Vertex Painted Bed

Been playing around with some vertex colouring recently. The lack of UV preparation hell is quite refreshing.

Steam train

I had a sudden compulsion to create a digital train set. Ultimately I hope to make it interactive in Unity. For now, here's the engine.

I started by making it quite high resolution (relatively) with a hollow cabin and much more rounded mesh. But after looking carefully at what savings I could make, managed to get it down to below 1.5k tris which I was quite happy with considering the amount of round shapes.

Here's the texture. I managed to pack a fair amount of the detail into it rather than use geometry. There are obviously areas I could have improved the UVs in terms of space usage and 9 slicing certain elements. I may give myself the challenge of getting it down into 256pxls at some point.

Splash!

Valesco - the ships captain

The island

This will be my next task - to try and bring this place to life. I need to get some more variety into the ground and maybe a trodden path running down the middle - but havent quite figured out the best way to achieve this in Unity (gonna have to ask some devs). 

It's all gone a bit Mental Ray!

In an attempt to bring all the characters Ive made recently together in one composition, I thought I'd create a kitsch holiday souvenir from the land of Eternal Springs. I got a little carried away, but Ive learnt a lot in the process (or at least become aware of more known unknowns :) )

Its the first time that I'v rendered using mental ray. When building for games I wont need this, but I thought it would be a good chance to play with some nice shadows.  That said, I have found it a lot harder than expected to get the lighting as I'd have liked (the shadows have come out a lot darker than I would like).

Ill put this one to bed now and concentrate on something in Unity next (as well as creating another character for the game (a fisherman).

Bearsuit Bob

Managed to get a lot of the detail incorporated into the texture so managed to get the tri-count in the 700's.

744tris in total. Could probably have gotten it down further around the neck area, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Please let me know if there any glaring mistakes. That issue by the armpit is one Im coming across a fair bit, where the quad is twisted. You dont notice anything once textured & I suppose this would be fixed in triangulation - but would be nice to know of other solutions.