Category Archives: 3D design

Designing the Army Men in 3D, Part 1: Recreating from Reference Images

What is more difficult than creating a character from scratch? Recreate a pre-existing one from low resolution images

Something extremely difficult is to imitate a 3D model only with poor quality reference images. It is a tedious and slow job, much more difficult to do than creating a character from 0, at least from the point of view of whoever writes this article, especially if the intention is for the imitation to be as accurate as possible.

Recreating Major Gooding

So let’s start at the beginning… we’re going to design Major Gooding, before he became Lord Malice, for a flashback animation. So let’s “hunt” the reference images directly from the source: the CGI FMV of Sarge’s War

The kitchen that brings back memories, the perspective of Hawk
Sarge’s War ending, the perspective of Gooding / Lord Malice

We have 2 640×480 blurry CGI scenes where we see Lord Malice’s past, when he was Major Gooding. One is Sarge Hawk’s point of view when he arrives at the kitchen that brings back his memories, the other is Malice’s point of view before he dies, when he tells Hawk what really happened. From these 2 scenes we captured the following images…

Another source of reference could be the 3D model of Lord Malice that we fought at the end of the game. But that is a topic for the second part, perhaps.

Recreating original Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

In this case we have the reference illustrations for Alice’s original design, from which we will create the 3D modeling

…Creating…? Bullseye

Bullseye is the latest addition to the Bravo Company Commandos, seen only in RTS. Although he has an in-game model and a piece of concept art, we never saw his CGI look like the rest. So here’s an exploration of how we’ll get his look.

Anyway, we’ve spoken directly with RTS designers, and through them and the obvious on-screen, the look of the Commando’s Ice Man will be almost the same as in-game, as the in-game models are based on the CGI models.

Army Men Toyverse 3D models

3D models Showroom

Characters, vehicles, weapons and other 3D models for the project. Below is a series of galleries showing some of the 3D models for Revolution and the rest of the Army Men Toyverse projects.

Characters

Vehicles

Making of 3D models & 3D printing

Weapons

Objects

Revolution assets library

The assets of the game will be a lot, but for the most part they will be the same three-dimensional geometry with different textures, as in the case of the Real World assets.

We will try to make each door, each wall, each window and each wooden furniture different, using an algorithm that will modify the location of the textures so that even if they have the same assigned texture, will be different, using mirror and rotated coordinates.

But the most important feature of these 3D assets will be that they will be made up of 2 layers of textures, not just one. And we are not referring to the different images that make a texture (diffuse specular map, opacity map, bump, reflection, self illumination, etc.) but will be made up of 2 textures, one on top of the other, with a system of opacity that will allow the texture from above to show certain characteristics of the texture from below, always talking about the order in which they will be positioned.

A texture will be the one that will have the details of the object, such as depth or any inescapable characteristic such as the hole for the key. The other texture will fulfill the function of color, surface texture and imperfections.