Saturday, January 30, 2010

Animated Render and Turnaround of Tower

I had a few hours free last night to make an animated render of the latest model, the tower at the end of the pedestrian zone where the player will be inserted into the game level. Add a snowstorm this morning that makes the streets somewhat impassable, and you get a weekend with Blender, GIMP, YouTube, and the project blog. Anyway, here is the result of my latest endeavors:





Although clearly not at the artistic level of many 3D modelers out there, and probably violating numerous design pet peeves as described by blenderguru, I'm still impressed with what I've accomplished and realize that I still have a lot more to learn. I'd particularly be interested in learning how to make the corners of my models more "rounded" and real-life while keeping the model within the low-poly mesh range. The roof also looks much too reflective for a typical slate roof like you find in Germany, which I noticed only after doing a turnaround of the model and seeing the it catches the light of lamp at certain angles. Need to figure our how to correct this (probably with a specularity map, right?).

Instead of baking the textures and importing the 3D model into Unity 3D, at the moment I'm thinking that I will continue to develop models for the game level and continue with my research on 3D digital game-based learning for second language acquisition. It has been fun and also interesting to be involved in the design process while simultaneously reading primary and secondary literature on the topic. I'll be interested in seeing what come of this whole thing in the coming year.

3 comments:

  1. Quite impressive! I didn't expect to be able to read the roadsigns too. And the textures look great! As for the shininess of the roof, you can probably change the specularity of the roof material from within blender. And blender may have a bevel edges command somewhere if you wanted to round out the edge of the buildings. But really it looks great!

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  2. Thanks a lot for the feedback and sorry that I didn't catch it earlier. Been busy with school and what-have-yous. I saw that you shifted your focus to a racing game (with some really cool models). Wish that I had some good 3D modelers on my project...

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  3. Thanks! It took a lot of practice and I have been learning a lot by making weird shaped buildings and racers. I am a great modeler but my knowledge in bump mapping, texturing, and animation needs a lot of work. Your bump mapping and texturing looks great!

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