A while back I started working on a small zombie tower defense game in Unity for ipad. The project went though various changes. Eventually we went away from it being a game, to being an AI tech demo. So now I was tasked with making a small city area for humans and zombies to run around in. Luckily I only made one tower, so I didn’t waste too much time on assets that weren’t going to be used. Originally the intent was to have a top down view similar to Starcraft. With this in mind, I modeled everything fairly low poly. Then towards the end of the deadline it was decided to have some closeup shots. It was a challenge making everything look good up close when everything was originally meant to be seen from afar. As you can see, all the zombies are the same except for shirt color. In fact, the human is basically the zombie, but with all the blood layers turned off before saving the texture. I got the vegetation from the Unity Asset Store. Here are some more screenshots.

“Imagine a busy city block bustling with people. From an alley silent, white-clad volunteers appear carrying armfuls of white handmade ceramic bones. They lay the bones in the center of the street and disappear, even as another volunteer appears carrying more bones. Over the course of the day the pile expands outward to fill the entire block. Imagine the sight of 50,000 bones laid bare for the world to see. Imagine the power of that vision…”

Learn more here.

Reference from http://monjaram.deviantart.com/ and http://ahrum-stock.deviantart.com/

Here is a simple biped rig for Blender 2.55. The model itself was from Make Human I simply cut him up, and rigged him. I tried to make this rig fairly simple. It uses IK legs, and FK for the arms. I made the hand very easy to control. simply select the ring on the finger you want to curl, and rotate. You can select multiple fingers at once to easily form a fist. The foot is about as complicated as it gets, but it’s still very easy to use. To stand on the toes, select and rotate the long rectangle above the foot. To roll forward on the toes, select the smaller rectangle near the end of the foot and rotate. The rest of the controls are pretty self explanatory.

Here is a quick animation test I did for a zombie video game I’m working on.

Play around with him, and make something cool. Post links to your animations, I want to see what you guys come up with!

Download Manny Here!
MannyRig2.55

Included on layer 1 is an uncut version of the model. Feel free to skin him if you don’t want to solely use the proxy.

Before we get on to the tutorial, you should check out this awesome project I’ve been helping out with called One Million Bones!

Vegetation has always been a neglected topic when it comes to tutorials. So I have decided to give the community exactly what they have been asking for. This method makes a tree with a reasonable number of faces. (mine came out to 7,128) This allows for having multiple trees without your scene becoming too heavy. Another great thing about this method, is that you can use it in the blender game engine. If you’re not using Blender, you should be able to use the same methods in whichever program you are using.

In this tutorial you will be learning

Modeling from details first
UV Unwrapping
Creating normal Maps using xNormal
Applying Textures

First load your reference photo into the background.

Press “Shift +A” and insert a tube into the scene.

Start maping the tube to fit the trunk, and main branch.

Select one segment from the main branch, and duplicate it “Shift + D”.

Use this new segment to shape out another branch.

Repeat this same step for all of the main branches.

Right now, the tree looks flat. This is no good.

To fix this, start pulling around verts along the Y axis.

Another thing you can do is to put the 3d cursor at the base of a branch, and rotate along the cursor.

Repeat these same steps for all the branches.

Now we need to connect all the main branches. to do this, delete the closest 2 faces where a branch intersects.

Now insert an edgeloop with “CTRL + R”.

Now merge the outer verts together, press “W” to open up the specials menu, and select Merge.

This looks too uniform, so pull the verts around a bit so it looks natural.

Repeat these steps for all the branches.

Now we need to make the smaller branches, so add another tube.

Start shaping out a branch.

Duplicate this branch, and place it to make a forks.

Now it’s time to UV unwrap the tree, so split the 3D view, and select the UV/Image Editor.

Now open your bark texture.

Make sure that the caps are deleted.

Select the edges where branches connect, as well as an edgeloop running down the branch, and mark seam by pressing “CTRL + E”

Now select all, hit “U” and select unwrap.

Change the Viewport Shading to Textured

Right now our UV’s are too small, so scale them up.

Some of the UV’s may be stretched, so edit them to make the bark texture a little more uniform

Repeat these last few steps for the small branch that we made.

Now on to the leaves. Load up a photo of a small leaf cluster into Gimp or Photoshop.

Crop and scale the leaf cluster into either 512X512, or 1024X1024

Mask out your leaves from the background.

With this mask you can easily make your color and alpha map.

These next new steps are optional, but making a normal map for your leaves will really help push this to the next level

In a new scene, Create a plane.

Split the view and open the UV/Image Editor.

Create a new material, turn on Z Transparency, and change the alpha value to 0.

Now apply your texture maps.

For your alpha map, uncheck Color. Check Alpha, and change the value to -1.

In the 3D view, change the display mode to GLSL, and change the Viewport Shading to Textured.

Add a Multires Modifier, and set the levels to 8.

Now go to Sculpt mode, and sculpt the plane to give the leaves some depth.

Duplicate your plane with “Shift + D” On one copy apply the modifier, on the other turn off the modifier.

Export both of your planes as .obj.

In Xnormal, import both your low poly plane, and your high poly plane.

In Baking Options, chose where you want to save your file to, then Hit the Generate Maps button.

Load up your bark texture into Gimp, or Photoshop, and desaturate it.

Apply a slight Gaussian Blur, Adjust the levels like so, Then Invert the image.

In Xnormal, click the “tools” tab, then “Hightmap to normal map”

Right Click in the Hightmap window, load your new bark texture. Then In the Normal map window, right click and select Generate.

Now right click, and save your normal map.

Now go back to your original scene file, and add a plane. Open your leaf color map into the UV/Texture Editor, and unwrap the plane.

Move the object center to the start of the twig.

With the face selected in edit mode, open the “specials” menue by hitting “W” then select “Subdivide”.

Move the verts around so this plane does not appear flat at any angle.

Add a new material to the plane. Enable z Transparency, and set the alpha value to 0.

Load your Color map to the UV coordinates.

Check the Specular Color box. This will make the specularity look much more realistic.

For your Alpha map, check the Premultiply button, as well as the alpha button, and setting it to -1.

For your Normal map, make sure to check the normal map button, and that you change the Normal Space to Tangent.

Repeat the same few steps for the Bark. (excluding the part on alphas)

Set the Shading Mode to GLSL.

To get a better view, of how the normal maps react, change the point light to a sun, and give it a slight angle.

To make the leaves double sided in the game engine, change the engine to “Game Engine”.

Now in Edit mode, select one face on the plane. In the Object Data Tab under Normals, check “Double Sided” In the same tab under Texture Face check “Two-side” as well as changing the transparency to Clip Alpha.

Duplicate the leaf cluster and position it onto the small branch.

Keep doing this as many times as you feel the need. Try to position them in such a way that gives good volume without the need for ridiculous amounts of leaves.

Now join all the leaves to the branch, and move the pivot point to the end of the branch.

Now place the branch onto the main branches of the tree, and duplicate until the tree is full. Then parent all the branches to the tree with “CTRL + P”.

Now put it in a scene, and you’re done! (This image is from the Blender Game Engine)

Here is a turntable of the tree

Download the finished .blend here

Also, post your creations. I want to see what you guys come up with!

Medium Poly Tree by Bryan Tenorio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Our team consisted of
Nialls Chavez – Programmer
Ryan Leonski – Programmer
Shandin Woodward – Environment Artist
Bryan Tenorio – character Animator

All the teams were given 3 keywords, 2 of which needed to be implemented into their game. This year’s keywords were Outlaw, Wicked, and Shrink We used the words Outlaw, and Shrink about as literally as we could. Our game is called “The Shrinking of Outlaw Bill” It’s a stealth, platformer. You are an outlaw who has the ability to shrink. So you must steal gold from people in the desert, whilst staying out of sight.

At the end of the third level there is a boss, but instead of fighting him you must shrink and climb up to steal the gold from his pocket!

I did the character animations for the main character, as well as all the enemies. Outlaw Bill was the first character I worked on. First I modeled him in Blender. I kept the model pretty low poly, since a lot of the detail would have been lost anyways. Then after I rigged him, I did all the animations. The other characters were based off of the original model, and used the same rig. This saved me lots more time than if I were to make each character from scratch.

For this game we did 2D, so even though I was doing my characters in 3D That wasn’t a problem. I simply rendered out each frame and made sprites for all the animations which would then be put into the game. This is how they created many older games such as Donkey Kong country, and Toy Story for the SNES.

You can download the game here!

“The mind of one man will galvanize a global revolution. His technology
will birth a new era of human existence and social connection, but this
great gift is rooted in dark tragedy. If he is to survive, he will need
the help of many, and if we are to survive, our awareness must grow.”

Here is some Test footage for this upcoming film by Eddie Alcazar, and staring Aaron Behr.

Below is a sample of some of my previz work that I have been doing to help with the filming process.

Make sure you check out the Official Website And also don’t forget to “Like It” on Facebook to get all the latest news about the film.

Keep an eye out for more on this movie. It’s going to be good.

I decided to dedicate a whole week solely to practicing my skills in drawing the human head. Another reason for this was an excuse to do a self portrait. First I drew my portrait in pencil. I don’t have a scanner, so I resorted to my handy little digital camera. (Expect some free CG Textures soon!) At first I wanted to go with a comic look with inked lines, and cell shading. I first attempted to do the inking in Gimp This wasn’t working out too well. I have a hard time drawing with a tablet. I can never seem to draw a straight line with one. It’s just so awkward compared to real life. Maybe if I had a Cintiq instead of my 4X6 Graphire. After my many attempts at digital inking, I changed my mind and decided to just do a digital painting. I adjusted the levels of the pencil layer, and set the blending mode to Multiply on top of the paint layer. This way it retains some of the roughness that came with the pencil sketch (which I like)

Here are a few of the better sketches I did. Drawing profile views was always a weakness for me, so this week I decided to tackle that problem HEAD ON. Head on! Get it? because I’m drawing heads. Ok, forget I said that. Anyways, It looks like I finally got profile views down, so I’m pretty happy about that. Reference from Flickr, and Deviantart.

Here is wake up call that I believe everyone needs to hear. We all have goals, yet it so easy to get distracted and wander off course. We live in an age where we need everything NOW. We know what we need to do to create the life that we want, yet we hardly take initiative. It’s discouraging to see how slow, and minute your efforts are. We feel like this goal is so far away, putting off the work wont be much of a problem. “One cookie wont hurt” “I’ll run tomorrow” “I’ll just watch TV for a little bit” “I’ll do my homework later”… You know what? That one cookie will hurt! And so will anything else that is counter intuitive to your goals. If you’re goal is to lose weight, then why aren’t you doing cardio every day? If you’re goal is to graduate medical school, then why aren’t you tearing apart those books absorbing every bit of knowledge you can? If you’re goal is to be a great artist, then why aren’t you drawing right now? Laziness will only hurt us. I challenge you right now, to put down that cookie, and go run around the neighborhood, Reread that last chapter in your textbook, Start that drawing that you’ve had in your head. I challenge you to take action right now, and get some forward momentum in your life, and rid yourself of laziness forever!

A quick little animation exercise I did. A guy is sleeping against a tree only to be awakened by a football to the face! He has no intention of throwing the ball back.

I originally started to do this using Kiopaa’s Pantin Rig for Blender 2.52 Alpha. However, while I was blocking in the key poses I realized that the rig wasn’t working as well as it should in the new blender 2.53 Beta. When I tried to turn him all the way around, his body warped. So I had to change the animation up a little bit. (Originally he was going to turn and walk away with the football.) Since I couldn’t turn him all the way around, I made him sit back down at the tree. During this whole process, I was having quite a hard time animating the eyes. I just couldn’t move them where I wanted to, so I was starting to get fed up with this rig. (it was meant for Blender 2.52 after all.) My self imposed deadline of Wedsday was drawing near, so I knew I had to do something. I don’t know of any working rigs for the new Blender 2.53, and I didn’t have time to rig up my own. So I went back to 2.49b, and loaded up Nathan Vegdahl’s Simple Biped Rig I basically redid everything with this new rig. I was having a much easier time. I didn’t have as much time to work on this week’s project as much as I would like, due to those setbacks I mentioned, and other responsibilities. Check back here next Wednesday and see what knew thing I have to share with you guys.

Also, you might want to keep checking back, because I have something else I want to share. What is it you ask? You’re just going to have to find out for yourself!