EPT
I guess I have myself to blame though since i signed up for extra courses heh. Sadly I have not had any time to work on my own project and most likely I won't have time before I graduate. Looks like we have to write a thesis for that, quite scary.Anyways today I'll just write some about how graphics in games work. Obviously there are many ways to go about creating things so I will just post some of my recent artwork and explain how it is built up. Here's the finished product of an M16A4 (I'm not a weapons expert but that's what it's supposed to be
)Warning: Large images :V open them in new tabs
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Mob2vAo.jpg)
The finished product
But what is it made up of? And how does one get there? Firstly, at least for making something realistic such as this, you need reference images. I'm pretty sure I've used about 30+ images showing different parts from different angles and so on. This picture I threw into my 3D modelling program to model against and achieve a very similar silhouette.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hL8SI2M.jpg)
Used for most parts, some things have been changed around
From here on we try to create a model with as much details as possible. I won't write exactly how this is done but there are tons of tutorials on 3D modelling online. Ask me any questions on the topic if you'd like. Here's my finished highpoly model for the weapon.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IgvBqOD.jpg)
It's not perfect but I'm pretty happy about it
The problem now is that a game cannot support hundreds of thousands of polygons, as seen in the last image. It would be too heavy with current gen technology. Therefore we create a lowpoly model from this version. The time making a highpoly version isn't wasted though and I'll talk more about it later.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/o1s8Cqx.jpg)
Sorry about the terrible renders
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/80gzBtC.jpg)
You can see the polygons here. If I had shown them on the highpoly it would've just been a mess
At this point it's time to start texturing and adding color to the model. This is done by first "unwrapping" it, which means you pick the faces (the areas between all the edges) apart and try to flat them out as much as possible. This is one of the most painful and boring steps but it's required. In the end we should end up with a kind of map which shows all the faces in 2D, like a PNG file, on which we can begin painting color. Here's how mine ended up.
Do note: I just edited four different images together to one to not clutter this post up with too many separate images.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/9bGJhOm.jpg)
The part in the lower corner has a lower resolution, hence why it's pixelated
In the previous image you can see four different maps created for the model. The one at the top left corner is called specular and it contains information on how light is reflected. the darker the area the less it reflects and vice versa.
Next we have the blue looking thing which is a normal map, this is where the 3D model with all the detail comes in. We can project our highpoly model onto our lowpoly and create this map, which in turn changes how lightning bounces on it. Basically this means that we end up with some faked geometry, and the lowpoly model will look like it has some more detail.
The third map which is mostly black, is the diffuse map. This is simply the base color to be shown, pretty simple.
And then the last map at the lower corner is called a gloss map. It is used to control the size of the highlight which is seen as light comes in contact with the model. Since this weapon is made up of some metal and some polymer parts (probably), this is a good way to show that the materials are in fact different, and make it more realistic looking. Metal is shinier.
There are also a ton of other maps which may be used for other purposes such as emissive maps (lightning, such as glow in a fireplace) or opacity maps (transparency). Either way we then import all these things to a game engine, in this case Unreal Development Kit, or UDK for short. There we put together a shader which decides how all of these maps should be used.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0208tfb.jpg)
You can do a lot more than this here, like animating leaves in the wind or make water reflect the sky
There are also some finishing touches I've added such as hitboxes and LOD (Level Of Detail) so that the model is simplified when the camera is far awar but it's pretty boring. All that remains is to mess around with the settings to get everything to look as good as possible and then it is done.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/yraTqmy.jpg)
If you're wondering about anything just ask here or send me a PM
I'm gonna go sleep for now though.
