I need information!

[-Skykanden-]

Hey.

Well I need help, I'm making a research project about 3d and animation in videogames and I need a lot of information and I would like you to help me if you could. This project will help me to go to the university and start studying a Design career.

I would like to have something different from Wikipedia, yeah I know I can find anything on there but I need several places to compare information.

Thanks

[scout]

what kind of information? because currently im studying 1st year animation in my art school.

[-Skykanden-]

Well I need information about 3d and animation related to videogames, with that I mean, most used programs (Even I've got a list i would like to compare) 3D process related information as rendering, modeling and so. I would like to have more information from rendering as it's the part I understand the least.

Also aplication to the games, etc...


I might me be making a small 'game' in which I will show a human body moving and so to show animations.

[scout]

ah yes. 3d programs, such as Autodesk Maya, which is frequently used to create 3d models for animated movies. Maya's quite complex, because of the amount of tools you have at your disposal, some of them you won't use till your probably at the later stages of your texturing/rendering. But even then, it requires at least a week to get used to the interface of Maya. I would suggest actually testing out the trial copy before moving on, since there are other 3d programs out there such as Zbrush, 3DS Max and such.

[Toumaz]

The most common 3D programs in the games industry pretty much boil down to Max/Maya as already mentioned (and Photoshop for textures etc). Mudbox is used for sculpting (for example, creating high-polygon versions of models in order to generate normal maps), and if you're doing animation of any sort (especially mocap) MotionBuilder is very helpful.

As for rendering, I'm afraid you need to be more specific - if you're looking to become a 3D artist, it's hard for me to discern whether you want the full gory technical details or merely details from the POV of an artist? I suppose that looking into fairly basic things like diffuse/specular/normal maps are a good place to start, and perhaps shading techniques such as lambert/gouraud/phong/blinn-phong. Good animation subjects could include keyframe and skeletal animation, and perhaps describe the basics of inverse kinematics while you go along. Perhaps highlighting the differences in creating art for various systems could work out, too - for example, the differences in level of detail and problems when developing for a PC/next-gen console as opposed to a handheld device.

It's hard for me to give any better advice than that without knowing exactly what you're trying to get at or write about - just ask again, if you need more help.

[L[0ne]R]

For 3D modeling most people use:
- 3D Studio Max
- Autodesk Maya
I'm not sure, but I think Maya is supposed to be better for movie industry, while 3DSMax is better for game modeling.

Here are some of the things you might need to do when making a 3D Model:
= Model itself
= UV-Map (you basically "unfold" the whole model flat, and then use that UV map as reference to paint the texture overtop)
= Material Properties (reflectivity, glow, specular, and other properties)
= Texture (image that's applied to the UV-Map)
--- Color map (or in other words - basic painted texture)
--- Bump map (a black&white map of bumps and dents in Color map)
--- Specular/Reflection/Glow/Other maps (to make certain parts of the texture have different amounts of reflectivity/glow and other effects)
--- Normal Map (to be honest, I'm not sure what that is myself. I think it's something like a lighting map. All I can say is that is can add a tremendous amount of detail to a model without adding any extra polygons)
--- Ambient Occlusion (simulated ambient shadows that don't belong to any specific light source. They add much more realism to the shading and are often "baked" onto the color map)
= Rigging (creating a skeleton for a model and defining which parts of model should be attached to which parts of the skeleton)
= Collision Box/Physics Box/Hit Box (we haven't gone through that in college, but some of those things are necessary in videogame modeling)
= Inner Faces (yeah, sounds weird, but a face is basically a side of a polygon that you see. If you have a 3D sphere - you can move inside the sphere and see the polygons from the inside. This is bad for the performance, since computer has to render sides of the polygon that players don't even see. For that reason when modeling - inner faces are usually disabled, so it looks like polygons only have one side. If you look at them from behind - they'll be transparent and you won't even see the polygons)

= Rendering (is normally something that is used for movies. What you see in 3D editor window is a basic model and texture, without any fancy special effects. Rendering is creating a "screenshot" of what you see in 3D editor, but in higher quality and specified resolution. Depending on model quality and complexity, and the computer power - the amount of time to render a single image could vary from instant to hours. In movie industry they have "render farms" - lots of computers which are set up to just sit there and render non-stop)
In case of games rendering is done in real-time, so you don't have to do it in 3D editor for anything other than seeing how your model looks in full quality.
= Mental Ray (don't know if it's in 3DS Max, but Maya has it. It's a feature that allows rendering additional effects like Ambient Occlusion)

Other things to consider:
= Polycount (obviously it has to be within reasonable numbers if it's a game model)
= Texture resolution and use of texture space (when making a UV map for a game model - you always have to try and fit everything into a square and leave as little unused space as possible)
= Quads or triangles (in college we were taught to model in quads instead of triangles, not sure the reasons but I think it is easier to model in quads, plus model structure is cleaner too. But when saving the model in game format - quads need to be split into triangles)
= Photoshop versions CS4 and after support 3D, so you can load models into photoshop and paint directly on them. I don't know how effective that is in videogame modeling though. But it should be very effective for making seamless textures where edges of the UV map don't connect.


thats all I can think of right now. D:

[Dr.DR4IG]

GameDev.net is all you need. In particular HERE's a good starting point because before you even learn the tools, You're gonna need to learn the theory behind gaming to begin with.

[-Skykanden-]

Wow thanks guys, this is going to help a lot, and your help will be reflected on the special thanks list.

Thanks

[vehicledestroyer]

If you have a PC that can run it (because mine can't) try out unreal development kit. It's a full dev kit kit/game engine. There might be something better out there but all I know is this one is free to use and has good developer support (lots of updates). It would be good in your case for practice, and getting familial with 3D models and modeling and animation.

Good luck! I'd like to get in to the same kind of work one day too. Hope all goes well!

[Illuminatus]

What you really have to look into is the graphic pipeline, go google for it.
I'm adding some more important terms you also should look up (that's roughly in the same order I learned at university):

- Modeling (sweeping, extrusion, revolving; quadrics; object -> surfaces -> polygons -> edges & vertices; triangulation; bézier splines; NURBS; )
- Transformation & Viewing (the mathematic behind it, so: vectors, normals, dot product, cross product, matrices; linear & affine transformations; camera model; perspective & orthographic projection)
- Illumination (local illumination model; the three different light sources, point light, spot light, direction light; BRDF; ambient & defuse & specular reflection; Phong, Blinn-Phong; flat-shading, Gourad-shading, Phong-shading; the two global illumination approaches, raytracing, radiosity;)
- Textures (procedural & discrete textures; procedural & surface & volume mapping; texel; sphere mapping; UVW mapping; texture filtering; level of detail, mipmap; bump & displacement & light & shadow & parallax mapping; environment/reflective mapping)
- Shadows (hard & soft shadows; umbra, penumbra; shadow maps, shadow volumes)
- Culling & Clipping (backface culling, view-frustum culling, occlusion culling; Cohen-Sutherland-algorithm, Sutherland-Hodgman-algorithm; scan-conversion; anti-aliasing; z-buffer algorithm)
- Animation (key frames, (inbe)tweening; path animation; articulated figures, hierarchical objects; scenegraph, bones, bipeds, kinematical chain; dynamic animation; particle animation; behavioral animation; crowd animation)
- OpenGL & Direct3D