I’ve been riding my bike to work every day since June, with the intention that I would rough it out during the winter, which in California is usually not too harsh. Last week, however, was the first time I had to contend with anything more than a light sprinkle. I found myself stuck in a hail storm, awash in sea foam along the banks of the San Francisco bay. At the start of the storm I stopped to place the rain covers on my panniers and as I got back in the saddle I said to myself (out loud no less — don’t laugh) “Head down. Keep going.” A good helmet, strong lights and a light jacket helped me reach home safely, hot and literally steaming. Yes, it is a small achievement, I know, but I arrived home with a determination to bring that attitude into my studio that night and power through an obstacle that had been troubling me for weeks.

One of the big steps I have wanted to make in starting this new project and moving beyond the low poly work with which I had become overly comfortable was to learn the pipeline for creating more modern game art assets. But, getting a normal map that looks the way it should has been a long slow process. My high poly model looked good, my low poly model looked good, but the normal map was just looking, how best to describe it… borked. I knew that the answer was there — I could plainly see where other people had mastered these newer techniques and I had surmounted obstacles like this in the past (UV maps in Blender, anyone?). But, getting there has been taking too long and has been delaying my goal of officially launching this site. I knew at some point it had to be a matter of obstinately pushing through and making it happen. The night of riding through the hail storm was also the night I got it. It makes sense now. There was one major thing I overlooked that was majorly screwing things up, namely that the normals were flipped in many places which a nice ctrl-n in Blender fixed, but there were also a number of little things that improved the overall look of the map. The important thing to note about this, is that I would never have known what these things are that so greatly affect the look of the normal map if I had not gone through the painstaking process of making mistakes and stepwise improvements. Here is the model as it stands today.

Here is one example for you to see what I am talking about. On the left is the normal map of one of the wires on the satellite dish at 300% before I made changes, the one on the right is after. The right image is a nice smooth image made up of mostly blues and purples. The before image is a mottled mash of tans, yellows and oranges mixed in with the blues and purples. Flipping the normals fixed most of this, but I also needed to go in add a few edge loops on the low poly model among other minor modifications.

The end result is still not perfect, but it is solid enough for me to say that it is done, and I will be moving on to the next step of preparing the textures for it. A couple more steps to go, learning GIMP well enough to texture and creating a spec map, and I will be moving on to one more learning project before I try to get into my regular rhythm. For those of you that I’ve promised stuff to, it’s coming — not as soon as I had hoped, but I’ll get there soon. My plan is to start spreading the word about this site at the beginning of the new year.

Stay free.
~shs~

For the past six months I have been riding my bike to work. I’m a big guy, strong but big. Getting rolling takes some effort, but once I am up to speed, I can travel with pretty consistent momentum. I try my hardest to find a path to work that requires the least amount of stops and starts. The worst is if I get stuck at an intersection with car traffic. Most intersections are graded to avoid flooding, which creates a large hump in the middle.  Starting from an intersection means starting on an uphill.

Art, for me, is a lot like this. Getting started on something new is an uphill battle. But, once I am over the hump, I can keep rolling with consistent momentum. The past few weeks have been all about this hump. I have been painstakingly re-examining every step of the process that take to create 3D art. I knew going in to this new endeavor that there were a lot of new skills I needed to learn and some I needed to relearn. It has been a great exercise to be able to take this process through step by step. It feels like a whole new way of working and in the end it will make the work I provide to the community that much better.

So, here is step one of the path, just about to get over the hump. This is a work in progress of my first hi-poly model, which will be what I use to create the normal map that I will apply to the low poly game model I will be posting. I’m not sure if I am creating this in the right way, but, you know, it’s all about trying and improving. I still have a number of steps to go before being able to get these out on a regular basis — here is a screenshot showing my progress.

Stay free.

~shs~