Chernobyl is Complete!!!

Hello all, that's right! It's done. It feels really good to have something finished that wasn't either A) Rushed too much for a school deadline, or B) Incomplete due to technical issues. The normal mapping and lighting gave me some troubles, but specular mapping was a breeze. I couldn't use Zbrush to sculpt out normal maps for this project due to me not realizing that you can't do some stuff in Photoshop and some in Zbrush. Apparently, when you make a model, its entire texture has to done in one program. Which is fine, that's what this next project is about (More on that later). The book I bought helped a little bit with the lighting, but not as much as I had hoped. Mainly, I just figured it out on my own. Lighting and the way normal maps react to it is still a little shaky with me, but oh well. You can't get everything right away. Anyway, here it is folks:

Sorry about the text and player model on screen once again. I will have this cut out of the version for the demo reel. Also, anti aliasing (jagged edges) are still present, which hopefully will be straightened out for the reel as well. I went online to figure out a way to remedy it, but everybody says that anti aliasing hasn't been fixed for unreal 3. I find this hard to believe. One way or another, this will be fixed, I assure you.


Now this project is done for now, but there will probably be changes for the demo reel version. There is one object in particular that might be changed, but I'm curious if someone will notice it, so I'm keeping my mouth shut about it. Two big changes that you will probably notice are the metal piece added onto the middle of the medical lamp, and the broken glass on the window. Just little things to give it more completion.

The final product will be pretty much the same as I originally planned, with a little bit of difference:

1) A moving shot from left to right of the objects, framed similar to these pics.

2)Still shot of the left side, showing a progression of the different layers. In order of final, model and lighting only view, polycount and wireframe view, color map view, normal map view, specular map view, and a shot of the final product again.

3) The same as #2, but it's the pic of the right side of the room.

The second shot I planned out in the very beginning, I decided was unnecessary. You only need one shot to establish the room I feel. So, that's that.............NEXT!
BAM! That's the gun I will be making, courtesy of the tasty rendering you see by my good pal, Jake Rynkiewicz. Over the next week, I'm gonna take it easy to celebrate Chernobyl's completion. But I'll also be planning for this one. Expect to see some stuff by the beginning of November-ish. The finalized version of this will be a turntable that rotates the object and shows the different layers of detail applied to the model. I'm going to try to make it a ZBrush only model, so we'll see how that goes. I'm going to do some online tutoring on making geometric detail on objects in ZBrush. Basically, this guy I met on a forum says he'll make a 60 minute training DVD for anyone who wants to get better with it, and it will be completely custom made to suit my learning needs. He also seems to be very professional and legit, which is a plus. Very cool stuff. He says that he'll also give homework assignments to make sure it all sinks in, so I might have that to show even before the gun. Time will tell. Now, for some well earned celebration Chipolte.

NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM!