My Ice Cream Truck!

     I spent two days working on this and... This is one of my favorite 3d models I have ever created. Now I know it looks a bit rough, a bit unprofessional and somewhat sloppy but that's why I love it so much. I had more fun creating this model more than any other 3d model I have ever made before because I allowed myself to just be creative with it. This was one of those "first instinct" type of works where I just went with whatever I came up with. No planning, no prototyping, no "oh these colors don't work with each other" or "this texture doesn't go here" or "maybe I remodel this more accurately to look more like a real ice cream truck" kind of deal.

None of that. The process was just "I like how this looks so i'm just going to stick with it and keep going" kind of deal. I just let myself have full creative freedom with this one and this is why I enjoyed working on this model and love how it turned out so much. It's kind of hard to explain, but what I mean is, as an artist (and i'm sure many others can relate to this) I always feel the need to get things looking just right. Looking "believable" to a certain extent. So, even though we always create art, it's like we always kind of put limits on ourselves our work flows. It's like we tell ourselves "no, this wouldn't go with the work, it wouldn't make sense, it wouldn't feel consistent". Sometimes as artist, we just have our own set of rules that we force ourselves to follow and in turn that kind of limits the creative process and creative freedom. I'm not sure if any of that made any sense. But, when it comes to creating art - something that should be fun and enjoyable, it sometimes just feels like an un-enjoyable more stressful experience because of how over critical we are of ourselves sometimes, or how sometimes we have high expectations for how a piece of art will turn out and in our head we imagine this perfect, epic, stunning amazing piece of work but then when we go to make it, the actual art work turns out looking nothing like how we originally wanted it to come out. Then we get even more stressed out because the work doesn't look exactly how we wanted and then what happens? That piece of art work just gets scrapped and never seen again. It never gets shared.

Artist need to stop being over critical of themselves. If you make something don't be afraid to put it out. Give yourself creative freedom, don't always try to be a perfectionist because that just makes the process feel stressful. Me personally, I feel like I learned an important lesson from creating this weird ice cream truck model. And that's to just go with first instincts sometimes. If you're having fun creating something, just keep going at it. Don't worry about technical aspects like matching colors based on color theory or getting something looking exactly like something else. Don't think about these things and just keep creating. Experiment with things outside your comfort zone.

     Anyway, I didn't mean to get off topic. This blog post is about my new ice cream truck that I made which I plan on using in one of my new upcoming games.

     The colorful rainbow texture is something I created by accident. I was just messing around in blender and trying some different things and man, you can create some crazy looking materials in there! I kept messing around until I eventually ended up with this colorful graffiti looking texture which I instantly loved and said "yes. This is what i'm going to go with". This texture is created procedurally. It's not just a random image texture that I got and slapped onto the model. It's something I was able to generate in blender through many experiments and it's actually not that hard to create a material like this within blender. Maybe later i'll do a short tutorial to show you guys how I ended up making this rainbow diarrhea.  Most of the materials you see on this model are procedural actually. The eyes and mouth, the ice cream and cone, the sound horns, and even the striped umbrella thing in the back. I was able to generate all of these all in blender alone without outside resources and that is very awesome.

     Here is a white version of the rainbow material. I was able to easily create this using the same rainbow material above. All I had to do was tweak a few settings. I think this white rainbow material seems more fitting for an ice cream truck. It feels like it fits more. but I personally like the original rainbow material I created first in the images above more. I will probably end up using the all rainbow material in the actual game I intend to use this model for.

    The above images are just quick blender renders which show other details such as this specular glossy look and bumpiness and smaller finer details because of the normals. I don't really care much for normal maps or over glossy models so these details likely won't appear on the in game model. I baked out the textures to a map to use in game and the game model of the ice cream truck will look more like this: 

     This again still isn't the final in game look. Once I set this model up in the unity engine, things like the lighting, color correction and other post fx that my game is using will give the truck a more polished look and to match the overall presentation and style of the game itself.

I also created a "rusty" version of this model, a third version which will also be used in my game somewhere.

     That's all for now. More updates soon. Maybe my next post will be about the actual game I am working on. We'll see how things go so keep checking back! I really like my rainbow ice cream truck though!

My house!

     I really enjoy 3d modeling and I usually try to model something each day or every other day even when i'm not working on a game. It is something that I try to practice and improve daily and get a lot of pleasure out of whenever I see my finished model. A 3d object or character that I created out of pretty much nothing becomes a thing that just exists with many uses. It could be printed as a real world object or used in a game or animation and so on. So for me, creating 3d models feels satisfying and rewarding at the same time. 

     If you have been following my work or this blog then you probably know that I have been 3d modeling for years now and I have probably created thousands of different models at this point. Of course I don't come on here and post a blog about every single 3d model that I make, but every once in a while you make something and it turns out cool and you are just so proud of it so you feel like you just have to share it.

     In this case, I recently created a simple house model which eventually ended up being an entire little environment. Which I will be using for my next game. 

     I was going for that old small American neighborhood type home while at the same time using inspiration from the house models in Silent Hill for the original PlayStation. I know it's just a simple house model and there really isn't anything cool or artsy about it. I have modeled houses many times before also but, I don't know what it is about this one. I just really like how it came out. Also, really proud of the texture work here. I think the textures are what really give it the feel I was looking for. 

Anyway, it started as a simple house, then I started adding more and more to it like bushes, some land, a wooden fence.

   Then I added even more things like some stinky trash cans on the side of the house and made the land the house is sitting on look like someone just cut out that piece of earth and now it's floating in the sky.

     Finished it off by adding a chain fence and exporting it out to use in the Unity engine.

     It came out so cool. Nothing wrong with liking your own work and being proud of what you have created. I think I like it so much because it came out exactly how I envisioned it. This wasn't just a random idea or something created out of boredom. But it was a concept I visually pictured in my head a couple days ago while working on my current game project. I thought about what the scene was missing in the level I was working on and I thought about this. I normally don't think about environments or environment design too much in games so it's unusual for me to create a model like this. One that is a game prop, full of other small props and a full low poly game ready (small) environment. I normally create each item separate and export it out to the Unity engine and then build the levels out of the parts I made. Kind of like legos. But this is all one piece and all the textures are baked to texture maps instead of using multiple individual materials. 

It looks nice, it's low poly, it's optimized, it's game ready. I don't mean to brag, but uh.. I just gotta say, i'm pretty good at 3d art. 

Virtual Snowconesolid Avatar Version 2!

Not too long ago I introduce one of my newest character models Virtual Samer Khatib as well as a complete "Making Of" blog post which covered the full process of how I created the character from start to finish. In my more recent blog posts such as this one and this one I have been talking about a new game project as well as sharing a ton of early screenshots from the games development. In the blog posts I talk about focusing on quality texturing and modeling this time around. I also mentioned that I want to use my new Samer Khatib character model for the new project.

After focusing a lot of time on the new game environment, I looked at my character model and began to notice how out of place and inconsistent he was with the rest of the scene. After all, I did originally just do a very basic texture job on the original character model which only included solid colors. So I decided to go back to the character model and re-work a lot of areas that could be better or improved. 

Before showing the new updated version of Virtual Samer Khatib here are some screenshots of what version 1 looked like:

Blender Render

In Unity Engine

Boxers model

Clothes model

So just simple basic clothing and regular solid colors. I liked it. It still looked good in my opinion. But for the purposes of my new project, I want to be as consistent as possible with the visual art style. I took some time and experimented around with a variety of image textures

until I was able to properly get down a good efficient texturing style that would work out for my model. 

Experimental texturing screenshots:

not final

Virtual Samer Khatib V2:

Originally I was planning on just re-working the textures, but I actually ended up re-reworking almost the entire model and then some. I fixed a lot of clunky areas in the model, added new geometry and adjusted verts to give the model's body a more defined shape, the hair has been adjusted and isn't as flat, I modeled new clothes with multiple materials for the model, the feet are better, I optimized the model to work better in game and made the entire thing more unified and easier to customize in the future.  Okay, time to stop bragging. Drum roll please....

Alright, here is V2 of Virtual Samer Khatib:

NOTE: This is without any lighting or post fx in Unity Engine

V2 Boxers outfit

V2 Striped pajamas outfit (also made color variants of this.)

V2 Badass leather jacket outfit (was originally suppose to be suit/tux. I might ditch the bow-tie. I guess it can be both a suit and a leather outfit really)

I spent waaay more time on re-working the new and improved model than I wanted to but it was very well worth it and i'm glad I did take the time to improve upon the original model. I am very happy with the results. This is a very nice update to the original character model and I might continue updating him even further in future projects as well.

More soon!

Making of "PonyTail"

Here is a quick breakdown of how I created the Ponytail character that you see above.

First, I started out with a quick character concept sketch that I drew on paper. As you can see, the character I originally had in mind was more of this older cartoony vampire type character. The end results was a completely different character. 

I started off by poly modeling the entire character from a cube. Everything from the head to nose was poly modeled by hand. I did not do any dynamic sculpting (dynamic topology) or retopolgy at all for this character model. However, I did use sculpting tools such as the grab, smooth and inflate brushes to adjust the vertices I already had on this model. 

After modeling the main body, I then modeled the features that give the character a unique look. Small detail stuff like hairstyle and type of eyebrows, adjusting certain aspects like how wide is the character and so on. Originally, I tried to go for a bald top - crazy hair coming out of the sides hair style, very similar to my concept sketch. I did not like the way it looked. It was messy so I scrapped it. I then decided to just model a simple ponytail type hairstyle as you can see in the next two images. After giving him a ponytail hairstyle, I decided to just name the character "Ponytail"

The modeling was done at this point.

I laid down some simple base colors for the character. Not final color scheme. Just preparing early for texturing later on.

For the eyes, I was originally planning on just texture painting them onto the mesh. However, I later decided to actually model in the eyes and make it part of the mesh's geometry. This was a much better result. 

Next came the texturing process. I started marking seams on the model and unwrapping the parts. I then organized them on a 2048x2048 texture map.

Still on the texturing process. I baked out an AO map and a diffuse map and used those to create one texture map for the character model. I then hand painted extra details such as the eyes, added fabric detail to the clothing pieces, fixed the messy parts of the texture map (such as artifacts from the ao bake or seam lines that showed) and played around with the color schemes a bit. 

Next came the rigging which is actually a very quick and easy task to do if you are using Blender3d as your 3d modeling program. Using Blender's rigify add-on, I quickly rigged my humanoid character model. While the rigify add-on does save a lot of time on the rigging process, it is not perfect. So I had to go back, adjust some weight paints and clean up a little bit so that the mesh properly deforms and is animation ready. 

At this point the 3d creation and rigging side of things from Blender3d is complete. Finally I exported the model as a .fbx and the .png texture map to the Unity game engine. I created a small working prototype demo and set up a third person controller so that the character can actually move and be in action. 

And that is the whole character creation process for "Ponytail".  I would say this character model probably took around 4-5 hours to create from start to finish. There is still a lot more work to be done in the unity engine. This is just one of the many things that goes into game creation. It's a very time consuming process and takes a lot of patience and work. But it sure is a lot of fun and seeing the end results of your hard work is a great feeling.