Art

So, you want to be a game developer but you have zero artistic talent, welcome to me. There's a few choices you can make, most of them suck.

At first I thought I could just buy all the art assets I would need to make a dumb game, so I started looking at the places I could buy assets from. You have a few choices. The unity asset store which has a ton of stuff but well, it's for unity (although i'm sure you could import some of them into UE4). Or you could use the Unreal marketplace but it just started and assets are pretty limited. Or you could buy models directly from Turbosquid but they can get pricey real quick. There's always OpenGameArt but, well, you get what you pay for.

All of the above suffer from the following; Either they are expensive, or you're artistic style will be a haphazard mess of objects that don't look at all alike. Artistic style in games is well, pretty critical. I came to the conclusion, I'd rather have shitty ridiculous looking models provided they generally followed a particular look.

So, I decided to make my own models, it's probably important to know the process anyways as a game developer (I assume) because so much of your code is going to be dealing with objects and their materials. A while back when I was doing my PunkBuster hacking, I used WebGL and threejs to do my presentation in 3D. I was using blender back then and well, it almost feels like the eclipse of 3d modeling programs (which if you are familiar with IDEs, this is not a good thing).

So I asked my friend for his copy of Maya (ha ha!), he pointed me to Softimage Mod Tool instead which is basically a full version of Softimage XSI 7.5 (pretty old, but still good). I started looking around for tutorials on how to use it because my goal was just to make a really dumb simple model, texture it, and import it into UE4. I came across this series of youtube videos by Edward Powell; part 1, part 2 and part 3. While he's importing into XNA (is that even supported any more? answer: no it's dead) the process for creating all the necessary details is the same, except we chose to export FBX files instead.

After I learned the basics of creating a model, creating the rendermap / texturemap applying the material I sought out to copy someone else's work for fun. (I guess I'm a reverse engineer by heart). I have an idea for a cartoony kids game so I was looking on Turbosquid for a simple model to copy. I came across this:

Luckily, in the viewer of turbosquid they also shared an image of the wireframe:

So that was my starting point, see if I can somewhat reproduce the tree on the right (the other trees are probably the same basic mesh but deformed on a curve). Here was my final result, after importing into UE4. I know it's terrible but hey it was my first asset so f'off.

So now that I know how to do the basics (and I mean very basic) the rest is fine tuning my skills and playing around in XSI. Another note, to learn a bit more of XSI, I signed up for a trial to DigitalTutors but I just can't justify the 20-40$ a month for a hobby that i'm dedicating only so much time to.