By way of introduction here’s some scribbles that I’ll probably work on for a bit and then dump, by way of learning to Blender and Unreal Engine 4 in order to create places to be in virtual reality. My name’s Ross, I’m from Scotland, I’m as old as hell and I’ve been digitally creating things, on and off, in my spare time, as a hobby for longer than I can really remember.
I’m currently the proud owner of an Oculus Rift and, while it’s not the metaverse that I’m looking forward to eventually inhabiting, it’s a pretty solid first stab from where I’m sitting. Something to get my teeth stuck into creating content for. After a long break from game engine creation, back in the Source/UE3 days, I’m back trying to get to grips with a creation pipeline that I was never very good at to begin with. :o
Since I was last in the game, it seems static mesh geometry has almost completely replaced bsp now so it’s a basic requirement I need to get to grips with a 3-d package. Spent a week and change banging my head against wall after wall, googling like crazy and finally getting to a place in blender where I’m comfortable enough doing most of the basic stuff and figuring out some workflows that ping back and forth between UE4 and Blender and a dash of Photoshop in between.
First scribble I did was the set of the movie Cube, roughing it out in UE4 then exporting the geometry to blender. It’s pretty basic but I learned a good few fundamentals doing it and I can tell you from experience, it’s a total trip putting on an HMD and standing there!
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Still wasn’t comfortable with the interface on blender (or UE4, tbh) at this time so very little additional work other than a couple of details like the rivets (which aren’t even baked, btw - those are about 200 polys apiece) and the handles that unlock the doors.
So my next mission was to delve a bit deeper into blender and, at the same time, start getting to grips with this PBR materials simulation malarkey. What happened to needing a couple of jpgs, twiddling some shiny and tranny sliders and maybe knocking up a normal map in photoshop? Now I’m required to learn some insanely complex visual scripting language. :eek:
The benches and the floor texture are stock UE4 content but the rest is the result of me banging my head against a bunch more walls for another week or so. Ah, life at the bottom of the learning curve.
One thing I did find out, tho was that modern day blender has a sculpting mode! I used to use a package called sculptris, back when I was heavily into Photoshop and it’s the only time I ever felt in control of 3-d modelling. It actually felt like sculpting . So I’ve been having a scribble about with that. Starting with a ball and trying to remember how humanoid facial anatomy works.
Mickey mouse ears are sockets for huge horns which I haven’t got right yet. Needs more twist, I think.
I think I’ll keep going with this devil for a while. I used dynatopo for the modelling but I really want to go into fine detail with it. I had a go in dyno mode but alphas don’t seem to work as well as they do in a multiresolution situation and I’m guessing that’ll need retopo, on account of I have a mixture of low and hipoly geometry in there already and if I start subdividing that some smoke is going to start coming out the back of my PC, right?. I’ve had a look at retopo and it seems like a logical next brick wall for me to bang my head against for a week or so.
So, yeah, that’s me. I’m the dumb noob with a pocket full of dumb questions that I’ll try to google the answer to before bothering you nice people with. Been browsing this place all day when I ought to have been working. Lot of talented people here. Inspirational! I’ll use this thread to document my progress from the pits of ineptitude to maybe, eventually, the dizzying heights of mediocrity.