Monkey King Doodle

I really dig looking at various concepts of monkey kings, they’re quite awesome. And quite abundant-to be honest i wasn’t set out to create my own version when I  started out sculpting, but as I went along, sculpting the forms away i thought  the forms would best suit a monkey king :)

Creature head touch up

Touching up on an old creature sculpt, adjusted some proportions, added goofy looking teeth. I'm still really pondering on whether I should take the character further.

This is where I left last year...

Garry's Mod Arms.

So for Garry's Mod I've been working along side Max aka MaxofS2D on the new view model arms. We wanted to keep the first set the same design as the civilian player models; denim shirt and bare hands. Easy enough.

The above image is what they look like in Marmoset toolbag and to be honest, even though the source engine is pretty old, it can still churn out surprisingly good looking models. We looked at CS:GO's arm models for a beginning point of where to start, the triangle count. They're pretty dense and the map size is 2048x2048 so we have room to dance, so to speak.

So it was really a case of balancing the tri count from the above images to the arms of current view model, which was like 1,500 for the arms and hands. Yeah...

And now here they are in game, with a little colour trickery from max, you can have custom colours for the the shirt to match your colour choice for the player model. Which is super neat. What is also really nice that we did was to keep the hands a separate mesh from the arms so that we can interchange light skin to dark skin, depending on the players choice.

Customisation is a big thing in Garry's Mod so it's only right we went the extra distance. Which also means I'll be creating new arm sets for different view player models!

Papo & Yo

I’ve been playing Papo & Yo on the PC, a 3d adventure platformer. It’s a charming little game whose looks are a little dated but it really doesn’t matter as the visuals are overshadowed by it’s a nice pace (from the usual games I play), it’s charm and the characters!

Lula, the little yellow robot helps you throughout the game, latching itself to your back allowing you to jump across large distances by virtue of a little rocket boost from it’s little yellow boots. And we have here Monster, the big dopey, fruit loving guy you see up there. If he’s asleep you can jump on his stomach to get to higher places you couldn’t otherwise, or you can feed him fruit. His seemingly loving nature can quickly change depending what you feed him.


There’s footballs dotted around the environment and you kick them about and if Monster is awake, and plodding about after fruit then I suggest kicking the ball at him, he’ll pick it up and expect you to catch it, chuckling as you do.

I don’t know what it is about this game I like so much but it’s really refreshing to play, at first it seems to be a rather calm adventure created by the Quicos’ (the little boy) imagination, being able to reassemble the environment to progress further. Behind this curtain of a calm exterior is a darker story to be unravelled. IGN’s review of the game is a complete whack-job and shouldn’t be read and relied upon unless you’re a 12 year old, gun toting, mother-bleep, weed smoking, COD player who doesn’t understand the term “new gaming experiences”, as this is true to that term, at least with the story.

It’s a nice take on bullying but I’ve not read into anything else that reveals the story behind Quico but it’s quickly becoming clear what’s going on.

I’m really wanting to do some fan art of this when I get some time from work. It’s really interesting, man. Check it out if you can. Steam are having a bit of a sale on it :)

New Player Model?

Decided to troll the facepunch forums with making a new player model. I wonder how they will respond.

Doodle!

Finished this up after work. I wasn’t going off anything but now i’m thinking of doing another likeness based of an image of a Tibetan child. To try and capture the emotion. There are some real sad looking ones out there on google.

This took about 35 minutes.

Unity RGB channel shader

Finally i get to play around with Unity and the Strumpy Shader Editor which is just fantastic. It resembles the the UDK node based editor and it pretty much is just that. Theres one or two things that are different like the RGBA channels of a texture aren't directly accessible from the node, as far as i'm aware. Though there is a way around this, using the split node which gives you access to them.

The above image is my initial attempt at the shader, the material allows you to have colour/normal and a specular. But I created the specular to incorporate the specular/gloss/emissive and alpha via the rgba channels of the tga, hence why I needed access to them in the shader so it was some use. I added some extra control in by including a range node to control the sharpness of the gloss by adding the green channel and the range together.

Basic shader with a test texture but it's all about the learning and i'm learning! :D

If i'm doing this the wrong way or if there is a more efficient way of going about this then please tell me!

Vert Lies

I’ve been reading into more of the technical side to vert counts and it’s actually incredibly interesting and obviously useful to know. As far as I understand when unwrapping a model, that when you create a uv split, or island, the vert that rests upon the seam actually doubles. When you click one vert on the seam in the uv editor, the corresponding vert will also be highlighted. Two vertices, not one. Max and maya don’t inform you of the “true” vert count. This is known as a uv discontinuity, which is why less seams is more as it’s less of an effort for the engine to render.

The engine also views the faces of a surface as sharing the same material properties which mean that vertex splits would occur when a different material is on the surface.

Also worth a note is that a model can be split up depending on smoothing groups as engines don’t allow verts to share a polygon with different uv coordinates. This is why it’s important to properly unwrap your model when dealing with hard surface models, as the normals can be messed up due to this, as far as I’m aware.

So if in max if your fine ass model of a box has a tri count of 8 but each face has its own uv island instead of being one; then technically you actually have a higher tri count in engine.
Interesting stuff!

Beast

This beast sits right next to me and boy am I envious! Wacom 24HD. The concept artist, Meg, let me have a quick go and it’s brilliant. I really want one to try it out on zbrush. Man that’d be fantastic.