Screenshot Friday! May 11th

This piece attaches to the rudder, giving leverage to rotate it.  Although the color has faded from the original, it has traces of red, yellow, and black paint!





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Topology - A Continuous Learning Experience

Image
To avoid a spooky ghost crew, I modeled a man and woman with the same topology optimized for animation.  After initial studies in muscular structure and proportion, I dove into ZBrush.  I blocked out the body with ZSpheres and refined it with Dynamesh.  Between ZRemesher and classic arm-wrestling with Maya LT, I reduced the poly count down to about 10K quads for one character.  Depending on performance, I might reduce it further in the future. Because I approached modeling with the end goal of real-time animation, I wanted to create the best topology possible for smooth and clean deformation.  Each model since my first has been an experiment in topology, and I have used that experience with prior characters to create the current body. Body Topology The knees and elbows both have an extra edge loop on the outside corner of the joint.  Since these areas deform intensely, the extra geometry distributes weighting across the area and retains volume...
Read more

Screenshot Friday! March 2nd

Image
The Gokstad ship model is coming close to completion!  The most significant parts are modeled and in the process of UV unwrapping.  It took about five different iterations to decide on a hull topology to match the planks, and I’ve currently settled on a separate, rectangular mesh for each plank for now.  The lower resolution LOD will likely be a single curved piece projected and textured to imitate the higher resolution version. After making this model, I am significantly more confident in working with NURBS! The Gokstad Ship, work in progress Wireframe Deck view, work in progress Wireframe
Read more

Ocean Simulation- or, Thank Goodness I Took Computer Graphics

Image
OceanConstructor Developer controlled settings As I dove into ocean simulation, I remembered a joke we used to tell in undergrad computer science classes.  “We’re just coming up with increasingly complicated ways of being lazy.”  To avoid the tedium of manually animating water, I coded a model based on Gerstner waves.  Detailed in Mark Finch’s Nvidia’s GPU Gems chapter ( linked here and below ), Gerstner waves determine the horizontal and vertical shift of a point in space as a wave passes.  Summing the displacement of several varied waves produces a naturalistic undulation. My current system in the Unreal Engine consists of three elements—a Blueprints ‘OceanConstructor’, a shader, and a C++ ‘OceanManager.’ The OceanConstructor class generates a dynamic material instance of the ocean shader, allowing for definition of parameters at runtime.  The developer chooses the number of waves to sum, the general wind direction, wave steepness, varia...
Read more