Burke Bugs

This was my first real 3D project. I actually started the project in a program called Hash Animation Master. I had everything modeled and ready to go and for several reasons, was unable to get it to animate and reder properly. I exported all of the models to 3D Studio and finished it there. 3D Studio didn't have a whole lot of features at that point ( this is one of the DOS versions remember) but one thing it always exceled at was fast rendering. Having that quick feedback made it possible to do hundreds of iterations on the textures and lighting.

Since I was a total newbie when I started this I ran into a bunch of issues but it really helped me to learn the process of 3D animation from start to finish.

One of the problems I ran into was the ill effects of colored lights. I threw in some colored lights at the beginning of the project. I liked the look I got but it really created havok when trying to adjust the colors of the textures. I wasn't able to adjust the colors of the bugs with any kind of precision. There were so many different-colored lights in such a small area that the lighting setup became very fragile and slight changes to the textures gave unexpected results.

Since then, I've only edited textures using white lights. It seems obvious now.

One of my very first finished projects

If you can get all of the textures to look good in simple, white, bare-bones lighting then you can make them look amazing when you put them in a more sophisticated lighting setup.

Another problem I ran into was that the scene only looked good from certain distances. The textures on the worm, for instance, only looked good from far away when much of the texture was filtered out of the material. When zoomed in, the worm just looked awful. I now make it a point to always view shaders from different distances. A good shader will hold up when viewed large and small.