It is amazing work! So much talent in the VP circles. Looking at the Well Walker there, I see that his right arm is quite level and the right hand forward…. now that I’ve seen that, I can’t un-see that the shadow of his arm appears to go backwards on the table’s playfield and not forward like the body shadow. ???
I made raytraced shadow maps for Dozer in full 360 degrees, meaning the Well Walker can cast a shadow in just about any direction he chose to have it. I thought he would of had the main shadow face backwards towards the back end of the table rather than forwards since the spot lights that shine from the front are the strongest light source for the walker. I think he chose to have the shadow forward simply because it’s more obvious. The shadows are all correct though in terms of how they should be cast, because it’s not like they were drawn or fabricated, they were actually shadows cast by the model onto a ‘shadow matte’. So although Dozer may have chosen to use different shadow maps at different times than I might have in relation to table lights the shadows themselves should all be correctly cast.
I’m doing a bunch of ramps and stuff for another project currently so I have to put the other two Fish Tank heads on hold for now, but I am eager to get back to work on them. Dozer hasn’t gotten back to me yet in the new year so I assume he’s still busy making his house move.
By the time I’m done replacing models and optimising some other things on the table, I estimate that I will have removed 80k-100k worth of wasted polygon faces. The Well Walker was 40k faces before now it’s around 6.5k. The first Fish tank head that I’ve just completed was about 25k faces, and now it’s just over 3k. The total faces used on the 3 heads is about 60k faces, I’m confident I can get all 3 done at around 15k faces (or less) total. The other bonus is that I can provide texture swaps for the green lighting, and now the fish tank heads will actually resemble their real world counter parts! The old models were great to get the table going, but I’m just able to achieve more professional results with the workflow I’ve recently adopted. With this new work flow I’d like to try to tackle every ‘character-type’ toy I can find for VP, to name a few, I’d like to update my Frankenstein model, I’d like to model the Bronto Crane from Flintstones, I’m almost done updating the T-Rex from JPark, among others. So if anyone can think of table toys that are character-like, feel free to bring it to my attention and hopefully we can find some nice resources.
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