I Need a Hand

Got a new hard drive today.  Big kudos to OfficeMax.  I bought my old hard drive there only three months ago, and when I told them that and showed proof of when I had bought it there, they just replaced it, no questions asked.  A better resolution than I would ever have expected!  I will definitely shop there again!

After spending some time restoring data from backups, I started working on a custom character to import into UDK.  This is proving to be quite difficult.  I can get most of the body just fine... but the hands are proving to be a problem.  I'll have to do some more work on it, maybe look up a tutorial that focuses on modeling hands, because right now the best I got is:

Comeback

Well, starting over after that hard drive crash, I managed to reconstruct the prison cell a bit, I got it to this point:

I will continue to work on it tomorrow.  ^_^

FML

Well, FML.  The external hard drive that I have been keeping my work on just took a serious crap... as in it stopped working entirely.  Right now I feel like throwing it across the room.  I had backups of some of my stuff, but I lost other stuff... so it might take me a day or two to get caught back up to where I was.  So I apologize if I miss a day or two of posts... I am recovering from my data loss.

Overlapping UVs Issues

Well, I'm afraid I don't really have much to report today.  I have spent most of the day trying to UVW Unwrap a skeleton figure I got from the Google online 3D warehouse.  It seems no matter how hard I try I can't get rid of the overlapping UVs, which I have to do in order to make it compliant with TurboSquid's Checkmate standards.  It is possible I might have to just have as much of the model be compliant as possible, but not require all of it.  I know how to check for overlapping UVs in 3DS Max, but even though I couldn't see any on the body part I finally finished, the check still showed overlaps.

So the only real addition I made today was to add the skeleton to the prison cell and I also modeled a shackle, though I have not yet textured it.  I also have to chain it to the wall in a way consistent with physics.

After I imported the models and materials into UDK, which is what I'm using to make my game, it looks like this in game:

High Standard Modeling

Hello again, it's time for another update.  And I have made some progress, though it might not look like it right away.  What happened was I took a couple steps backwards to improve the quality of the model.  On TurboSquid.com, they have a standard for their higher end models that they call Checkmate, and a slightly less restrictive one called Checkmate Lite.  I want the models in my games to be of the highest quality, so I re-did the model to comply with these standards.  The prison cell that I have at this point now looks like this:

This has only 84 faces and 92 vertices.

If anyone is interested, I do take tutorial requests.  As I discover how to do these things, I would be more than happy to share my newly discovered knowledge with the world.  So if at any point anyone reading this would like more details on how I did what I have done, just post a comment and I will get to it as soon as I can.

The First Steps

This is the beginnings of the model of the first room, which is an underground dungeon cell that the player inexplicably finds themselves in.  It is done in 3DS Max and utilizes UVW Unwrapping and a normal map to give the illusion of the brick texture.