Little hyperbole, but I'm certainly not as good as I could be if I just put a little more effort in.
Best advice I can give for starting to model - ditch Blender for 3Ds Max as soon as you can. Max is standard and much more useful to learn, and not necessarily any more complicated. It's what we use, it's what Relic uses, it's what at least 50% of the games industry use.
There are plenty of beginner tutorials out there on various websites, a hell of a lot more than when I was starting out. I can't really send you in the direction of one that might be particularly useful because everybody learns differently.
I started out on a crappy tutorial (at least looking back on it) making buildings for Sim City 4, but that game is a hell of a lot more forgiving than pretty much any other modern game. While SC4 did use 3D as a base for it's content, it only displayed 2D images on 'Lots' rendered at different angles and at different distances using a specific lighting set up. I was allowed to be sloppy with SC4, you can't be sloppy with a modern game otherwise you're going to have a whole heap of problems.
Top 10 things you should learn when dealing with 3D in Max is -
1. The interface. Nearly all beginner tutorials go over this, probably the most boring part of explaining how to model since it doesn't really cover any modelling, but important nonetheless.
2. Basic shape creation. Poly's, Tri's, Primitives, Chamfers, Extrusions, Bridging, Inserts, Constraints, Axis/Planar aligning, Cuts, Slices, Quick loops... don't get hung up too much on the jargon, just learn what they do.
3. Converting primitives to editable Poly or Mesh (virtually no difference). Selecting/Editing Vertex's, Edge's, Border's, Polygon's, Element's. You use these all the time in modelling, they all have different functions in the model making process so it's handy to know what each do.
4. Smoothing groups. If you get these right you're automatically better than 90% of modellers in the CoH community (1 out of 1 DMz's agree)
5. Optimise your models. Poly/Tri limiting is of utmost importance if you want a game to run smoothly, traditionally the most Tris in a CoH1 Tank is about 5000. EF pushes the boundaries a little since CoH is a decade old now, but still you generally don't want a model to reach over 7000 tris. Delete all backfaces and polygons that are not visible, every little Poly or tri removed is an extra piece of computing power saved. (∞ out of ∞ DMz's agree)
6. UV mapping. I ran away from this when I first saw it because it looks intimidating as fuck. It's really not - just find a tutorial, get on with it and learn.
7. Texturing and Learning Photoshop. Plenty on this subject, you'll need another external program to do this step properly, primarily Photoshop. A very time consuming process if you don't know what you're doing, but you're not going to get texturing without it.
9. Materials. Learn what Diffuse, Specular, Glossiness and Normal maps are. Then make some.
10. Model what you see. Don't just throw some shapes together and call it finished - gather reference material, download blueprints, play games, study game environments and assets, look at how models are made and textured, that sort of stuff. Might take a while, but you'll get there.
Most of all, you shouldn't feel put off because you're just starting out and you feel like you're never going to learn anything, everybody starts somewhere man. If you stick at it, you will learn it. If you watch tutorials, make models and textures, no matter how crude, you will learn. If you do this every day, you'll improve dramatically. Don't expect to be cranking out AAA quality straight away, like everything it takes time, it take patience, but it's never not worth doing because you feel like you're not learning or it's too intimidating.
If you're really interested I could try recording myself making a new weapon tomorrow, I probably won't cover the basics or texturing, but I can explain what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, it might give you an overall view of what to expect. Hell, it might actually make me focus on my work.
Last edited October 15, 2016 at 3:07 AM by Steve 'Burro' M.
