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!
I’ve been experimenting with new blog templates this weekend, and finally finished up the modifications. You may have seen the blog changing frequently over the last few days. I still have a few little issues to clean up, but for the most part, everything is working correctly. This is a variation of the TechmaniaWP which can be found at…
http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/1648/techmaniawp-10/
I was going to try to create my own theme from scratch, but this one had everything I was looking for and is very easy to edit.
Comments?
I’ve been doing a great deal of research on HDR technology lately, and have come across a few good techniques for creating your own HDR Diffuse, Spec, and Environment maps. I’ll be posting a tutorial next week on how to create an HDR map from 3D images. It’s not the most efficient way, but I’ve had some really good results so far.
I’m always looking for more information, so if you have any good advice on generating HDR maps from 3D, I’d love to hear about it. Please take a minute to drop by the forums at… http://www.pixelsandpolys.com/forum/
Here’s a trick I found when I was prototyping out waves for the our current project (It was actually used in Sid Meier’s Railroads with very nice results, although it was mostly due to great programmer implementation and very little to do with the art). This image is created with the eyecandy 4000 plugin set, more specifically, the smoke plugin.
I begin with a black background and create a simple curve shape on another layer. Don’t spend a lot of time on this, it’s only purpose is to create a selection set.
Next, use the layer to make a selection, then create a new empty layer to work on. Select the Eyecandy 4000 / Smoke plugin.
There are a lot of different setting you can play around with, but here I just show a sample wave setting that I started with. It’s important to note that I changed the direction of the “smoke” so it would point downward and added a side taper to fade out the edges. The original image is a 512 X 512.
Although I haven’t tried it myself, I’m fairly confident that you could use the Column Length setting to achieve some cool animated wave textures. Watch what happens as you move the slider. It could be a cheap way to collapse a wave if you have the texture space for it.
Here are the results from the filter (They vary slightly from the above image due to an accidental closing of a window). As you can see, the top is just the outside of the initial selection mask.
Now I just need to create some nice foam along the top. I created a new layer and changed it to additive.
I didn’t spend a great deal of time on the foam, but this give you an idea of what it’s capable of. It is very difficult to create a wave texture by hand, so this is at least a good place to start.
Eye Candy 4000 has a lot of other interesting features and is well worth the money. Here’s a link to their site:
http://www.alienskin.com/ec4k/ec4000_features.html
Happy photoshoping!
