Okay, Draven I've got to ask you just how you go about building your textures. I know you've said a while ago that you do things procedurally, but exactly how do you start off, what comes first, how many textures do you wind up using, are any meshes UV-mapped at all? I'm very curious because I'm getting fed up laying out UVs for complex near half million poly models that consumes so much of my time. I keep thinking that there's got to be an easier way to do this!
The important layers to remember are colur, diffuse, specularity (and sometimes glossiness), and bump, and the way they interact with each other. Using those 4 you can often get more or less exactly what you are looking for. Wel, that and a lot of test renders If you can give me a couple of days or so to finish what I'm downloading, I'll whip up a little basic tutorial for ya. However, a couple of quick questions answered for now: 1. I use a lot of surfaces (Megatron II has around 60 individually assigned surfaces on him so far), but normally the only image I use for texture purposes on TFs will be a reflection map, and I try to use that sparingly. 2. No model of mine that you have ever seen has ever had a UV map at all.
Cool and thanks. Any help on this is greatly appreciated as I would literally have to spend weeks laying out UVs before even getting major texturing progress made.
What do you use for your UVs? If you're a Lightwave user (I can;t remember if you are or not) there are a number of free UV tolls available; I reccommend UVImaginator, which is pretty easy to get hold of; just Google it. One thing you could do is make your UVs, texture your objects, then bake the surfaces onto the UVs. Just a thought; I have heard you can get good results that way. Either way, I'll knock a quick surfacing tut up over the weekend. Anything in particular you want me to cover?
My God that is freakin AWESOME. I would love a toy of that guy (and I haven't even seen the whole thing yet) thats what Masterpeice Megatron should be.
Well I understand how to create uvmaps using both Photoshop and Maya's UV editor (and even Max's UV editor), so it's not so much as an artistic question as is, how did you go around getting all of the variation in your textures without it looking too repetitive or stretched or even having edges crawling at the seams. Do you just paint a whole lot of maps in Photoshop and use projection mapping? And also, would it be possible to do camouflage using procedurals? As for surfacing tutorials go, probably how to go about creating the basic material such as a matte metal, dirt at the edges, creases, and rivets. Certain things like creating individual markings may have to be done through either decals or layered shaders using projections. Basically though I'm trying to stay away from UVmapping every little bolt or small piece on the thing because it's so big in poly count. I hope this is of help. Because my major in school was game development, pretty much all of the texturing for objects were done via Photoshop and laying out the UV vertices, so I never had much exposure in terms of high-resolution model texturing, especially in terms of mechanical stuff (everything was pretty focused on organic, low poly stuff that was well under 10,000 polygons as opposed to something closer to 500K poly model and mechanical with lots of various parts). If worse comes to worse, I could always see if I could generate a normal map from the high resolution and build a much lower resolution model.
Thats the beauty of procedurals; the don't cause trouble on edges like mapping can do (look at somethig that's had an image map applied, and you can often tell where the image is different on the edges). The biggest thing in varying procedurals that I have found is size. If you get that wrong, your textures wil look like crap. Also, once a procedural is applied, it does NOT move. For what purpose? *little confused* I don;t know if you ever saw Sub-Sonic (he was the Spitfire TF in Redemption), but his camo was entirely done with procedurals. No prob. The best way to do rivets, incidentally, is to build them. You don't need a lot of points/polys at all. However, there is a shader that simulated rivets and panel lines; I'll look for a link. If I can;t find one, I'll put the shader up for download, since it was a free one anyway. For dirt and the like, I actually usually use a combination of shaders; Gmil (which ships with Lightwave. It's an ambient occlusion shader), and Grit (which is a free download; I'll get you a link). I do them with 2 layers; one full colour image, and one black-and-white image of identical proportions and size, used as an alpha channel, on top of it. Ahhh, now I see where you're coming from a bit better, d00d. Cool, I have no problem in trying to help if I can There are actually plugins that do similar things; they take your full detail model, generate maps for it, and then generate a low-poly model to map it onto. It's not cheap, though, from what I can remember. Incidentally; if any other 3Ders have anything they'd like me to cover in the surfacing tutorial, I have no problem with putting it in (as long as I know it myself, of course). I'll do a little series, if people would want that, covering different topics.
Those fully-colored pictures on Page 4&5...damn. That's the first time in a LONG while that I've seen a picture of Megatron, shuddered and gone, "Damn. That's a little scary. I'd be frightened if I saw that." Incredible work, D.
Ok, sorry to revive a dead thread, but I went through all of the pages and haven't seen an update thread. Are there complete pictures of this guy available? Like everyone else, I am completely blown away by it
Actually I would like to see an update on this.. I love the whole thing, except for the face. The face is too human.. to "Organic" looking. Other than that the rest is superb to me!
Err... Transfan, just to warn you ahead of time, the reason that Draven has Megatron's face the way it appears, is because it's a stylistic interpretation of the character, rather than a dead on reproduction of what most have considered the normal blocky face (which if you want, you can click on my sig). In other words, it's not that Draven can't make Megatron's face all blocky, it's that he'd much rather put his own spin on it. Well in any event, I'm sure he'll clarify much better then I could ever hope too! Oh yeah, if you need a VA for Soundwave, I happen to know some one who might be interested.
I assumed as much.. But to me it just doesn't seem like a robot, more like a Cyborg, something kin to Robocop or something.... I like everything else on it.. and not that I don't like the face, it's still hella better than I could ever do, I just get a super enhanced robocop feel from it, instead of Transformer. even the cartoon got to me when they would have this "Robot Face" with basically Human mouths. Mouth that can smile and change shape like a humans, just seems like no place on a "robot"
There will be an update on this piece once I have done a substantial amount more work on it. Right now, however, I'm working on putting together a teaser trailer for Redemption Episode Two. As for the face; we live in an age where we already have memory alloys that can change shape. Bearing that in mind, I see no reason why a sentient mechanical lifeform from another planet couldn't utilise similar technology. Star Cracker summed it up perfectly; it's a style choice, and it ain't changing. Oh, and TransfanTN: you might want to keep your voice down when you talk about Megatron looking like a super enhanced Robocop. He might hear you.
Draven.. Don't get me wrong I love your work. even the face. I guess it was more the Megatron without his helmet on really making it seem robocopish... I don't know. But still it is awesome. And by the way... Were can I see episode one??? I've never seen it or heard of it till I read this thread.. I wanna see it!
Gotta love those cannons!!! You rock at rendering Draven! maybe Michael and Don Murphy are watching this... whats the alt mode on this one?
Long time posters may remember pics of Megatron II's alt mode, that I posted quite some time ago, as being a tank. It's not any more. You'll see.
freakin sweet, nice job. never saw the original alt mode you had for this, but I can't wait to see the new one you have in mind. Anyone have a tissue? cuz looking at those pictures has me slobbering all over myself!
