Studio@jumpers-inn.de

Sometimes, it’s just cool to have access to expensive toys! Okay, let’s start at the beginning. My colleague Rainer is working in the field of programming by demonstration and therefore uses data gloves to monitor human hand movement. Unfortunately these gloves need a very good calibration to give good results and the mapping of the glove data to a model is useless if the hand model is not accurate. The problem now was to get an accurate model of a human hand, ideally from Rainer’s hand. Since we do have a 40,000 € 3D digitizer in our lab we obviously thought about scanning his hand. It turned out to be tricky because you need several scans from different viewpoints and a human can’t hold his fingers in the exact same position for that so results are not that great. Usually, if you want to scan a hand, you make a clay model of the hand and scan that. And that is pretty much what we did. We got ourselves some Creaform and Artestone and went to work. Surprisingly, the first try succeeded so well that we got this:

The finished hand model with a stand.

Now all left to do was take this and put it into the modeling center to process. Several minutes later (thanks to Rapidform!) the finished 3D model turned out to be really great. Below is a render of the high resolution scan version (right side, ~200,000 faces) and a automatically reduced version (left side, ~5000 faces).

Left: auto reduced version (5k tris) Right: scan version (200k tris)

Every once in a while things just go smooth and easy!

UPDATE: Spent some more time with the render settings

Spent some more time with the render and material settings

Well, haven’t posted in a long long time now. A lot of stuff has happened, but nothing that fits in this blog. I have been toying around with lux a bit more, but nothing worth showing has come of it. But now I managed to work some more on game art for Duality, namely our first and only enemy monster, a cute spider.

I made a base mesh in Blender from reference, then created the details in Sculptris. Bumps and color were painted in Sculptris as well. Then reimported into Blender, adjusted the low poly mesh, baked the color and normal textures. What you see in the render above is the actual game model. The spider is already rigged and I’ll create some basic animations with it so it can act as an enemy.

This is one of my first tests to generate a normal map from a high resolution mesh and then apply it to a low resolution map. The image below is a screenshot from XNormal showing the generated normal map with a ambient occlusion map for colorisation.

The short movie below illustrates the normal map effect better:

RockWallNormalTest

So for the game I’m helping in developing I’ve started to do a enemy monster, namely a spider. I started this in Blender and modeled the basic shape from a box. I used a mirror modifier as well as a subsurface modifier to help in the process. I also used a top down view of a spider as a reference image. Then I applied the modifiers and exported to .obj. From there I’m now working in Sculptris to flesh out some details and give it a paint job at the end. For today I started with the legs, more to follow soon.

A friend of mine reminded me of a sculpting software I read about some months ago. It was still in development then and only available to a selected few beta testers. But this week version 1.0 has been released to the public! So head over to www.sculptris.com and give it a shot. It’s a really cool piece of software written by a single guy in only 6 months – very impressive.

The program is really easy to use, has a great interface and is just plain fun. See the trailer to get a glimpse of its features: