The Talented Ball (a la Maya)

As I may have said before, the talented ball is the first project of three in the 3dBuzz Maya Fundamentals class. Once I've finished this one (tomorrow!) I'll be onto the next one which is a lot more fun and interesting - its an alien spaceship flying through space!

Anyway getting through the animation on this and got a really nice bouncing effect by messing with the curves.. will upload the finished thing tomorrow for anyone to see!

Meanwhile, heres a sneak preview:


Am noticing more and more how much easier Maya is to use than 3dsMax -- I really can't understand why anyone uses Max any more and since I heard recently that even games companies are switching to Maya I can really understand their incentive for that!

However, I want to make sure in the future I'm not going to be shooting myself in the foot if I do want to work for a games company sometime, so in a few weeks time I intend to call around every games company I can find (yell.com is ace) and see how many will tell me what software they use for 3d modeling...

Anyway, been setting myself targets lately and organizing my time really well (yeah I'm proud, having been too disorganised for too many years now) so thought I would post my upcoming targets regularly on here with the aim of meeting them.

So first of all the coming week and a half. I intend to have finished the next project of Maya Fundamentals by Monday and the third by the Sunday after.. this is a very ambitious target given that I've got just under 60 hours of videos to watch, hopefully while working along at the same speed... However will be doing my best towards this and will re-adjust if I'm clearly not going to meet it despite putting the hours in!

More 3D struggles and polygon counts for games

Redone the good old talented ball modeling, now wanting to animate but Maya doesn't work at uni yet - tries to save its preferences into an illegal place for us poor students - works for the lecturers (administrator priveleges) though!

Just found an article on how many polygons are used in various games that have been released. Here's the info for anyone interested:

Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006
Wretch - 10,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Boomer - 11,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Marcus - 15,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004
Characters - 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture
NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256×128 8bit texture
Gant bridge - 16,000 polygons, includes LOD

Halflife 2, PC, 2004
Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons
Barney - 5922 polygons
Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons
Classic Headcrab - 1690 polygons
SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)
Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001
Masterchief - 2,000 polygons

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Gamecube, 2005 (Small mistake here, it's not on GC but PS2)
Snake - 4,000 polygons

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005
Leon - 10,000 polygons

Jak & Daxter, PS2, 2001
Jak - 4000 polygons

Jak II, PS2, 2003
Jak - 10,000 polygons*

Lost planet, X360/PC, 2007
Wayne - 12392 polygons (but finally 17765 polygons for compatibility with motion blur effect)
VS robot - 30-40,000 polygons
Background - ~500,000 polygons
Peak number of polygons per frame - ~ 3 million**

Dead Rising, X360, 2006
Peak number of polygons per frame - ~ 4 million**

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, GC, 2002
Link - 2800 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, GC/Wii, 2006
Link - 6900 polygons

Super Mario Sunshine, GC, 2002
Mario - 1500 polygons
Levels - ~ 60,000 polygons

Dead or Alive series, Xbox, 2001-2004
Character - ~10,000-15,000

Vitua Fighter 5, Arcade/PS3/X360, 2006
Character - ~40,000 with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Background - 100,000 - 300,000 polygons

Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, PC, 2002
Character - 4096 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 3, X360, 2005
Cars - 80,000-100,000 polygons (interior + exterior), damages add between 10,000 and 20,000 more polygons per car
Brooklyn Bridge - 600,000 polygons (LOD might be included)
Manhattan Bridge - 1 million polygons (LOD might be included)

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, PS3, 2007
Cars - 200,000 polygons (probably interior + exterior)

Midnight Club, Xbox360/PS3, 2007
Cars - 100,000 polygons

Gran Turismo 3, PS2, 2001
Cars - ~2,000-4,000 polygons

Gran Turismo 4, PS2, 2004
Cars - ~2,000-5,000 polygons

Lair, PS3, 2007
Main dragon plus its rider - 150,000 polygons
16x16KM scene - 134M polygons (streamed into memory, not loaded at run time)

Deathrow, Xbox, 2002
Characters - up to 7,000 polygons - 55 bones - 1024x1024 textures on the bodies and 512x512 on the faces

Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, PS2/Xbox/GC, 2002
Characters - ~7,000-10,000

Mortal Kombat 4, Zeus Arcade Board, 1997
Peak number of polygons per second - 1.2 million quad patches**

Mass Effect, X360, 2007
Sheppard + armor + weapons - ~20,000-25,000 polygons

Virtua Fighter 4, Naomi 2, 2001
Jacky - 14,000 polygons

Virtua Fighter 4, PS2, 2002
Jacky - 7,000 polygons

V-Rally 3, PS2, 2002
Vehicles - 15,000-16,000 polygons (Might count multi-passes)
Stages - 500,000 polygons

Kingdom Under Fire : The Crusaders, Xbox, 2004
Main characters - 10,000 polygons
Characters - 3,000–4,000 polygons

Axel Impact/DTRacer, PS2, 2003/2005
Cars - Base mesh ~12,000 polygons (max LOD)
Volume Shadow mesh - 4,000-5,000 Vert (dynamic shadows are not stored as actual polygons, hence vertex count)
Stages - ~200k polygons

Canned Boss Game Studios game, Xbox, 2002
Cars - 25000 polygons (highest LOD) - 4 textures/poly, Base texture, Reflection map, a texture used to compute a fresnel term, Shadow map, Specular highlight (encoded in the alpha channel of the reflection map)
Backgrounds - 2 or in some cases 3 textures/poly
Peak number of polygons per second - 30M polygons**

Half-Life, PC, 1998
Zombie - 844 polygons
High Definition pack Zombie- 1700 polygons

Half-Life, Dreamcast, 2000-2001 (Canned)
Zombie - 1649 polygons

Half-Life, PS2, 2001
Zombie - 2822 (Highest LOD)

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, PS3, 2007
Main characters - ~20,000-30,000 polygons
Drake - ~30,000 polygons
Pirates - ~12,000-15,000 polygons

Crysis, PC, 2007
Nano-suit character - 67,000 polygons (uncertain whether it's an in-game model or not)*
Characters' heads - ~2500-3000 polygons
Characters' bodies - ~5000 polygons

Now I think that means I can safely use around 4500 polygons per character for games now which is loads! Thats a hell of a lot of modeling

Structure of Man Videos

I've lately been learning Maya from the 3dBuzz Maya fundamentals course, just at animation stages of the thing now got my copy of maya unlimited student ver and the file won't transfer across grrr

So will have to start that again. I've also been working on learning anatomy from the Structure of Man Videos made by Riven Phoenix (google it). They cost a 'whole' 45 dollars which works out about £26 here at the moment so I bought them and they are worth the money! (43 hours for 26 quid thats only about 60p per hour of training!)

Here's my first stuff from the first 12 videos (there are around 200ish videos lol)

Rats!

Rats! (from the front of the cards in Rat Bastard 17)
They look better on the cards as this was simply a silhouette printed onto black card to make it quicker to draw them in. Was happy with the cards not so much with the silhouette it looks a bit rubbish to be honest!

Talented Ball

This is the talented ball, also known as the first project from the 3dBuzz 3ds Max Fundamentals course. I have recently started doing the Maya Fundamentals course instead as I would prefer to use maya in the long run, so am on the way to making a very similar video in Maya which I will post shortly...

Eye and sprint animations

Random videos from the Animation lectures so far. They aren't very good :)

Rat Bastard 17 Rules

Card Values range from 0 to 10. Wild cards can be any value from 1 to 10 of the players’ choice.
The objective of the game is to get rid of all his cards.

Deal

Deal each player three cards face down and two cards face up as shown below. These five cards will be referred to as the ‘hole cards.’ Neither player may look at their face down hole cards until they are used. The hole cards may not be used until all cards in the players hand have been used.


Deal five more cards to each player. These are the cards in their hand and the players may each look at their own five cards. The players may, at this point only, choose to replace one or both of the two face up hole cards with any of the five in their hand. Place the remaining cards aside. These cards form the deck.

To determine who goes first:
Each player takes a single card from the top of the deck. If the players have cards of equal value, both players pick another card and repeat until one has higher than the other. The player with the highest card goes first. Cards picked this way are then discarded.

Play

The game begins with each player putting a card down alternately in turns. While cards remain in the deck, each player must have a minimum of five cards in their hand at all times. If a player has less than five cards in his hand he must immediately pick another from the deck.

Until all cards in the deck are gone:

As each card is put down, its value is added to the total value of any previous cards. After a player puts his card down he must say this total value. The total amount in the centre may not go over seventeen.

If a player cannot go lower than or equal to seventeen then he must pick up all the cards in the pile. The other player then puts a new card down starting from zero again.

If seventeen is reached, all cards in the pile are discarded and the player that reached seventeen puts a new card down starting from zero again.

When all cards in the deck are gone:

When seventeen is reached, the player that did not reach seventeen must pick up cards from the top of the pile until they have five in their hand. Any remaining cards are discarded.

While a player has no cards in his hand, he may use his hole cards.

Only the outer hole cards may be used in each turn, i.e. any hole card that has a card on both its’ left and right may not be used. If the total goes over seventeen when using a hole card, that player must pick up cards from the top of the pile up to a maximum of five cards in their hand.

When a player uses all his/her hole cards:

The player wins when all his hole cards are used. He then must call the other player a ‘Rat Bastard.’