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Tutorials and RefThese are all various tutorials and resources I've made. Some are links to websites, some are images that contain the whole tutorial in it. And there are also orthographic modeling reference images in here too.  Game Industry Advice4studentsI was asked by an aspiring 3d artist who was about a year from actually attending college, for some advice about the gaming industry and this is what I had to say to her. She was specifically thinking about going to Digipen, which is the same college I went to. But the advice applies to just about any school that offers a program in "video game' 3d art.Game Industry Advice4students More Like This Comments I use 3dsmax for my personal work. We use Maya at work. Ive never used blender, but I have a friend (amateur) who swears by it)
 Do you use 3ds max because you learned first with it, or would you reccomend it for modeling.(I'm trying to decide which would be better for low poly game modeling with normal mappings,rig,and animations.)
The first 3d program that I learned was 3D Studio 4 for DOS (and despite the name sounding similiar, 3d studio for DOS was absolutely nothing like 3dsmax). The second 3d app I learned was Maya. /Then/ I learned 3dsmax at my second college. So I don't prefer it because it's the one I started with. I prefer it, because it's generally much better. There are some things that Maya does better, they're just few and far between. I can think of like... three features that I use in Maya that I can't do, or do as well in 3dsmax, while I can think of a dozen features in max that I can't do as well, or at all, in Maya. So my opinion remains consistent that Max is a superior 3d application.
The new mass of modeling tools that were added to 3dsmax um... two versions ago, (maybe three, I'm not sure anymore), topple leaps and bounds above anything found in maya. Maya's using basically the same modeling tools that were available in Maya version 5, that came out, like 9 years ago. They've made no legitimate efforts to improve the modeling tools in Maya over the years. It's rather pathetic, really. One of the only things that Maya does better than Max, that I use on a regular basis, is Maya's transfer maps tool. 3dsmax has one; it's called Render to Texture, but it doesn't work as well. Zbrush's built in zmapper thingy works better than max's map transfer feature, and Maya's Transfer maps works better than Zbrush's. So in the end, if I've got a high poly mesh, and a low-poly mesh, and I need to generate a normal map, I use Maya to do it. But if I've got a high poly mesh, and I need to /make/ the low-poly proxy geometry, I use 3dsmax, because it's tools are like, the most wonderful and amazing and fantastic thing ever made, if that's what you need to do. (I've had to make a lot of proxy geo over the last 6 months at work, and I was doing it in Maya for a while until I was about to pull my hair out by the roots and finally just opened max instead and got it done in a fraction of the time.) Anyway, I'm rambling. My opinion is that max is better. I use both regularly, I was taught both in school. I have to use both in my day-to-day work. Max is better. Maya is still capable and there are reasons for using it (in the case of my studio, we use it entirely because the Sony Tech development group writes tools specifically for Maya, and it was supposed to be cheaper to share tech or something.) Lol better than a yes/no answer so I don't mind.
 I'm a super amateur so I'm trying to be cautious on which to pick. I wish I could understand 3d modeling in my head like I do with art and writing. It's something about 3d models that feels too...technical. like I tried it once before and it always feel like to many things could be too loose or misaligned. For example, on my trial i tried modeling a bare foot. it was going well...i guess. but the padding of the foot wasn't flat(grounded). not sure if there is a specific function to get faces to rotate at a fixed degree(without placing every vertex to the grid but I gave up... Point being, my critical thinking isnt tailored for 3d modeling...yet... Well you could try either zbrush or mudbox - which is far more tactile and manual than the more 'technically' inclined 3d apps. Both zbrush and mudbox are 3d sculpting apps where you start with primitives, (in the case of zbrush, you create your base mesh using 'zspheres'), or imported base meshes, add in levels of subdivision, and use the sculpting tools to make the objects.
I only used a trial of mudbox, and it was like, 3 versions ago, so I really have no idea what using the program might be like right now. I know that zbrush is a very very odd program and it can be very confusing for someone who is accustomed to the more 'normal' 3d programs (like me - lol), but if you haven't really grown accustomed to thinking that 'this is how a 3d program should work' then you might be in a good place to work your mind around zbrush. You mean like an eye that's just faked? Textured directly onto the face? If you want to animate the eye, I don't really recommend doing it that way, unless you are REALLY REALLY strapped for polys.
Still make a spherical eyeball with eyelids and everything. To make it look like a 2D-Animated type face, it's all about the texturing that you apply to the model. If possible, you could even go for a cell-shader to emulate that 2d-animated painted cell look. |
Sta.sh
(sorry for the random comment)
