upper body.