Chapter 8

Mid-Poly Environment

Introduction

In this chapter, we will be building a simple scene for our character to be rendered against: the abandoned warehouse.

We will begin by blocking out the main structure and then we will build in the details and populate it with the objects that we’ve already created, although with a few more from the DVD (kindly provided by my friend David Milton).

All of the objects in this scene have been built using the same techniques that you’ve already learned, so there should be nothing that you can’t reproduce. Have a look on http://www.3dfor-games.com for tutorials for some of these other objects. Feel free to populate this environment with your own models and assets or whatever you like. Try to make it as original as possible—use your creativity.

Maybe you already have a library of models that you’ve already created; if so, select the ones you consider to be suitable and add them to your scene. If you don’t have anything that fits perfectly, by all means spend a little time modifying what you have to make this scene truly your own.

Creating the Initial Textures in Photoshop

To begin with, we will block out the main internal walls of the warehouse in Photoshop. We will start by looking at the reference photos, organizing them in Photoshop, and then stitching them together to make complete walls. As two of the walls of the warehouse are really long, this step will require a lot of tweaking, but hopefully the reference images will be good enough for us to build complete walls or almost-complete walls. Because this scene doesn’t have to be accurate to the original building, we will have plenty of room for adjustment and creativity.

Let’s get started. Open all of the reference photos from the Chapter 8Source FilesWall 1 folder on the DVD in Photoshop. When I took these reference photos, I took the starting shot at the start of one wall and gradually moved to the other end. I kept parallel to the wall, right across to the other end, taking overlapping photos as I went. This is a very quick way of getting this type of reference.

We could build the textures up ourselves in Photoshop, but for this exercise, we want to preserve all the grit and decay, which would take longer if we were to build them from scratch. We will get a real gritty feel to the scene by building it like this. Don’t worry if you can’t get permission to take this sort of reference—there is lots of it on the Internet. If you see a set of photos you like while browsing, email the photographers; most amateurs will send you higher-res versions of their photos if you ask nicely, especially if you are complementary about their work.

Now back to the build. In Photoshop, create a new file. Make it long enough to drop all of the photos, ready for matching, together in one long image (20000 × 5000 pixels should be enough for now). Now we need to figure out which is the leftmost photo and drag it onto the new file. If you don’t have a powerful machine, you may struggle with these large files, so feel free to quarter the reference images (as we will be scaling the final image down at the end anyway) or load the finished texture files from the DVD in Chapter 8Source Files (in each of the three “Wall” directories). I prefer to keep large source files so that I can use them in the future and for higher-resolution work.

With the first photo on the new file, slide it along to the left and drag the next one onto your new montage. Set the opacity of this new layer to 50 percent and using the Move tool try to line it up as close as possible by making it overlap the first photo.

Zoom into the image at a key area, like a window or a vertical wall support, and once you have it as close as possible, use the Skew and Perspective tools to fine-tune it. Once you have it matching up neatly, set the opacity to 100 percent again and use the Eraser tool to remove any unwanted parts of the overlapping image. Drag guides onto the image, which helps keep the walls square and to preserve the horizontal and vertical lines of the building.

Don’t worry about things like the skip wagon obscuring the wall; once we have the full wall laid out, we will go back and remove them from the image.

Continue this process for the rest of the wall. If you find that some of the photos are darker than others, adjust the Levels or Brightness and Contrast to make them blend together seamlessly.

Now that we have the full wall all joined together, we need to crop all the bits off the top and the bottom that we don’t need and make sure that it looks roughly balanced (so that there are no obvious seams or problems).

We’ve almost completed the first wall already. Using the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool and also Copy and Paste to take areas from one place to another, remove as many of the obstructions from the image as you can (or that you have the patience for). If you manage to remove most of the big obstructions from the image like the skip truck but leave all the pipes and stuff hanging off the walls, you will create quite an interesting image without too much effort.

Once we have this “clean” image, we need to flatten it (Layer > Flatten Image) and think about cutting it up into textures. I have decided that we will use a number of square textures for the walls that are 1024 × 1024 pixels. With this in mind, we need to manipulate this image so that it can be chopped up into 1024 × 1024 squares.

Go to Image > Image Size > and make sure that Constrain Proportions is checked. Now adjust the height of the image to 1024. We are looking to note what the length turns out to be. To get the best-looking texture maps without too much stretching, we have to look at the length (in pixels) and divide it by 1024. In this case, my image divides by 1024 by just over five times, so I will need to make my image length 1024 × 5, which is 5120.

Set the height of the image to 1024 and the length to 5120, and chop the wall texture into five equal 1024 × 1024 texture maps. As you can see from my image, I have dragged guides onto the image at equal 1024-pixel intervals along the length, which we will use as a guide to cut up the image.

Now that you have a 5120 × 1024 image, use the Rectangular Marquee tool (shortcut M) and carefully select the first 1024 × 1024 texture map on the left. Using Image > Crop to crop the image.

It is important here to go to Image > Image Size (Alt + Ctrl + I) to make sure that your cropped image measures 1024 × 1024 exactly. If it doesn’t, undo the crop, confirm that your guide is in the right place, and repeat until it is 1024 × 1024 exactly.

If you fail to get this exact, there will be a visible seam on your map where the next joining texture meets and the less accurate you are at this point, the more visible the seams will be.

Once you have the texture complete, save it out as your first map. Call it something like Wall-1_1.jpg (or whatever file format you prefer). The naming of these files is again very important. We are going to create more than ten of these and it will be very difficult mapping the wall object if they are not sequentially named per wall.

Now undo the crop command to revert back to the full image, select the next texture tile along, and repeat the whole process until you have all five texture maps cropped, saved, and named sequentially.

Now that we have one wall complete, we can either choose to mirror it for the opposite wall or create a new, second wall. If we mirror it, it will look a little bit worse, unless we are planning on populating the room with lots of really large objects (hiding the obvious mirrored texture).

For this scene, I have decided not to fill it up too much with junk, so follow the same method to create the textures for the opposite wall and also the end wall.

If you are a seasoned Photoshop artist and don’t need the practice in this type of work, feel free to load the other textures from the disk to speed things up. However, if you are relatively new to this type of work, at least try to do Wall 3 (the end wall), as this is quite a challenging task. The reason it’s challenging is that there wasn’t really a good way of taking a photo of the wall without all of the collapsing roof girders in the way, so all of these twisted girders will need to be removed from the image. Try to create this image and send your submissions in to me via the Web site (http://www.3d-for-games.com); I’d really love to see how you get on with this. I’ll post some of them up on the site.

Figures 8.12 and 8.13 are my before and after shots. As you can see, there was a lot of wall to repaint. Again, this task was completed using the Clone Stamp tool (S), Healing Brush tool (J), Rectangular Marquee tool (M), Copy (Ctrl + C), Paste (Ctrl + V), Skew, Rotate, Scale (in Edit > Transform), and whatever else I could find.

The lines of the walls aren’t completely straight, as the building is falling down. You could make more of this feature by chopping out of large parts of it and by having piles of rubble modeled within the scene.

Creating the Basic Structure in 3Ds Max

Next, we will move on to creating the walls in 3ds Max. We could have created these first and then created the textures to fit (an order preferred by a lot of people), but as I knew that the photo reference was complete, I thought that we could get a slightly more accurate build if we got the textures to work and then created the base model for them. Either way, we would have gotten a similar result, so it’s up to you to take whichever approach works for you best.

We are going to try to keep this project as simple as possible, as it will be populated with all of our models built so far and probably with a lot more that you will create yourself. With this in mind, all of the geometry will be fairly simple. And as the scene is going to be very dark, we will not need to use as much detail in areas like the roof.

Open up 3ds Max and start a new scene. Create a box with the dimensions 5000 × 2000 × 2000 cm.

The box is created at this scale so that we can easily apply the single-texture maps. Remember that our long wall textures were cut into five texture maps; these five subdivisions will make it very easy to apply them to the mesh without stretching or distorting them.

Next, right-click on the box and convert it to an Editable Mesh from the drop-down menu. Collapse the rows of vertices along the top of the box to create the roof shape.

Select all of the polygons and apply some UVW Mapping to them. Select Box mapping and set the tiling as follows:

These settings should give us perfect mapping coordinates for our texture maps. Once you’re happy with it, collapse the stack.

To make texturing the warehouse shell a little easier, detach the separate walls and roof.

Before we do this, with the mesh still in one piece, flip the Normals of the polygons (as we are building the inside of the warehouse, not the outside). To do this, click Flip from Surface Properties > Normals, with all the polygons selected. This command turns our mesh inside out.

Now select and detach each of the end walls, floor, and roof, starting with the floor. Remember to name them correctly as you go.

Finally, we need to see the polygons displayed one-sided. With all of your objects selected, right-click > Object Properties > Display Properties > check Backface Cull and click OK.

In the previous image, I have clicked the Select By Name button to show the contents of the scene list.

Now, we have some walls. Let’s get our textures on them to see what they look like. Select the end walls and the roof, right-click on them, and select Hide Selection to hide them in the viewport.

Open up the Material Editor (M) and change the first material to a Multi/ Sub-Object, discarding the old material. We will keep the number of materials in this Multi/Sub-Object at ten and we will map both of the long warehouse walls with it.

Just as we have done before, click on the first material in the Multi/Sub-Object and in Blinn Basic Parameters, click on the Diffuse button and load in wall-1_1.tif from Chapter 8Textures on the DVD or load up the first of the textures that you created from the photographs. Click the Assign Material to Selection button and then the Show Standard Map in Viewport button. You should see the texture map on the selected polygon. If for any reason you do not, confirm that the polygon has a material ID of 1 and try again.

As each of the maps will need to reference an individual ID number, select each of the wall panels in turn and change their IDs as you go along, from left to right, in order (2, 3, 4). Continue this process on the opposite wall with IDs 6, 7, 8 until both side wall polygons have separate IDs from 1 to 10. Once you’ve completed this, repeat the process of loading each of the other wall texture maps into the material editor and display them in the viewport.

You may notice that the texture maps don’t look like they quite line up properly. This is because they are all backwards (due to us flipping the normals earlier). To fix this, select all of the side wall polygons, add a UVW Unwrap modifier, and click Edit in Parameters (this will open up the Edit UVs window). Select all of the vertices and then Mirror Horizontal. You should find that all the UVs are now correct and the wall textures stretch seamlessly from left to right on each side. Collapse the stack.

As you can see from some simple renders in the Perspective view, our walls are coming along nicely.

Once we start to add some of the large 3D objects in the scene like the skip truck and build lots of twisted girders and burned boards hanging off the collapsed roof, it should start to look quite presentable for a simple scene.

Let’s start working on the end wall. In the reference photos, there is a gap between the end wall and the side wall, but for this scene I want to keep everything contained, so this will be closed off. Pull down the top vertex on the end wall and add a slice, so that we don’t distort the textures. Unhide End Wall 1 and set the IDs to 1, 2, 3, and 4 from left to right, starting with the top ones first.

Now we need to create a new material. You could add these four extra textures to the existing one if you like, but for this scene I kept it separate (for no good reason). Load the textures in as you did before, but this time using End_Wall-1_1.tif to End_Wall-1_4.tif.

Finally, make sure that you have clicked the Assign Material to Selection button and then the Show Standard Map in Viewport button each time.

The Roof

The roof is probably the most complex part of the warehouse build. The roof is made up of three main areas:

We will start by building the solid girders. Looking at the reference photos, it’s quite difficult to actually tell what’s going on with the roof structure. We can see lots of girders, but as they are all overlapping, it’s difficult to see how complex the structure is. This is actually good: we will be able to get away with less detail and still have something looking quite complex.

In the next image, I’ve taken the best reference shot showing the girders and adjusted the levels in Photoshop so that I can see the girders defined as clearly as possible. Looking at one section of the structure, I have roughly traced over the image in Photoshop to show us what we need to build.

Looking at the image, the section (highlighted in green) is made up of eighteen girders welded together. You could choose to do this more simply if you like, but as these girders make up the bulk of the collapsed geometry, I think I’ll model them. I’m going to make a simple web of intersecting square girders with a simple tiling rust texture on them. I’m not going to be focusing on the roof too much for my scene, but if you are, feel free to texture the rivets and support braces.

We need to start modeling the girders by creating an eight-sided cylinder at the apex and then extruding some of the faces. Copy this object a few times and manipulate it to form parts of the structure.

Continue doing this until you have half of one of the girder sections modeled. Then just attach all the parts by collapsing or target welding vertices. Once you have one half completed, apply a UVW map modifier to it and box map it. Remember to select View Align and Fit. In this case, I chose to tile the mapping six times on the x axis, four times on the y axis, and 0.2 times on the z axis. Finally, apply a basic rust texture (Chapter 8TexturesRust1.tif) in the material editor and we’re almost done.

Lastly, for this girder section we need to make a copy of this half using Mirror or a basic shift + drag copy and then attach those two parts together.

As you can see from the previous image, I have added extra polygons where each of the girders join and have strengthening plates riveted to them. This step was specifically done so that we could create extra detailed texture maps for them for detail at a later date.

Instead of using square bars, as I have in this case, we could delete two of the sides and have the girders built from an L shape, or we could just have them flat. It’s up to you, really. Obviously, flat ones will be least expensive, but will cast thin shadows from certain angles.

You already have all the skills to complete this build, so feel free to use them and experiment. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? Just remember to save incrementally, have auto backups on, and have some fun with it.

Finally, we need to fit the new roof girder to the rest of the building. It may need to be tweaked and scaled slightly to fit the shape of the building, as your build may not match all of the photographs that you used to model the separate parts from.

To get mine to fit perfectly (well, close enough), I had to scale it slightly. To do this, I adjusted the pivot point of the girder first—go to Hierarchy > Pivot > Affect Pivot Only. Then I clicked Center to Object (from Alignment) and Reset Transform and Scale (from Reset). Finally, I manually moved the pivot point (by dragging it) down on the y axis until it lined up roughly with the bottom of the girder. When I scaled the girder on the y axis, I did not modify the bottom girder much. Play around with setting the pivot point at different positions and scaling the girder to see how you can benefit from different pivot point positions.

Now that we have a solid girder, we should make a few copies and then start to twist and rotate them to make them look like the roof has collapsed. Copy a few of the more mangled pieces and scatter them around the floor and have a few copies hanging from the ceiling. As the scene is going to be quite dark, you shouldn’t need to spend too much time on this—unless you really want to, that is. You should be aiming to get something that looks a little like this:

Now, don’t worry if everything doesn’t quite look right in the scene at this point. We will just get everything in, then look at each of the different models in turn and tailor them to fit the scene, colorizing the texture maps as we go.

At this point, I’m going to add a camera, so that I can look at my scene. Go to Create > Cameras > Target and add a camera. Press the C key and you should be looking through it. Mess around with the parameters and stock lenses to get a feel for the different controls.

Next, add the rest of the models that we have already created. The easiest way to do this is to go to File > Merge and load each of the finished models by selecting the names from the list. If you’ve given your models random names, you will pay for it when merging scenes of lots of models, as you won’t be able to tell what is what.

If you have been untidy and not named any of your models correctly in the files, and if you’ve left all sorts of rubbish in the files, then you might want to go back and open each 3ds Max file individually and delete everything you don’t need and name everything properly.

I have also decided to add a skylight light via Create > Lights > Skylight (from Standard lights) so that I can start to play around with the colors of the scene. At this point, the girders we’ve created look a bit brown so we need to create another, darker rust map or modify the one we have on there.

Here’s a look at what we’ve got so far:

Have a look at the image and think about what to do next. As this isn’t going to be going into a game engine, we can be a little flexible with what we do. On the other hand, this is just a block out to be used as the backdrop of a render, so we don’t want to go mad with it.

The character is going to take up the left hand third of the screen, so we don’t need to worry about that too much; thus the key remaining areas are the floor and the roof.

How much time you want to spend on this will determine what you do next with this scene. How do you want it to look? Take a few moments, with a pen and notebook maybe, and have a think about how you could make this look interesting or cool. To give you some ideas, you could try to replicate the photo. This would work; it would be straightforward and you wouldn’t have to think much about what you need to do. Another suggestion is that you could produce some concept art and really try to push yourself with what you create. Something like this might work:

I hear you cry, “Are you mad? It’s completely different!” Yes, it is different, and no, I’m not mad. Have a look at the concept image and think about what you could take from it. I’m not going to give you all the answers on this one (sorry), you’re going to have to work that one out on your own. Here are a few ideas:

Whatever you do, it’s important not to be too precious about your work. You should be ready to make major changes at any time. There are normally a lot of stakeholders on a project (art lead, art manager, producer, external producer, art director, development director, managing director, chairman…) who can and will ask for changes, some of which will be significant. So you have to be ready for them.

I had an art teacher (Mr. James) from when I was around 11 to 15 years old who taught me this lesson well. He had a very unusual method of teaching it, too. If you were working on a painting or drawing and you were working the very fine details in, right from the very start of the piece, he would come along, rip it in half (or into many pieces), stick it back together with tape, and ask you to continue with it. Obviously, the first time this happens, you’re furious, or heart-broken, or totally baffled, but he had a point. In fact, he had two points. The first was that when starting a new piece of work, you should think Big, Light, and Accurate.

The Big part of the equation meant that you should start off using the whole of a sheet of paper or canvas, not just start detailing in the corner. When translated into 3D, this means that you should start by planning or thinking about the whole thing, roughly blocking out simple forms, to get a feel for the area and construction.

Light meant to use very light pencil strokes, so that you can easily change what you’re doing without having any permanent marks on your page. Again in 3D, this translated to starting with primitives and low detail objects, which you would be happy deleting—not spending time on the finer details, as these should definitely come later.

Accurate—well, that’s just being accurate with what you are drawing or painting. Translated into modeling terms, this means doing your research, producing the concept art, and gathering the reference images. But more than anything else, it means looking at what you’re doing and looking at your reference images continuously. Print them out, stick them up around your workspace, and know exactly what you’re building. As soon as you start making it up, unless you have the skill and experience to do so, you’ll lose the quality.

The second lesson was not to be precious about your work. If he ripped it in half, was it ruined? No, it just wasn’t what you’d planned. Could you recover? Well, that was up to the individual, but everyone got over it at some point. It got you thinking outside of the box: not only could you think outside of the box, but you could take a knife to the box and create something truly original from it.

The most important lesson is that you should not always labor to finish a piece of work if it is looking cruddy or isn’t going your way. Shelve it, leave it for a few weeks, and go back to it with fresh eyes. If it still looks bad and you can’t get it right, move on, or post it on forums for it to be crucified—none of it matters that much. But don’t be precious. Change it radically, transform it into something new, but don’t waste too much time on something that doesn’t work—life’s too short.

Before we get back to the warehouse, at the end of this chapter, there are two tips that you might want to skip ahead to before coming back to this point. One is about a basic compositional rule and the other is about a simple lighting system. The reason I mention skipping ahead to look at them is that reading them will probably influence how you construct the rest of your scene.

Back to the warehouse. First, we need to map the floor. The warehouse in real life was covered in all sorts of debris, pigeon excrement, and all sorts of other nasty, sticky stuff, but I’m going to make it more like tarmac.

Feel free to use whatever texture maps you like. You might want to create a series of maps form one large image or you might want to tile the floor, but cut parts out to add detail. Whatever you do, it’s up to you.

I have taken a mix of tarmac from a photograph, blended with some of the crud on the actual warehouse floor, and created a tiling map from it, as shown in the following figure.

Next, I created a new material and applied the floor map to the floor geometry, tiling it eight times across the width and twenty times down the length (so that each floor square has a 4 × 4 tiled map on it).

Let’s look at the roof. The best reference image of the set seems to be this one:

For a bit of variety, I will create two texture maps from the same image, one with the little window on and one without. If we create two maps, we can mix and match them to give the roof a bit of variety. You could opt to make just one if you like and tile it or you could use the other reference photos to build a brighter roof, but I’ve decided to keep mine dark. I’ve switched some of the central detail around to make the look similar, but individual.

To apply these maps to the roof, first we need to convert the roof shape to an Editable Poly object, then create the extra polygons to mix and match the texture maps that we need to subdivide the faces. The quickest way to do this is to select all of the edges that run along the length of the building and then click Connect from the Edit Edges rollout. Instantly, each of the ten faces should be split in half across the building.

To apply the texture maps to the roof, select all the faces and give them an ID of 1. Apply a UVWmap modifier to them, this time checking the Face mapping. All of your faces should now have the first roof texture map on them. Finally, randomly select some of the faces and change their ID to 2, giving us the mix and match variety. Depending on how you’ve created your texture maps, you might want to flip some of the UVs around so that they sit together nicely. You should end up with something like Figure 8.33 (I’ve hidden all the other assets in the scene so that you can see this clearly):

Feel free to apply these maps to the roof in any order you like, but take care if you use the texture maps I’ve provided—if you flip them around, be sure to line up the horizontal beams).

Next we need to chop out some of the roof where it has fallen in. Have a look at the walls at the end of the warehouse. We will make our cuts where the wall texture brightens up slightly (where it lets more light in, due to the missing roof). It doesn’t have to be tied to the wall textures completely, as we can always edit them, making parts lighter or darker to fit the scene.

Make the roof an Editable Poly (if it’s not already), select some of the edges towards the end of the roof, and use a combination of Connect or the Slice Plane (while the faces are selected) to make some cuts to the faces.

Once you’re happy with the basic form, you can collapse the roof to an Editable Mesh and detach the chosen faces. Use the Shell modifier to add some depth to the roof pieces, then scatter a few around. I’ve got a couple clinging to the edges of the roof and a few mixed up in the girder debris. This is only a simple scene, so I’m not adding too many.

Next I scatter a few more of the assets around. I’ve added a few piles of bricks, a few barrels, a skip, and a few other bits—feel free to add whatever you like. Here are a few of the extra assets that I have provided on the DVD. Also, you can visit http://www.3d-for-games.com for more.

Once you’ve had a bit of fun with adding the extra objects, you should have something that looks something like Figure 8.37:

In Figure 8.38, I think that the textures on the barrels and the metal box are a little too bright, so I’ll make a slight change to them in Photoshop and load them in again. I’ve added the character here, too, just so that you can see everything together. It isn’t rigged or holding the gun, but you get the idea.

And that’s it—your scene is complete. Here are a couple of extra tips to help you on your way.

Two Final Tips

Composition and the Rule of Thirds

Although this subject was covered briefly in Chapter 7, I want to go over this in a little more detail as I believe it is very important. The rule of thirds is probably the most common rule of composition. Feel free to Google it to see how different people and industries explain it. It is commonly used in 3D, fine art, design, and photography, and is really well documented and taught—-justifiably so, as it is the main guideline responsible for well-composed images and renders. The rule of thirds (or sometimes known as “the golden section”) was documented as early as 1757 in a book as a rule for proportioning scenic paintings, but was used much earlier as well.

The basic principle behind the rule is that your page, view, or image should be divided up into nine equal sections with four imaginary lines, two each running vertically and horizontally.

Place important elements of your composition where these lines intersect, as shown.

You can also arrange key areas of your image into bands that occupy a third of your page. A great use for this would be a horizon, but other less-obvious ones could be the eyes of a subject in a photo, or a combination of a horizon and a tree, using two intersections.

In this photograph of a seascape (Figure 8.41), the land mass is roughly taking up the bottom third and the remaining two-thirds are sky. Browse through some classic landscape paintings online and see just how many use the rule. You can also see how the photo of the child is using this rule in a slightly different way. Obviously, this rule isn’t meant to be used for absolutely every one of your renders or scenes, but consider it next time you produce an image or composition. Key terms to research for additional information include: the rule of thirds, the golden ratio, and the golden rectangle.

Lighting and Three-Point Lighting

The three-point lighting technique is another well-documented technique widely used in games, television, film, and digital media. It is a very simple but effective method of lighting a scene, which often forms the basis of most lighting.

The reason that it is so widely used is that the artist, photographer, or game designer can illuminate the subject (in our case, our future commando) while controlling or almost completely illuminating any shadows produced by direct lighting—giving us full control over how our character looks.

The technique is called “three-point” lighting (as you may have guessed) because it uses three main lights. These three lights are the key light, the fill light, and the back light. I’ll explain how each one works and what it is used for.

The “key” light is the main light in the scene, as its name suggests. This light is usually the strongest in the scene and shines directly on the subject, serving as its key illuminator. The intensity, color, and angle of this light set the lighting in the scene.

Next is the “fill” light. This light is the secondary one, which is usually placed on the opposite side from the key light, illuminating the shaded areas on the front of the subject created by the key light (such as the shadow cast by a subject’s nose). This light is less intense than the key light and softer (often half as much), and is used more as a flood. Not using a fill light often creates very sharp contrasting shadows from the key light.

Finally, we have the “back” light. This is also known as the “rim” or “hair” light. This is normally placed at the rear of the subject, and rather than providing direct lighting (as the key and fill lights do), it is used to create subtle highlights and definition around the subjects’ outlines. These are normally used to lift the characters away from the background they are standing against and to provide a stronger three-dimensional look.

Here’s how the lights look from above, looking at our future commando soldier:

On this occasion, to give you something else to think about, I set the key light to yellow and the fill light to blue, which gives a very subtle warmth to the render.

Do a little Internet research for other lighting combinations, too. There is a four-point lighting technique that we could have used for this render; do your research and see how different people use different techniques form different industries.

Moving Forwards

Congratulations, you’ve completed the tutorials! Well done, I’m really impressed that you got through to the end. Now that you have the basic skills, try to build on them. Use the Internet to find more tutorials and talk to people on forums—you’ll get lots of help, if you look for it.

I’ll be adding a few new tutorials on the Web site to accompany the book—www.3d-for-games.com—so come and visit. I will be giving stuff away regularly to help you on your way and I have a few friends lined up to teach you even more.

It would be great if you also send in some of your work. I’ll post it online for people to comment on to help you out.

The final chapter is about getting all your work together into a portfolio and getting ready for interviews—assuming that you want a job in the games industry.

Congratulations once again and I hope to hear from you soon.