Adjustments to the Hoverbike

After blocking out a early version of the Hoverbike yesterday i have made some amendments to it. Firstly i wanted to change the wings on the bike so i rotated them 90 degrees to make it more slimline in design.

Here are the wings rotated 90 degrees:

I then added more detail by adding some Exhaust pipes, a set of mini guns on the front and also adding in some jets underneath the wings:

I was alot more happier with the Hoverbike now and i felt i could move on to the next job in hand which was to unwrap the rest of the models both Weapons and the Hoverbike ready for texturing. Unwrapping may take me a few days to complete so there may not be any diary entries whilst I'm doing so unless there are problem that arise.

First look at the vehicle in 3DS Max

Today i have took my Blueprints of the Hoverbike and i have create the following I'm not entirely happy with it i think some improvements can be made but its a start at least. Things looked alittle too bland and no real form or shape to it, adjustments or additions will have to be made i think.

Here are some screenshots of the model:

Deadline Handin of work is.......

For a couple of months now i was wondering when we would know exactly when the Handin date would be for the project and today i can say that D-Day is officially the 7th of May. This is good to know now and i can now plan out the final few months knowing when everything has to be handed in. I have set myself to have everything modelled and textured round about the 26th April. Finishing around this date will give me plenty of opportunity to collate all my work and create the Model book that needs to be done for assessment. Another piece of good news is that i have managed to book off lots of time off work in order to complete everything so expect lots of updates in the next 2 months :)

Making a start on the Vehicle

It was about time i started to model the vehicle, however after discussing at some length with Dean i wasn't happy with the vehicle i had produced back in Pre-production. I felt it was a little weak in design and didn't really seem to fit my character as i wanted them to look like they belong together. Me and Dean talked about my character having more of a chopper bike type of vehicle to move around on and this would look much better and fit more into the Unreal universe. So i started to look into other vehicles in UT3 and came across the "Manta" that already ships within UT3 when you buy it from the shops. Here is some screenshots of the "Manta" and i decided that i would base my design upon this vehicle:

Having researched into the Manta at some length i started to create some rough sketches like i had produced back in pre-production below is some examples of the sketches:

In the end i narrowed the kind of shape that i was after down to the above picture with this as a template i created some Blueprints for the actual build of the Vehicle.

Here are those blueprints:

A change in the workflow

In my original rationale i proposed to import all of my models into UT3 however after a discussion with Dean my tutor we decided that this would be a massive under taking. Since i had never used the Unreal Editor before this project, also after all the problems that i had encountered importing the character into UT3 it was decided that i would only import the character. I believe this was a good idea otherwise i doubt that i will finish everything on time, having said that i did say that i would look into importing the weapon/s and vehicle after i had finished the course. I found it very useful actually importing the character into UT3 as this gave me a much better insight into how much work really does go on implementing models into a game engine such a s Unreal.

Time to loose some poly's.....

After experimenting with Z-Brush and XNormal i decided to look at my model again and see if i could lower my poly count down to my original budget that i had decided upon at the beginning of the year with Stas and Dean. My budget for the character model was 10,000 polys or 20,000 tris.

After adding all the new added straps and extra detail i had well over stepped this budget and my character was now standing at a whopping 12,0019 ploys or 23.674 tris. I was not happy about this and i don't believe it is good practice to over shoot by so many. In what experience i have i do know that poly budgets are a big issue in the industry and these poly budgets must be obeyed.

So i looked long and hard at my model and started chipping into it using target weld and deleting any polys that i felt were of no use or did not have a purpose or did anything to the silhouette in any way. After a couple of hours of refinement i was alot happier with the model as now i came below my agreed poly budget. Also i believe that my actual geometry looks alot better now and a hell of alot cleaner as some of my model still looked messy.

Below is exactly how many polys i was able to save which I'm very pleased about:

• Old Mesh = 12,0019 polys or 23,674 tris


• New Mesh = 9,904 polys or 11,099 tris

I think i should point out that i could probably could look even deeper into getting the poly count down even further but with time ticking i am happy to move on from this stage. I also think with getting my poly count down it will also help my model run smoother in UT3.

If we look at the two images below there doesn't seem to be much loss of detail either between the two models can you tell which one is which?

And the answer is ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

the new lower poly model is on the left with the higher poly mesh on the right. So as we can see there isn't a great difference in to two meshes at all.

Experimenting with XNormal and ZBrush

After making some refinements to my model i thought it was best to make a start with the Z-Brush work. So with my High and Low poly meshes ready i decided to put the torso into ZBrush for 3 reasons really.

1. To familiarise myself with Z-Brush once more as it has been a while since i had used it.
2. To bake out a normal and Ambient Occlusion map.
3. Experiment with XNormal.

So i began to do this and after having alittle play about with ZBrush i decided to take my High and Low Poly Mesh's into XNormal.

Following some tutorials on the site i found XNormal really easy to use and i thought everything was going great. I baked out the Normal map really easily no problem and i also baked out the Ambient Occlusion. (I have to say that the Ambient Occlusion that it produced was way better than the previous Ambient Occlusion i produced in 3DS MAx itself.)

However things did not run smoothly, when i applied the Normal map to my lower poly model the Normal map did not seem to work properly and i wasn't happy with the way things had turned out. (I'm sorry i haven't got any images to show the result as i accidentally deleted the Normal map that i produced by accident).

After thinking things over i believe that the error was occurring because when i produced the lower and high poly meshes i deleted all the straps and fine detail on the lower mesh and this is something i shouldn't of done. I could be wrong on this maybe i was doing something in 3DS Max I'm not entirely sure. So this got me thinking??