Blend Shaders

Made a bunch of blend shaders this week. Started with lava but got pretty frustrated trying to get the lava to look like Lava, I think it's a lot more advanced than I thought it was. Moved onto water and snow which were infinitely easier and look a lot better.

Normal and Diffuse for the water shader.

The snow shader, attempting to blend using a height map. Kind of successful but needs more work. Was going off this tutorial, which inverted everything, but that seemed unnecessary so I changed it.

Height/Slope Blending

I wanted to do something a bit different than the standard mountains with snow on them for height blending. So I made this volcanic environment.

I took a height map from Google Earth of a canyon in Egypt and another of a volcano and blended the two together. Then I made textures for obsidian, a red glowing obsidian type rock and ash for the top.

Here's the material editor for this. It looks like a lot but really it's the same thing repeated for the spec, normal and emissive channels.

And a close up.

Here's the material for the lava surrounding the volcano.

Projected Couch

Here's the couch I made yesterday, in all its 131,060 tri glory:

Brought it from Max into Maya to make a low poly cage for it, down to 2737 tris, then projected the high-res one onto the low for the normal maps.

Here it is in UDK (I haven't textured the legs yet):

3DS Max Couch

Haven't really modeled anything in a while and boy do those skills get rusty if you don't use them. Here's a really spectacularly terrible couch I made in Maya:

I've been trying to learn 3DS Max as well as Maya so I figured this was a perfect time to do some tutorials and make myself a couch in Max. I do really like the Max interface better than Maya, but I know my way around Maya better.

Anyway, here's the couch I made in Max. There's a lot of turbosmoothing going on here, along with some push/pull vertex painting to make the rumpled looking cushion. Unfortunately I don't know how to UV in Max so this is going back into Maya for cleanup and texturing.

Chipped Rock Floor

Made this chipped rock floor in 3ds Max while following along with another Digital Tutor lesson. Very first time using Max and it seems pretty handy for blocking things out like this.

In progress blocking in Max:

 

Took my tiled block pattern into Z-brush and sculpted about half the blocks, then back into Max and duplicated the sculpted ones along the blocked out guidelines I made.

 I generated all the maps in Max with Render to Texture, then made an additional grungy normal map in Knald based off a photo I took of fishsticks I made that burnt to a baking sheet:

 
Finally I brought the whole thing into UDK and combined the two normal maps for finer detail.

And the final result: