A New Hope

Well I think an apology is in order! I promised regular updates and that is not what has happened so far. To make up for this I have decided to share a few helpful tutorials with you all, I will do this on a regular basis and even if it helps one person it was worth it. You can find the links below or on the main panel to the left!

The theme of this round of tutorials is modular asset creation. Modular assets are a really efficient way to create environments. Recently I have noticed quite a few students on Polycount who haven’t been shown this technique so hopefully this will help someone:

• Creating Modular Environments in UDK: http://www.thiagoklafke.com/modularenvironments.html
• Modular Fantasy Building tutorials: http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade
• Working with Modular sets: http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_sets/modular_sets.html

Ok, now that we are friends again I’ll also mention a friend’s blog I have linked (just above the tutorials). He is a great guy who is looking to create a brand new portfolio too so please take a look across there and give him some art love!

Now, back to the work! Last time I promised you more details on how I plan to try and make sure I reuse as many textures and assets that I create. I will do this with by using two main techniques, tiling textures and an asset library.

Tiling Textures

Ok so tiling textures aren't exactly new, they are a great way of getting the most out of your texture space and are an efficient way of working but what am I going to do differently? My plan is to create my own texture library of hand crafted tiling textures created using a combination of Maya, ZBrush and Photoshop. ZBrush has some very handy tricks which lend itself well to creating tiling textures (tricks I intend to share with you all!) and I plan to take advantage of them all!

Asset library

This is the more obscure of the two techniques I plan to use, it entails keeping a library of all assets I create with the intention to reuse at a later date. For example, if I'm creating a tiling wood floor texture in ZBrush I will need to export an .Obj file of wood planks which I will then take into ZBrush and sculpt. The plan is to keep a copy of both the .Obj file and a copy of the ZTool (ZBrush asset file) so that they can be used at a later date in another scene/texture.  In a nutshell the technique for creating tiling textures in ZBrush includes combining multiple assets to form a texture, so having a library will be extremely useful.

As you can see, these two techniques should go together well and I hope it will prove to be a fantastic time saver in the long run!

Thanks again for checking in, the next post will be very soon (tomorrow?!) and will include the planning for my first major portfolio project, ‘Eagles Rest’! Once again I apologise for the terrible title, maybe I’ll make a thing of it…Anyway, hope to see you back here soon!