Jr.Who - W.I.P. - Chess Match
 

Jeez, it's been a while since I did a project without a tut! I was walking around my house thinking of something to model (as Steve recommended) and the one thing that stuck out at me was my chess set. My sister bought it for me about a year ago in Mexico. It's a pretty nice hand-made marble set, with a lot of detail in it. I really wanted to use ZB3 on this, but I guess I'll have to suffer doing it the old fashioned way. :(

I also just happen to be reading the book "Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How A Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine" for school. For those of you who don't know, Bobby Fischer was a genius chess player (best one to come out of America) and was the one that finished the Soviet's many reigning (35+ I think) years over chess. My dad talked about him a lot, and was a big fan of him.

I'm going for 2 shots. The first one is just a basic chess setup, the second is going to be the end of "The Game of the Century". "The Game of the Century" was a match between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer, when he was 13-years old.

I took a bunch of reference pics, but for most of the modeling I'll just look at the pieces in my hand, which already feels kinda cool to actually touch the object you're modeling. :D

For the rendering, I'm gonna try some ambient occlusion renders (they look so good, always wanted to try them out), but when I get to the texturing I'm going to take a stab at Maxwell (hence the reason I told Andreas I'd need his help in particular).

-Steven Palmesano
:beer:

Close-up of the pawn's smoothed mesh (before the detailing begins):

And 3 of the references:

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...g?t=1204575551

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...g?t=1204575552

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...g?t=1204575552

Cool man,

Not using Z will help you out a lot to be honest, with setting up a nice base mesh/ and UV map that you can then later detial in Z or texture to add the detials to it.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Good luck with this, I'll be glad to help out with any Maxwell questions.

awesome idea Steve.
That looks like the tinyest marble chess set ever. but its got some neat, yet simple looking details.

Can't wait to see what you craft up!

-Alexander

Awesome, thanks! I'll probably need some help around when I'm almost done modeling. I'm thinking of looking at the Think! site for some tuts. Do you know if they're any good?

Yeah, it is small. The only bad thing about the set is that the bishops look like pawns, so I'll have to modify them a bit. The good thing is, my opponents get confused with the pieces. :D

Never heard of Think!...

You've never heard of it? Maybe they changed the name?

http://think.maxwellrender.com/

Oh.. wow.. never knew saw that part of the site, might come in handy for me too, so thanks :D

Thats a very cool chess set. This should be a cool project.

Looking forward to seeing this progress.

Good Luck!

Well, all was well today, I fixed a bunch of problems, moving along, etc.… then, I inserted an edge loop to test something, and Maya gave me the cursed "Undo Queue Is Turned Off" bug. After about 15 seconds of turning on the Queue, and pressing the undo/redo to figure out a good spot, my object disappeared. It had an object there (the manipulator tool was on something), but it was gone. So I quickly saved it under anther name and then it randomly crashed.

Anyway, I lost a bunch of work, but at least I know how to fix some of the problems I was having. I'm too mad to open Maya back up now, but hopefully I'll post some updates tomorrow. :headbang:

Here's the update on the pawn. Almost done with the bottom, which is probably the toughest part on him. I still need to finish up the top part and fix some of the edges. I'm going to make 3 different pawns, but for the rest of the pieces, I'm just going to use the same ones.

Are you using "harden edges" on a sub-d surface? Just wondering because the right image doesn't match up the left with a regular smooth.

No, I never use SubDs anymore. It's just the smooth mesh preview.

About done with the first pawn (unless someone points out something about it). The poly count is at 1098. It's weird working on something unsymmetrical, I keep taking it the cautious way, but then it doesn't look right. I'm not going to get too worried about the seams, just gonna hope that texturing covers it up a bit. ;)

Got a friend coming over tonight, but I'm gonna try to finish the other 2 (or just 1) before the night ends.

1 Down 8 to go ;)

Though I have to be honest (and I think your know this) but the model is pretty sloppy. I mean no offense, but allot of the edges aren't straight, and your have tons of creases running up the model. Now like you said your not really bothered by it, so it doesn't matter.

Anyway, Looking forward to seeing the other pieces.

Good luck, and have fun :beer:

The edges are supposed to be going in at the top, so that might be what looks weird. This marble is not smooth, too, so I don't expect them to be perfect. A ton of seams? I see 2 big ones, and the more I look at the pawn, they're supposed to be there.

Still, there was supposed to be a couple more details, but there's no way I can do them without ZB. :(

Finished with the 3 pawns. Together, their total poly count is 3224. I think I might start working on the rooks (gonna make 2 different versions) tonight, as they should be very easy.

you didn't actually take the time to model all three of those, did you? i'd think taking one, duplicating it, and then manipulating them using a lattice would be the best way to do it.

LOL, no way! I keep duping them as I go, that way if I screw up really bad, I have something to go back to.

Finished with the rook. I was looking at a couple of them, and they look exactly the same, so I'm just gonna stick with one model for now. The poly count for this one is 656.

I've got 2 weeks left with the modeling part of this project and Brawl comes out this Sunday, so I will most likely extend the deadline. ;)

I thought that the knight was going to be a lot harder, but I got it finished tonight. The poly count is at 1039.

The bishop, queen, and king are basically big pawns with some adjustments, so they shouldn't be too hard.

Seems like I'm going to finish this one early, so I'm thinking of modeling a chess table and a pair of chairs.

Sorry for the extremely slow update. Brawl is amazing and has been keeping me very busy. Finished off all the pieces in the last couple of days. The poly count on the bishop is at 1104, the queen is at 1726, and the king is at 1394.

Need to get this finished on Friday. I sure hope that a table and chairs aren't that hard. :D

Looking pretty good.

Do the actual pieces have the edges in the up right areas (not the edges but the bits invbetween (hope that makes sense!)

Could you circle that part in something like PS for me?

Here you go

Yeah, those are supposed to be there. I'm not too worried, as the texture should hide them, anyway.

these are really starting to look great jr who.
Can't wait to see this project when its all done! and as you start to model the heads for each piece too. I guess thats an important part haha.

Umm... why are they supposed to be there if the texture should hide them...?

Thanks, but… what do you mean about the heads? These pieces are finished.

They're there, but the texture should make them a lot less obvious. In the real thing, there's more detail (in the front), but I can't do it without ZB.

Anyway, got a bunch of the blocking out done on the table last night (sorry, no pic :( ) and I'm going to try to finish that and move onto the chair today.

Bet you you could if you thought about it.

I've thought about it and tried it, but it looks really messy.

Not even with a disp map?

If he gonna use a displacement map he might aswell do the displacement map in ZBrush....

…

Exactly. I am beginning to hate Pixologic a little more every time I work on this project…

Jeez, this table is proving harder than I thought, I keep discovering little details to put in. I don't even want to know how bad the chairs are going to be! Need to put a lot more work into this one…

Here's the current progress:

Here's a close-up of the bottom of the table. This is going to be a pain, cause in my reference it looks like it all meshes together, though I might just leave it separate so that I don't have to mess with booleans. ;)

I don't know though… what would be better, joining it and screwing around with booleans, or leaving them separate?

Why If he aint got it then work round it... Sledge hammer to crack a nut... Plus Jrwho will get used to the workflow of adding a disp map to it and rendering, using a simple map over a full 32 bit floating point map.

Woah, I can't believe it's been that long since my last update! Finally got the modeling finished. The HD renders took a half an hour a piece, so I should be prepared for the Maxwell renders now. :D

If you look on my site, you’ll find the HD pics (which I would highly recommend doing).

-Steven