My company
Slide has been ever so busy of late, but we're slowly finding the time to have a decent crack at translating Ian's winning compo artwork into 3D. Here's a bit of an update...
First of all - it's a great design to work with! In case you'd forgotten, this is what it looks like on paper :
Here's the 3D model in it's current incarnation (we ended up tweaking the concept slightly in a couple of places where
we felt there was still stuff to resolve - but tried to stick to the
concept everywhere else.) :
What you're looking at there is the finished mesh (minus the glass and the front lights, which I've hidden for these shots), fully UV mapped and ready for texturing.
I've baked the UV cage and a Mental Ray ambient occlusion pass into the 2048x1024px diffuse texture. Translation : the grid lines you can see above are actually in the texture, so you can see what you're doing when you paint it up. The nice realistic shadows are also in the texture - again, they form a good basis for adding textural details to the model, and at the same time add some richness to the whole thing. Here's the texture first without, then with, the ambient occlusion pass :
In terms of being an in-game mesh there's a fair amount of room for optimisation - it's quite heavy at ~3800 tris. Part of the reason for this is that I've modelled edge flows which, further down the line, can be cut-into in a hi-res version of the mesh to produce the edges between the metal plates in a normal map. Don't worry if that's all gibberish to you by the way - I'm hoping to put together some short explanations of how the model came together, and will explain stuff like this (when it happens).
So what we'd like to do is share this model with you lot in it's current form. I want to make it easy for anyone to experiment with texturing, to the point where you can edit the texture and see your changes live in an XNA viewer window or something. We've got a plan for a good way of doing this, which will take a couple of days to sort out - I'll post again when it's all ready.
Perhaps after that we could have a thread where people show off their own tricked-out OrcaSubs : ) Go-faster stripes, "XNAUKUG-4-EVAR" on windscreen and a full leather interior, hell yes!