Update 2010/8/28: Here are some older articles and tutorials I’ve written. I think I wrote the last one in very early 2008, before I went to BioWare. I was young and naive, and technology has changed.
Tutorials
- Character Creation with 3dsmax: 7 video tutorials, covering the creation of a model/unit for Rome: Total War video game. A tutorial I did a couple years ago, that is a good introduction to 3dsmax. You can get more details and download mirrors by following the link.
- Photoshop and Photosourced Texture Creation: 4 video tutorials for an online class covering: introduction to Photoshop CS2 (lesson 1), photo editing (lesson 2), creating nice diffuse maps (lesson 3), and extracting specular and normal maps from the diffuse texture (lesson 4). You can get to the download links and additional material (suggested reading and resources) from here: Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3, Lesson 4.
- maxScript Direct-X Scripted Material Plug-in: A tutorial on an absolutely essential and all-too-overlooked pipeline feature for any 3dsmax technical artist. First I give an overview of the scripted plugins and what they are used for, and then pick apart an example (but in-depth) scripted material plugin.
Shaders and Rendering
- Shaders, an Artistic Mathematical Overview: An article I wrote that is an introduction to the mathematical aspect of shaders, lighting, and normal mapping. A must read for any 3D artist.
- Beveling: An article about beveling vs. hard normals, and the shader/programming ideas behind them.
- Parallax Mapping Overview: An article going over methods of Parallax Mapping, nomenclature, and how they differ.
- Blood and Iron Material System Documentation: Thorough documentation for Blood and Iron’s shader-based material system and pipeline.
Misc Articles
- Blood and Iron Postmortem: A retrospective on my senior thesis project.
- Good Game: Aldo’s last thoughts on Blood and Iron
- Easy Script Deployment: A very simple way for small to mid-sized studios to deploy their scripts easily, only requiring some maxScripting.
