Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Ultimapped

By far, one of the nicest features I've used in XSI is the Ultimapper tool. I've been able to normal map my zombie friend quite easily. The next step is to export it to an Ogre mesh and see how it looks there. It should be quite straightforward.

Here is the result from the directx realtime viewport in XSI. It looks nicer with a moving light :)


And here he is with the normal map applied as a diffuse texture.


By the way, XSI is a very nice program once ( and if ) you get used to its weird user interface.

3D tools are inherently complex, I don't know why some developers attempt to obscure them even further by using non standard interfaces whenever possible.

For example, what's so bad about using the standard OS open file dialog... is there a real need to implement a custom crippled version of it? And this is but a drop in the sea...

Oh well, I believe anyone who uses XSI for the first time feels my pain.

I suppose you can get used to it and learn all these non standards workflows, but the real question is: Why should you have to?

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Good Head!

Maybe you've listened to Turbonegro songs before, maybe you haven't. Of one thing I'm pretty sure: These aren't the kind of heads they had in mind :)


Drawn with a 0.5 technical pencil, coloured with a pink highlighter and then inked with a 0.5 pilot pen.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Michael, The Vegetarian Zombie

Let me introduce you my new friend Michael. He enjoys long walks on the beach, playing the piano and cooking. He's also single ladies!

Next step will be to unwrap the UVs of the low-poly version and figure out how to create the normal map.