WAAAGH! Plaque

[SevenCubed]

Fun Plaque I made for a friend of mine as a present. I've got several projects going at any given time, but I'm trying to show restraint and only post pieces that are finished. =)

This was done almost Entirely in Photoshop... I was trying several things with textures and corrosion and whatnot. Some things were more successful than others... you can't really make out the Diamondplate on the deepest parts, but they turned out well.

I could have taken better pictures perhaps, but um... I didn't. Enjoy!

[cycollins]

I have to say, though, when I first read the title of your thread, I thought it said "WAAAGH! Plague". Take a look at it in the underlined font above. The "q" becomes quite ambiguous. It kind makes sense in its own way too. Still a strange posting for a site of this kind, don't you think? Maybe on a Center for Disease Control site, but not so much on a wood carving site. Kind of a round-about way of getting the word out. However, given the subject matter of your plaque, it's kind of thematically correct. Look forward to your further posts and keep us all up-to-date on the spread of sickness as well.

cycollins

[eepers]

Aw yeah! Tre' cool man. Have you tried getting heightmaps out of Max or other modeling packages yet?

[SevenCubed]

Actually, the bolts around the border were taken from MAX. I've got all sorts of advice for height-field stuff, so I'm happy to advise. I've got a piece that I did almost entirely in MAX, but I'm not gonna post stuff 'till it's painted an' whatnot. Great fun.

[betacrash]

what is MAX? are you talking about 3d studio max?

[SevenCubed]

Eep! I'm sorry, yeah. 3D Studio MAX. I can start a thread in Techniques somewhere about doing Height Field stuff with MAX... I probably should. I use MAX at work, so that's what I'm used to.

[eepers]

One simple method for getting a depthmap out of 3DS Max is to simply project a black-to-white color scale ramp on the UVs from the side of the object, no real need to try and render out alpha channels or such.

I did some experimentation with that back in the early research days on Gears of War. I tried unwrapping this robot model I did and laying out the texture coordinates, then I basically started modeling a "texture" over those UV layouts and projected the color ramp from the side to get a heightmap. Worked reasonably well for the military style robot I was building, but was massively inferior to modeling in high detail when it came to organic creatures and such. All that isn't too relevent to the carvewright other than to say if you know how to model in Max, it's a no-brainer to get that model into a heightmap image.