Pixels and Polys

I use PolyBoost religiously and I’m happy to hear, and to let you all know, that version 4 is out, free to existing users, and at it’s usual price of $154 for new purchases.  There is also a demo available, which i think is for 10 days or something.  It has been totally converted to C++ which speeds up performance and now all the tools work at the speed of native max tools. There seem to be a lot of texture enhancements in this rev as well as symmetry enhancements. Enough babble from me, here’s the video explaining all this:

http://www.cmlcreative.com/Videos/PolyBoost4_video.avi

I would recommend turning the sound off since there is no speaking and the music is annoying and choppy. I’ve dealt with the creator a number of times transferring my personal license and all of our work licenses to and from different versions of max. He is an incredibly nice guy and really quick to help you out. He even modified the script for me when it broke our internal .DDS exporter. What a guy!

Anyway, if you are a modeler and you want to have a much deeper tool set than what max alone gives you, I can’t recommend PolyBoost enough. Go buy it. Now. GO!!

www.polyboost.com

Thanks,

Sulz.

I ran across a very interesting paper about Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2 a few days ago. It’s refreshing to read an article that talks about art techniques that aren’t tech heavy. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the idea of using megatextures and other new technologies as much as any other artist, but I think they really have something special with this sequel. Their approach to character design, environments, textures, and shaders yields some fantastic results.

Well worth the read!

Latest Trailer: The Soldier

Okay, so I haven’t had time to post a huge tutorial, but I’m going to try to be more realistic about my time until we get closer to the end of our development cycle with Revolution. I just need to scale things back a little for the time being.

If you’re a terrain or level artist, there’s a very cool program that you should check out called World Machine. I ran across this program some time ago when scouring the internet for anything that was even remotely related to terrain generation. It is a very powerful procedural terrain generator that has some spectacular erosion features. It uses a graph based user interface that is actually very easy to use once you get the hang of it. If you’ve ever seen the interface for Unreal’s shader editor, then you know what I’m talking about. It’s very easy to add modifiers, noise, or masks to your render.

At first glance, the program does look a little intimidating, but trust me. You’ll be up and running in less than a day. It’s free to try the basic version which limits your render to 512. However, the standard version is not going to break your bank account.

I hope you find this program as useful as we did.

Brian

Well, the reason I’ve been away for so long is finally here!

I’m glad to be able to announce Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution! (now that the press releases have been sent out)

Kotaku.com

Lots of high res images can be found at:
joystiq

We’ll be talking about some of the art generation process soon, probably after E3.

Hey Everybody!

My name is Chris Sulzbach, or Sulz if you’d like and I’m the new contributor to the pixelsandpolys blog/forum dedicated to video game art and technology. I’d like to first thank Brian for putting together this excellent forum/blog and I hope that it catches on amongst the local MD/DC/VA game community (and then the world!) and that we can all share some tips and tricks to make each of us more productive and stronger artists. My short-term goals for contributions to the blog are reviewing the top 3 things I picked up at GDC. These will include not only talks and tips, but also some general observations about the industry itself from a first-time GDC attendee and speaker. I’d also like to show some of the work I did for Sid Meier’s Railroads! on which I worked as a locomotive modeler. I’d like to also give a tutorial on my methods of creating one of the locomotives in Railroads! I’m currently working on characters for an unannounced project at Firaxis, lead by our very own Brian Busatti. If anyone has any questions or comments, please post them in the comments section as usual or feel free to e mail me at csulzbach@firaxis.com

Thanks for reading!

Sulz

Chris Sulzbach, a fellow Firaxis employee and Baltimore flutag favorite, will be joining Pixels and Polys as a contributer to the blog.  Although Chris has only been in the industry for a few years, he has really helped streamline the art pipeline at Firaxis and has done some spectacular art work during his time with us.  Look for some inspiring posts from Chris in the near future, which may or may not include a post or two about GDC. 

Thanks Chris!