My demo reel work

[Silent][Moebius]

can't you use your digicam to make short recordings? or is the quality so bad?

great textures you got there! and props to you for making them yourself!

just a little nitpicking about the bullet holes you got there. when a buller strikes the floor it usually is at a shallow angle, so you wouldn't be getting holes, but scorches on the concrete. that's the only part that stung my eye. other than that, excellent stuff mate

[multimediaman]

If my camera is able to actually record video, I'm not aware of how to get it to do so. It's a Canon Digital Rebel SLR (6.3MP) ... in case anyone has that same camera and knows how to do that, I'd be very appreciative of any advice

That might not be a bad investment, to get some sort of additional camera that could take videos. Though I'd constantly find myself wanting videos over 1706x1280 resolution. I have yet to find anything that takes over 640x480, which in essence, limits you to textures only 512x256 at the largest

**edit**

okay, last update for a bit today... Lighting. I noticed I wasn't getting anywhere near the realistic lighting that I wanted when I first set out to light my scene using a lighting rig, if you will... but the epitomy of ugly lighting happened when I merged my character model into a scene a few weeks ago, and the lighting was awful. She looked like she was glowing. Then it struck me.. my lighting awfulness was due to the fact I used a styrofoam ball, and its translucency and stuff was killing my scenes.

So.. I've gone and shot a painted wood ball, and here's the comparison of lighting setups:

[Silent][Moebius]

well instead of inversting in an additional cam, why not invest in a new digi cam that can record stuff and also shoot some great photos? i'm no expert with cameras but that would seem a more logic step than to buying an extra camera

[multimediaman]

Well, I'd just hate to get rid of the camera I've got for texturing... but considering I have so few textures that need to be animated, I don't think it's anything near a priority...

And here's yet another update:

Sky and surrounding environment for the win!

... what you see here is actually not a series of photographs, they're actually renders. Think Gran Turismo 4 here.



The skies you see in combination with the surrounding environment are 3 total, one mid-day party cloudy, one afternoon partly cloudy, and one mid-day clear sky. I plan on making an incredibly stormy looking sky eventually, and a night sky, however those are some time off, and with these environment textures, would require some editing before they look quite ... right. Things like eliminating some of the shadow and harsh sunlight on the stuff, for the most part. But for now, I've been itching to get started on the buildings of PIR, so that's what you'll see next.

[multimediaman]

holy mackerel! I thought I was updating this thread! apparenty not though... pardon me while I back the dump truck full of pictures up to this thread:


This extremely low-poly grandstand just needs a full-size:

...

meantime:


-- generic updates --

I've completed a large-scale revamp of the lighting system.

Here's a pic of the old vs. the new:



As you can tell, the sytrofoam lighting particularly killed the character's lighting the worst... but overall, everything looks about 2-3 times as good now, that they aren't lit in a way that makes them appear to glow...



the next update stems from a Google Earth imagery update. HUGE resolution difference than what I had used earlier to create the reference plane. Needless to say, I captured hundreds of images from google earth to paste together into a huge reference plane image (actually 6 total textures of 2048x2048 resolution) and that is now my ground reference plane. Again - here's an image of the old vs. new.




-- Portland Int'l Raceway begins: -- (again)


Gray Shader



Texture 1


Texture 2


Texture 3



and finally, here's a small comparison of the building... See, I had it done originally, but as you can see from this comparison, the original model had a few lame qualities about it, compared to the new model, that is...




Just for anyone wondering, the face count for this building model is 753. The back of the building doesn't exist... in true racing game fashion. but the top does exist, so I can get some very nice-looking top-down renders if I'd like

[Xoliul]

I don't get it with those surrounding environments; how are those renders ? What did you use for them ?

[clix101]

amazing work! looks absolutely awesome, i cant wait to see more

[multimediaman]

Originally Posted by Xoliul

I don't get it with those surrounding environments; how are those renders ? What did you use for them ?

dozens of stitched-together photographs. In fact, the horizon line is probably one of the most unconventional (to my normal way of working) textures ever. But pretty much it's all billboards going on

(by "renders, and not a series of photographs"... I was trying to say that it was more 3-dimensional than your standard "slap a background image in your scene" or "slap a panoramic in a cylindrical/spherical environment" sorta options...)

[NightEye]

Lovely work once again mmm!

One thing I noticed (might be perspective), the top-right windows (on the render, that is) look just a tiny bit too small

Lovely, really!

[multimediaman]

too small as in left-to-right width (onscreen)? If so, that has been noted, and I might see if I can fix that after I finish up with my latest progress today.


As for the rest of the buildings, here they are! (this should've been posted a bit before, but I got caught up with scarface, and preordering my PS3




Again... if you know of anything wrong with these to the point where they would be noticably wrong even with their background status, then by all means, let me know.

And finally, since there is actually a lot of bodies of water around PIR, I've decided to develop one of the most basic water materials I could... and here's what I ended up with. This is mainly to provide for some sort of showing of water in the background. The camera will never get too close to it in actuality, in fact, it's not even going to be animated since it's supposed to be in the background so much. (note: scaling of the water I didn't bother to get right in this pic, so the waves are actually quite a bit larger than I intended them to be. more likely use will make it look like little tiny ripples from a mere 2-4mph wind



questions? comments? critiques? praise?