Temple Guard

This is my take on parts (Steps 9-22) of Bill Fleming's excellent "Digital Desert" tutorial from the second issue of 3D World Magazine.

The most obvious technique used here is the creation of non-planer (lumpy) objects. The spires and the building began life as 8 point cubes in FormZ. Some of the cubes were cut to form the doors and windows of the wall sections. These cubes were then given a low res subdivision (usually between 64 and 128 polygons) and the points are then moved around to create the 'gross' shape. The cube is then subdivided again, a little jitter (noise) is added and then the mesh is smoothed. The process of moving points, subdivide, jitter, smooth is repeated until you have a high res mesh or until you go insane from the tedium of pushing points around. Sometimes a deformer was added to taper or bulge the overall object.

The rocks were again created from cubes but this time the Magnet (Displacement) tool was used to pull the cube into a rocklike shape. A touch of jitter is added and then smoothed with a fairly high curvature setting. Once the rock was completed a "skirt" was created from a 2D rectangle to give the effect of blown sand against the rocks.

The raptor (from Poser) was a somewhat failed attempt to use the above procedures to create a more varied critter. I first reduced the polygons by 50% and then did the move/sub/jitter/smooth thing. I was able to create a couple of extra waddles, vary the teeth, eyes and muzzle and add a lot of small, smooth random humps along the surface. He was exported to .OBJ, run through UVMapper and textured in Painter3D and Photoshop.

All the other textures are Bryce procedurals and just to make for a long render there is a Volumetric cube sky. It took me forever moving the texture around to get a cloud "hole" to light the scene foreground but I really liked the way it shaded the background.

My many thank to Bill and 3D World for publishing the tutorial.

Click below to jump to my homepage!