All criticism and advice is greatly appreciated.

I threw together a couple low-poly models and started running into problems when I came to the texturing. I didn't quite realize how hard it is to get things lined up properly. Going to come back and work on the issue of organic models later.




Second texture lined up much better, but I'm going to need to spend a bit of time figuring out how to get the texture to be displayed sharper.




Nothing to write home about, but I at least have a few good problems to solve.

Started on a small location from the ride Horizons, which the background image is also taken from. I have a huge love of retro-futurism, so I'll definitely try to get this closer to finished.




Looking back at how much of it is done, I feel a bit ashamed of how long it took. Certainly feels like I should have been this far a lot quicker.

Hey man, for future characters try to give the arms a little more space, maybe get em at a 45 degree angle or go parallel with the ground. It will make unwrapping, texturing, and skinning a little easier. Give the polycount wiki a look for poly flow too, its good reference when doing these characters. For the small location environment try to leave the background clear, so you can read the important elements better. I'm no environment artist but it looks like you got the basic forms going and some basic lighting. some things with the ceiling are a bit odd, but part of that could be the room itself if you are working from reference. Keep posting man, can't wait to see more.

Originally Posted by gillmeister74

Hey man, for future characters try to give the arms a little more space, maybe get em at a 45 degree angle or go parallel with the ground. It will make unwrapping, texturing, and skinning a little easier. Give the polycount wiki a look for poly flow too, its good reference when doing these characters. For the small location environment try to leave the background clear, so you can read the important elements better. I'm no environment artist but it looks like you got the basic forms going and some basic lighting. some things with the ceiling are a bit odd, but part of that could be the room itself if you are working from reference. Keep posting man, can't wait to see more.

Thanks for the tips! Also reminded me I haven't been spending enough time in the Polycount wiki, amazing resource that it is.


After some Googling and experimenting I found some good settings for getting low-res textures to be rendered more clearly. While working more on the texture I found that A) keeping my UV map too tight causes issues with colors seeping over and B) low-resolution textures have a habit of making distance and edges hard to see in some situations. I'll have to play around with the level of detail and resolution in textures to find effective ways to fix the latter.

It looks like with your current models you have textured so far, that they have perfect symmetry. In case you did not know; You can delete half of a model, if it has perfect symmetry and you intend on keeping the symmetry throughout the texture as well, and then map that one side of the model. You can then mirror the object back and then merge it and the UVs will pull from the same set as the original side you mapped. (if that makes sense) So you now only have to texture one side of the model and it allows a lot more room within the texture space for your UV packing. As for your actual packing of the UVs (packing UVs is when you move around the UV tiles within the UV texture editor and arrange them almost like in a puzzle, to maximize the amount of pixels used for each UV map), you can optimize your maps quite a bit more, allowing more space for the UV shells. Your shells within the maps are really spaced out, wasting precious UV space.

Not to bash your work, I am just spreading knowledge. Hope this helps. Keep on trucking man, practice will only make you better!

Originally Posted by Add3r

It looks like with your current models you have textured so far, that they have perfect symmetry. In case you did not know; You can delete half of a model, if it has perfect symmetry and you intend on keeping the symmetry throughout the texture as well, and then map that one side of the model. You can then mirror the object back and then merge it and the UVs will pull from the same set as the original side you mapped. (if that makes sense) So you now only have to texture one side of the model and it allows a lot more room within the texture space for your UV packing. As for your actual packing of the UVs (packing UVs is when you move around the UV tiles within the UV texture editor and arrange them almost like in a puzzle, to maximize the amount of pixels used for each UV map), you can optimize your maps quite a bit more, allowing more space for the UV shells. Your shells within the maps are really spaced out, wasting precious UV space.

Not to bash your work, I am just spreading knowledge. Hope this helps. Keep on trucking man, practice will only make you better!

Muchas gracias, Add3r!


Been in a really unproductive mood for the past few days, so I just spent some time redoing the UV maps of my last two models up here. Once I get out of my funk, I think I'll get back to some more detailed models, maybe some sculpting as well.

MUCH better, that's definitely an improvement! I am not saying do this to all of your models, as asymmetry is always good and will only help make a piece more interesting. But say you are going into a project knowing that the piece is going to have perfect symmetry, this method is definitely the way to go.

Originally Posted by Add3r

MUCH better, that's definitely an improvement! I am not saying do this to all of your models, as asymmetry is always good and will only help make a piece more interesting. But say you are going into a project knowing that the piece is going to have perfect symmetry, this method is definitely the way to go.

Quick question, as I'm sure I'll run into this problem later. Let's say I'm making a model of some guy's shirt and it's going to be symmetrical. When I make the texture won't it be immediately obvious it's being mirrored when you look at the seam? Is there a way to fix that or is that just one of the situations where it's best not to mirror the texture?



Wanted to do a bit more sculpting, but since I struggle quite a bit with it I decided to put together a base mesh first to get the topology in. Zbrush isn't getting any easier to use, but I definitely want to become skilled with it.

Sorry for the extremely delayed response, but yes, thats one of the things you have to work around when it comes to painting textures. If you just half-ass a texture, then yes. It will very much show the seam. But if you spend time tweaking and messing around with the overlaps and the texture break, then you can get a seamless texture on the model. Same goes for making tileable texture sets, like tiling brick, grass, any ground textures, etc. You make sure the rocks tile, the make sure the grass tiles, etc. its all part of the art ;)

Recently moved and between the stress and the computer problems my productivity has been killed. Going to start scheduling my practice to try and get back into the swing of things.


Awhile back I saw a video of an artist who's workflow involved sculpting out a model, retopologizing and then refining with some more sculpting. Looked interesting, so I gave it a quick shot. Sadly I'm still not very good at sculpting and I think I'll be focusing on improving for awhile until I'm confident in my sculpting.

Still sculpting, still getting the feeling I'm not making any progress. My brain just freezes up whenever I sculpt. I have no idea where to add in more detail or how I'm supposed to get the shapes I want.

Going to try and hunt down all the sculpting tutorials and videos I can find. Will probably use this as a chance to finally give some serious attention to anatomy.

Even more sculpting practice.




On my last model I decided to break out my anatomy book and follow it as a reference instead of the pictures I've been using thus far. Big improvement. More detailed, better proportions and it was much easier to make.

Wanted to give environmental modeling another shot in order to distract from the texture and baking tutorials I've been struggling to drag myself through. I found a nice landscape image sitting on my computer and used it as my reference. Also only gave myself a week to complete it, but the extra pressure didn't help very much.

Started throwing together a quick mech from a reference I had lying around, not thinking if I wanted to do much with it and ended up messing around with UV mapping quite a bit. After a couple failed texture attempts I tried to learn more about unwrapping and I feel I've made some progress on the process.



Next I need to learn more about texturing, specifically how to go about adding more detail and perhaps look into how to keep my edges from disappearing.

Been swept up in another environmental scene. Once again, based off some one else's drawing. I'm planning on taking this one as far as I possibly can as I feel uncomfortable with making a lot of things in the scene.

Replaced the back mountain model with multiple objects. Trying to find a good way to make the terrain. The light source on the ruins is also a problem, as just the light alone will either not emit enough on the ruin or emit too much on the surroundings. I'll probably try using a texture instead.

Been working on finding a good way to make rocks. I put together two attempts and retopolgoized them. Neither seem very promising, so more attempts ahead!

Spent the day recreating a part of a mountain from reference. The results aren't terrible, but there's much more improvement to be had. Also textured it, but I lost the texture. Didn't work out as well as the sculpt itself, so no big loss.

Found a very good method of sculpting texture on to rocks on CGCookie. Easily gives better results than anything I've tried.





Messed around with the technique a little and I think I'll be using it quite a bit.

Spent forever working on normal maps for the mountains in the background. I ran into issue after issue, all of which were probably caused by inexperience. Wish I had more time to work on the project, but progress is being made regardless!

I put in a particle system for grass but it's going to take lots of refinement. More important I've noticed a few problems with proportion and lighting that I don't think I'll be able to get back tot he reference without remaking most of the scene. For proportions I don't think it's too big of a deal, but I want to keep the general scheme for the lighting.

I'm not sure what the angle of the sun is in the original drawing so I had a rough approximation that worked fine for awhile. However the fog in the scene makes things difficult to remake, so I'll be deviating from it. I want to keep the foreground dark and the background bright to keep a nice silhouette of the large ruin in the back, so I'll spend some time figuring something out.

Decided it was a good time for some anatomy practice before my next project. Mainly wanted to get a better understanding of the skull and muscle mass and how they shape the head. Strange how the proportions came out so wonky, but I didn't use any references of a full head, so I suppose it's no surprise.

Legs done! Anatomy is starting to become rather interesting.

Finished the torso so I'm done with anatomy for awhile.

Just a little sword I made to try out some stuff with.