Wanton Hubris

Someone was critiquing that concept for me and they called the blue thing the Recognizer is sitting on a landing pad. That got me thinking, so I started into a new design so the area looks more like a gas station for Recognizers – they stop here when they need to gather more power, for example.

This seems like a more promising direction.

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”

So someone suggested that I try sketching out the environment before trying to model it in Max. That sounds reasonable except that I’m terrible at drawing – in real life, for sure and on the computer, definitely. However, I took a shot at it. I think it produced some results that I can use. There’s a few elements here that I like so all in all a worthwhile exercise!

Tron Concept Art Movie

Going to try and build some geometry to support these ideas now.

Not feeling it. Not yet, anyway. I like the charging unit itself but the surrounding geometry just doesn’t work at all. Blah. Gotta think of a new tactic here…

I’m going to maybe take a step back and go for a much more modular approach.

I’m getting started on the background scene now that the Recognizer is in a reasonable state.

It’s not entirely unwrapped but I like the shapes I’m seeing. This is sort of a display stand for the Recognizer.

That looks better…

I straightened out most of the UVs and eliminated the seams in between the mirrored sections. That’s more like it!

I took a shot at unwrapping the Recognizer. I can only use a 512×512 texture on it so it’s kind of tough. I’ve mirrored the mesh left/right and forward/back so I can maximize the texture space by re-using tons of UV space.

I can see a bunch of problems here so I’m going to have to dig into the UV islands and get things straightened out. You definitely notice stuff that isn’t at a right angle. Here’s the current UV map which will definitely need to be fixed up:

More when I’ve got this figured out better.

OK, taking a diversion for a bit. Polycount started up a low poly modeling challenge with a Tron theme. That seems like a good way to work on my modeling skills so I’m going to do that for the next little bit. I’m going to set up a scene using Recognizers and some basic Tron style geometry.

The challenge details are here : http://www.polycount.com/2010/11/09/low-poly-challenge-4-tron/

And this morning I started putting together the basic model for a Recognizer using movie reference and pics I found online. I took a few liberties with it but I think it looks correct, over all.

Next steps will be to figure out how to get the neon lighting highlights onto the model properly and all that.

I got the lantern pretty much textured up today. The lit up portion took on kind of an Asian feel and the metal parts are sort of a polished brass. I think it looks neat and I can see carrying this theme forward into the rest of the scene.

What’s most important though is that I got more experience under my belt with creating textures and unwrapping meshes. It really is an art form and I need to keep doing it if I ever hope to level up in it.

You can see the basic diffuse map there along with the normal map and a texture I created to act as an emissive mask so that only the light emitting parts of the lantern would be lit and bloomed out.

Might texture a wall chunk next, just to see what the lighting is really looking like coming off of those lanterns.