All posts tagged 3D

Memory Lane

 Martin · 3 years

I've used OneDrive as a centralized place to keep all of my work for a while now, and it's great. Everything I do gets uploaded immediately, and it makes syncing up devices (and refreshing my computers) easy. I got rid of my old backup CD's a long time ago, instead opting to keep all my old projects in the cloud.

OneDrive surfaces my old work occasionally, and I low-key love it. Each day it creates a new "on this day" album, which will contain all of the visual stuff I made that day - photos, renders, etc. - on the same day throughout time. It can be a real blast from the past!

Yesterday was one such day, with the render above, which I created in trueSpace more than 20 years ago. My intent was to use it as a backdrop for an adventure game I was planning to make, but I had no idea how to actually make games back then, and so, like many projects back then, it was over before it even got started.

Still, I got a kick out of seeing this. My skill as a 3D artist has come a long way since then!

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Piranha Plant render

 Martin · 8 years
piranha-plant-1

As a practice exercise for modeling/creating materials in Blender, I decided to work on a model inspired by the famous pipe-infesting Piranha Plant enemy from Super Mario Bros.

The model was created as a very simple low-resolution mesh with a SubSurf modifier to add detail, and all the textures were created using Blender's internal texture nodes, in Cycles.

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Mini handheld console render – Update 3

 Martin · 9 years
handheld-system-render-9

After finishing the last render in this series, I posted it to Facebook and a friend of mine who has a lot of experience working in the VFX industry gave me some great critique. So I took this the project back to the drawing board and using his notes, re-worked almost every part of the scene. The result is a much better render!

You can read a bit about the process of building this render here.

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Mini handheld console render – Update 2

 Martin · 9 years
handheld-system-render-3

Here's the final render for my handheld system, which I've dubbed the Martendo.

To finish this one off, I tweaked a lot of the finer points of the geometry of the cartridges, added pins to the boards, and put some images on the screen and cartridge labels.

This was a satisfying little Blender project for me. It's always nice to be able to set aside some time and just make something for the fun of it.

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Mini handheld console render – update 1

 Martin · 9 years
handheld-system-render-2

A small update to the render I posted the other day, featuring a chunky little handheld game console.

I've worked on the back a bit, adding a battery compartment, an indentation for the console information, and some screw holes (which actually have screw heads in them).

I thought I was pretty much done with this, but after I rendered it out, I noticed that the cartridges just don't look finished. I think I also want to add some generic branding/labels to the carts and the back of the console too, and maybe a simple image on the screen. I might do that part (the screen) in Photoshop though, just to make things simpler. We'll see!

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Mini handheld console render

 Martin · 9 years

This is just a quick little render of a handheld video game console I made today. The proportions are probably all off, but I like how it looks. There's a volume wheel on the opposite side, and I even left a slot in the back for a cartridge.

Future additions will probably include a game cartridge in the back and a battery compartment cover.

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New GameMaker example: 3D Starfield

 Martin · 9 years

I've updated another of my old GameMaker examples to be compatible with GameMaker: Studio! This time, however, I've completely re-imagined the old example, and replaced it with something that demonstrates the same principles, but in a totally different way.

The new example is a 3D Starfield simulation, and it replaces the old 3D Night Sky file.

This new example uses the same technique as the old one, creating a model and using primitives to add points to it which draw as our "stars", but this new example also adds some linelists to the mix, as well as some infinite motion. I think it's a much more fun way to see this technique demonstrated, and it wont feel quite as redundant when I get around to updating the day/night cycle example as well.

As usual, you can download this new example over at my GameMaker Examples & Tutorials page. Thanks for checking it out!

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3D Animated Water example updated

 Martin · 9 years

I've updated my old 3D animated water examples to be compatible with GameMaker: Studio today, combining the two former examples into one superior example.

The previous examples used two methods for creating the water effect. The first used layers of scrolling, textured 3D planes drawn with an additive blend mode to make a detailed, if not always pretty, body of water. The second used a pre-animated texture, created in PhotoShop, to create a similar effect. A skybox was also employed, to make for better background scenery.

This new example combines methods from both of these files to create, in my opinion, a superior effect. With this updated example, the layers of scrolling texture have been relegated to a surface, which gets updated each step. This surface is then drawn over a base color plane for the water, all over a skybox with pre-baked reflections built in.

The effect could probably be more detailed, or could benefit from shader support for true reflections, but for what it is, I think it's a notable improvement.

You can find the updated file for this example on my GameMaker Examples & Tutorials page.

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Update to Blender addon for exporting 3D models to GameMaker

 Martin · 9 years

I spent some time experimenting with my Blender addon and GameMaker's 3D the other night, and I realized that the models it was creating were not entirely how they should be. It seemed that if you used the option to flip the object's Y axis on export, which is often necessary because GameMaker and Blender's world axes are different, then the model's normals would be flipped.

This wasn't immediately obvious to me, since the correct orientation of GameMaker's built-in models has always been kind of ambiguous, in my opinion. After following the code in the manual to make some of the primitive shapes however, I compared the results to what my Blender addon was creating, and came to the conclusion that the output from my addon was not quite correct.

So after a lot of tinkering (Python and Blender API are not my strong suits) I believe I've finally got the addon updated to export models that are oriented correctly and which should always have correct normals. Additionally, I added a feature which a friend of mine had built into his own version of the addon, which will let you output the model script in an alternative way, to more easily allow you to add it to an existing model in your game.

You can download the updated version of my Blender addon at the original page, which I've changed to include the newly updated addon. That will always be the place to go for the most recent version.

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Lighting test parts – Update 3

 Martin · 9 years
two-trees-5

Here's another update to my lighting test scene I've been playing around with in Blender.

I tore out the entire original scene, save for the trees, and re-worked the pieces so they'd fit together better. I might do more work like this in the future, so I can make "islands" of any shape, but for now I'm pretty happy with how things look.

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I've included a bonus render first-person perspective, just for fun. Since I haven't filled the whole scene much yet, there isn't a ton to see, but it will (hopefully) get wilder as I continue to work on the scene!

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