Oh how the 10 weeks came and went. Today…yesterday…THURSDAY was my last day at Hi-Rez.

I showed Sean the mesh I had chosen before the paintball mask – the nemes. That is what the headdress is called for the Egyptian pharaohs.

Then, I had to modify all of the head flair so that there would be female versions of each. I noticed that this usually required moving it down (because the female is shorter, I presume ), back, narrowing it from the front of the head to the back, and enlarging side to side. That, plus more specific fiddling around with vertices where needed.

The tablet was being crazy (love Vista tablet settings that take over everything), so I did not finish the textures for the paintball mask today. Since I had already made the high poly ZBrush version/normal map, I am bound and determined to finish them anyway and email the files to Sean. That isn’t cheating, right?

Other than that, I did a bit of the afternoon playtest before retreating back to my desk.

I got to say goodbye to Nabil (cool IT dude) and Jerry (character AND environment artist who was in front of me). Jerry has awesome traditional media paintings that he made which are hanging in his cube. I was always blown away seeing his work, along with all of the character folks. I never really spoke much other than hellos and short comments on what I saw people working on. Usually everyone was busy, so I didn’t see a reason to barge in and interrupt them. And, as mentioned before, I am sort of shy.

When I left, I think everyone else was either gone for the day (it was around 6:20) or at some ice cream party. Being a vegan, I hear things like “ice cream party”, and the words are filtered straight into the trash bin of my mind! Hah! I wasn’t going to the ice cream party, but I looked outside to see if Sean was chilling out there (don’t ask why I figured people would be there as opposed to some location in the office – I’m still pending a good night’s sleep). I had already emailed him, so I just went ahead and left after leaving my entry badge at his desk.

And with that, I will leave you with a singular, but really good, tech note:
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Keep your poly angles at or below 45 degree angles, if possible!

Why? You can often get away with just using ONE smoothing group, for starters. It will, of course, look less ‘polygonal’. Plus, when generating the normal map from the high-poly mesh, the edges will not look nearly as distorted in the map. I would sometimes have to go in and touch up the normal map manually in Photoshop in the places where the low-poly mesh would have strong angles. This saves you a lot of that trouble.

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This wraps up my blog about my Hi-Rez Studios experience. I am so happy that I got this opportunity. It makes me wish the quarter was longer. Even though I wasn’t very gabby, I still learned a ton given the patient, fun, and informative nature of those in the studio.

Last Friday I was essentially free to do as I pleased and work on another mesh of my choosing. It took a while to come up with one that fit the theme of the desert environment that hadn’t been done already. The first idea fell through because I realized it would not adhere to the restrictions after sorting through some reference images. And that was a sombrero. Yes, friends, I’ve noted in my cohort’s (OK, more like cohorts – a couple were specific and a couple were vague) production blog that he was not hesitating to divulge precisely what he was working on. It sounded much less like the vague ramblings of a mad person than my blog does at this moment

In a couple of days I will take the time to go in and edit my entries accordingly to include what I was working on… so they will be more readable.

The reasons why the glorious sombrero wouldn’t work? I noticed they are always worn higher up on the head. The problem with this is that the hair is removed whenever there is “head flair” applied to the character both to save on tris and because the avatar hair styles are so variable that you cannot design around each one. Each of the flair, then, needs to 1. Cover the back of the neck, 2. Cover the “sideburns” area, and 3. Cover the forehead’s hairline all the way over the top of the head (of course, most hats and similar items would do this already).

After hunting around for desert-y things, I stumbled across some cool paintball masks online. Not being a paintballer, I had no idea what these things looked like before. A lot of the references I found were customized, and a lot had camo (mine will not). Success!

I finished the low-poly but would save UVs for home.

Sean was out on Friday, and he was my resident tech-notes giver. So I apologize that there will be no tech notes this time around. However, I did go to the playtest that afternoon. I need to play more Global Agenda now that the quarter is over (I’m writing this late) because I die pretty often on those missions! At least I got some assists. :\ Sad, I know. I play video games like a girl (for anyone offended who does not know: I am a girl).

Because of my grad review, I went to Hi-Rez yesterday (Thursday) rather than today. Since I usually work on my meshes at home on Thursday, this threw me off even further. It didn’t help that an exit was completely closed on 285, making me a little late. I called in when I realized I was going to be sitting there for a while. All that off week behind me – I think I’m back to normal now!

Last week’s mesh (the Venetian mask/masks) happened to be the last one on HR’s ‘official list’ of desert flair. The fact that it was the last on the list means we now get to come up with our own ideas. We already had a lot of freedom before since we were given a variety of reference images for each object, but not concept art to follow. So we could make some decisions even within that situation.

Anyway, I am working on the object I suggested, and I’m looking forward to how it turns out! It’s a Pharoah’s nemes, which is the headdress that they wore. It has a challenging fold to it, and finding images of what it actually looked like (especially in the back) rather than a very abstracted heiroglyphic reference is strangely difficult. The Halloween costume versions honestly aren’t so good for research either! Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.

I will finish UVs and start (hopefully finish) the texturing before sending some pix over to Sean for review.

The tech notes are going to be a little slim this time around since I was really just working on modeling in Max on yesterday. I get a lot of my tips after I’ve shown my initial ‘finished’ version – then I get the reworks from Sean for the real finished version a.k.a. the mesh’s final pass.

Tech notes:
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• In the Unreal mat editor, use math>one minus if you need to invert stuff. This was specifically suggested to me in regard to inverting the fresnel.

• Use exponent to modify how tight/focused the fresnel should look.
• When looking at an object that has some specularity, observe if that specularity appears to carry some color. For example, for a gold object, put some really light gold into the specular itself rather than just leaving the shiny area white. Also for gold objects, put a darker color (oftentimes some browns will look nice) into the diffuse. You may notice a pattern here – I’ve been told to put darker colors in the diffuse of metallic materials in general.

  I’m looking through my notes, and that appears to be it for now. As promised – slim!