Mudbox Painting Tutorial on Servant of Dagon model

Hello,

To follow up on the set of tutorials I've been doing the past week I am doing a diffuse painting tutorial using Mudbox 3D today using my Servant of Dagon model.

I go over some basic painting tools, how to approach using reference, and paint a new texture from start to finish in an exploratory fashion

Modelling process tutorial - Servant of Dagon

Hello!

I had a special update today, a fellow indie developer messaged me with questions about my creative process on the Servant of Dagon model I shared this past weekend.

So in interest of sharing with the community I took the time to document the process and I did some screen grabs and annotated them with comments to create a sort of "process tutorial" on the model.

A process tutorial is basically means it shows how I went about creating the model as logical steps; rather than being a "how do I operate the mechanics of modelling program X" approach.

I know that when I was learning a lot of this I had to do it by myself and its really hard to find a tutor or mentor on these topics so I hope these grabs shed some light on the creative process.

Please feel free to ask questions I'll try to follow up with comments, additional grabs or write ups as needed.

I've put a few pro-tips on a lot of these shots, if you have some insights or pro tips of your own you'd like to share please leave a comment below!

Step 1: Create a low poly base model, typically using box modelling techniques. If available recycle old models you have as a starting point!

Step 2: In my example I have recycled a chest from a human model that I created in the past, here I am stitching that chest together with the newly modeled tail and head piece I created for the Servant of Dagon.

Step 3:  Use the mirroring technique so that you only have to create 'half' of a model.  This saves immense amount of time. If you need non-symmetrical parts add those after you have mirrored your model over.

Step 4: Here I show the marking of UV seams as a step towards doing the UV mapping.  Try to make the seams in places that will be out of the players line of sight, or in areas they are less likely to view often.

Step 5 :  Create the actual UV maps.  UV map creation can be very time consuming and complex (especially as a beginner) make sure to watch SEVERAL application specific tutorials until you are reasonably sure you have found what appears to be the easiest method applicable to your application.  In my case LSCM unwrapping automatically unwraps the model in a very satisfactory way at the press of a single menu option.

Step 6: Further adjust UV maps as needed.  Even if your application does a brilliant job you may want to either adjust the map for maximum coverage on the canvas (blank space is a waste of canvas that could be adding detail to your model!) or arrange as I did in this example so that I have room for some accessories I plan to add to the model in the near future.

Step 7: Import in to a sculpting app (Zbrush, Mudbox, Blender etc) and sculpt large details first at low subdivision levels

Step 8: Sculpt the more fine details at higher subdivision levels. Focus your time in high visibility areas like the face or areas the player will see most often.

Step 9: Paint the model.  Ideally these days you would be painting in an advanced 3D painter program like Mudbox, Substance Painter or others ; but if needed export the UV map and paint in Photoshop or GIMP.

Step 10: Get him in game!  Obviously the end goal is to get our new model in game!

Let me know how you liked this tutorial and if the process approach was good/bad for you!

Servant of Dagon - looking better in game (SOLVED)

Yesterday I mentioned that the Servant of Dagon was not looking up to the quality level I had expected in the Unity 5 Game engine.

This morning (fresh after some rest!) I took another look and found that by default texture compression had been selected for this model's texture.  After removing the texture compression he looks much closer to the intended quality levels as seen in this shot:

I moved him a little closer to the camera here to get a bit more detail in this shot showing through, he looks quite nice now (sharper and more details)  ... nasty compression, we hates it my precious!

Rise of Dagon : Servant of Dagon

This week I wanted to work on getting a new monster model in to the game, but it takes a gigantic tonne of work to do all the 3d modelling, uv mapping, texture painting, sculpting, rigging, and animation as you can imagine!

However I decided that I had to try and do this  - so far if you've been following I've only been showing one enemy in screenshots, the skeletal footman.  While I hope everyone loves a good skeleton it was simply not nearly enough visual variety for people to remain excited about over the long term!

So I began a mad scramble to put this guy together - giving myself a goal of doing it in one week. Thankfully he's been on my design list for a while and I knew much of what I wanted out of the model.  Dagon is the evil god of the universe in this game and he has both dragon / serpent as well as darker cthulu like qualities.  So these Servant's of Dagon are a reptilian race who worship him and act as his agents in the game.

Back view of model

Realize of course I'm a guy with a full time job, a wife and kid and I do all my dev on the time  I can squeeze in between all of life's other commitments so were talking about 1.5 hours a day MAX and maybe 4 hours per day on the weekend.

I did not get him fully animated so you could say I failed my goal - however I did get him in game with the beginning of an idle animation.  Having set such an aggressive goal I was able to stay very focused and having got a nice looking model in game in such a short time I am really pleased!

What's a bit odd (to me) is he looks much better in Mudbox than he does in Unity 5. I'm not sure why as I brought over high res materials and normal maps etc. He doesn't look bad either - just not as spectacular and I can't be sure if I'm doing something wrong or if its just how it goes?  After seeing the Blacksmith demo video from Unity 5 I can't help but feel I am doing something wrong and losing out on visual fidelity if I knew the right buttons to press!

If you have any hints or tips on how to improve my characters look in game drop me a line I'd love to hear about them!

Rise of Dagon adding in logic for doors

This week I focused on tying in the logic of doors and gates like the porticullis I implemented last week in to the logic for the game.

So this required some code changes in several areas:

- player movement
- monster movement
- level logic code
- additional scripts on game objects in the scene

While this isn't a lot to show off visually in a screenshot I did try to record a video but my software kept crashing when I tried to record audio!  Unfortunately that took too long and I'm just going with a screenshot today.

Hopefully I'll figure out what's going on with the video cap software soon and I'll try to get a video update soon as I haven't done one in a while and many things have changed.

The other thing I took on this week is a second iteration of the inventory and character inspection sheets.

This screenshot shows off the new inventory - which if you compare to older screenshots this now hugs the left and right rather than obscuring the whole screen.

This looks nicer - as obviously you can still see what is going on in the game as you tinker with your inventory - and avoid getting clobbered if a monster is coming!

There is further work to do in the inventory iteration, I would like to polish the graphics up a bit and I have a mouse-over inspector but for some reason its really  jittery so I need to solve that problem so the UI feels smooth rather than touchy.

That's it for this week, thanks for reading!

The Rise of Dagon : Pits, Brazier's, Unity 5.0 released, and more oh my!

Last week I shared the new Portcullis that I was able to get in to the level format and editor for the Rise of Dagon.

As anticipated I went ahead and implemented more items in to the level format.

So this week I have added the following:

• uncovered pits
• covered pits (traps essentially)
• pressure plates
• floor braziers

An important note to make though ; I did not put in the logic to control the pressure plates and the covered pit doors.. that will have to be in a future update as it took a fair bit of work to get this content in this week.

I had one problem when doing it and that was the default Unity UI doesn't have a 'drop down' list so I did a really quick toggle for the implementation of the covered pit vs the uncovered pit but I could see this was going to get really laborious and inefficient eventually.

Some googling turned up a thread on the Unity forums talking about this implementation of a drop down list someone shared that looks promising (but I have not tried out yet).  Have you heard of any other good tutorials or drop down lists people have shared as of the 4.6 GUI rollout? I know a lot of people probably have needs in this area?

I also added some additional code to the logic of the player and monster movement that makes it so you can't step in to the same square as a component such as a brazier (there will eventually be other ones)

Above I show a shot from within the Unity editor that shows the light probes in the scene and an early version of the uncovered pit.

And then finally below I have the uncovered pit in an actual in-game screenshot that was placed with the level editor:

Right now you can walk right over them, I look forward to making the code that has you 'drop down' the pit and fall to the next level or potentially die - that should be a fun bit of code!

It was on Wednesday that I did some of these shots and Unity 5.0 was released .. so these shots are the first one's that are using a production build of Unity 5.  It was interesting because as with several of the beta builds when I loaded the project up some of the default shader properties must have changed once again and I was forced to make changes to my materials mainly in the area of the metallic and smoothness properties.

Overall though I ended up feeling like this final tweak to the shader seemed to improve the visual quality of the level just a little bit.

Another thing I've done this week is add just a little touch of ambient light to the levels.  It makes everything more 'visible' on darker screens ; but it then makes it so the level isn't quite as dark and scary so I'm not sure if I like it or not yet? It is nice to be able to see things for sure but I do want to build an atmosphere that the dungeon is a scary place so I think I will end up tweaking it down - or potentially pushing it up and down depending on if you have a light source on with your party perhaps?

The Brazier I added seems to have some problems in that it exposes the general weakness of the fire sprite I'm using at the moment (looks way too saturated and thick to me?) as seen in the shot below:

I've put that down on my list to make improvements on but for now it's a nice additional to the lighting possibilities in the level!

Finally here's a nice shot showing a pit and a brazier around a corner:

Thanks for reading, see you next week!