Frost Giant revisited

Well, lately I've been quite sick, need operation but my blood check always not qualified. I'm also working this one on paralel with my collaboration with JohanesKurnia (no WIP allowed to be shown by him yet) and my office works at home so spended about a week on home so I got more time to do some progress.

Laurentiu didn't supervise this one anymore, so I redefine the concept for this guy. I'm not gonna putting any beard or furs, but maybe to a more frontline warrior with huge club and minimal armor. Gonna do some quick sketch later to see what this guy gonna be.

Anyway the whole process now done within blender + Gimp and also fetched a cool normal map generator called xnormal. Tried Nvidia's melody but it refuses .obj (and every other formats aswell) that made with blender. But also melody is normal map only. While I think xnormal is capable to produce normal and displacement map. Yet this is quite good, since I still do research on how to utilizes free (as in free speech and free beer) softwares to produce high quality CGs.

Other softwares I bumped to are DE Normal Generator (it's on sourceforge), this one supports Linux with the source code available on the website and ORB (Open Render Bump). Tried both but seems failed in opening the models. DE Normal Generator uses its own file format, and included a python script for blender, but failed to export the guy. I doubt that xnormal would work under wine, since it uses .net framework, directx 9.0c april 2007, and VC libraries.

Blender's built in normal map baker isn't capable of creating the so-called "tanget space" normal map, which is unusable on dynamic objects (creatures), only usable on such objects like wall or something. Tangent space normal maps are more dominated by blue color, while blender produces balanced red, green and blue on the maps. It is said tangent space normal maps generation will be implemented on 2.44 or so. That'll took at least 6 months for the release.

BTW here're the progress caps :

Original Mesh (subsurf modifier) :

Sculpted in Blender (level 3 multires) less than an hour work :

Diffuse Map (still WIP) made 100% under GIMP :

Normal map generated from xnormal :

As you can see there're several marks in normal map. They're artifacts and I'm still looking for a solution for it. Cheers.

100 of triangles fun

This time it's quite challenging. A character. But not just a character. The client requested a full featured facial animation, with 100 triangles limit on the model.

Whoa d00d. How? Hoooow? For comparison, older games such as quake took at least 300 triangles or more. They don't have facial animations. Maybe older RTS games would took less. But 100 with facial animation? They also asked for m3g format. What the hell is m3g?

Have you ever done this? they asked. Low polies yes, but not this low, let alone featuring facial animation. And what the heck is m3g, I have no clue. But I said yes anyway. I like the challenge.

The model is a fish, for a mobile phone game under Java. Done a research in a day on all about m3g. Resulted in some m3g file tutorials and specifications. Okay I get this m3g thingy now.

Modeling finished quite fast. But optimizing and reaching the targeted polygon budget, now that's a real headache. It's way too limited. Hum.

Animating a turntable 720○ rotation and exported it using Max 9's default jsr-184 exporter. Testing it using Max included m3g player. Okay the model looks great.

But I'm in dillema. Should I rig a skeleton? Or use other methods? Gawh. Would took longer times and too risky. I don't know how m3g would handle bones from max. So I decided to use morph animation for all the deformations. At least old games support morphings, m3g should too I think to myself.

So I created about 16 target morphs. Animated it, and exporting it again. Here comes trouble. The model won't show. I tried many times but still it's either blank or the model's static without any animation at all.

Then suddenly, I found a PDF of 3dsmax' m3g exporter specification. I read a line there and said to myself "dude, you're screwed". The line said "m3g exporter don't support morph animation". Yet my animation was 100% based on morph animation.

Stressed out for couple of hours looking for answers. Tried most things that came up in my head, and all failed.

What the hell should I do. Well, fired up Firefox again and typed www.google.com. Tips of the day : google IS your best friend :). A little harder search finally gave me an answer.

Exporting is fine, testing on the viewer.... (crossing my finger) the animation going well. Wohooo! Victory is mine...