I am very pleased to have contributed to Halo 2 Anniversary while I was at Microsoft Studios. I was responsible for creating the in game Master Chief and Hunter. Halo 2 Anniversary, and indeed the whole Master Chief Collection, looks great. I can't wait to pick up my copy and start playing!
Master Chief © Microsoft
Model, textures, pose and render by Joel Mongeon
Created using modo, dDo, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag
Hunter © Microsoft
Model, textures, pose and render by Joel Mongeon
Created using modo, dDo, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag
Part of my job as Senior Artist at Microsoft Studios was to investigate new and innovative tools and techniques to share with our partners. I modeled Master Chief using a 3D modeling package called modo created by The Foundry. I also modeled the Hunter using modo and a brand new plugin called MeshFusion. The following review was written as an overview of MeshFusion for video game artists. I hope you find it interesting and makes you want to give MeshFusion for modo a try.
MeshFusion review
Creating amazing shapes with ease
Joel Mongeon
9/15/2014
This will be an overview and review of MeshFusion which is a real-time Boolean plug-in for the Foundry’s modo. MeshFusion was created by the team that created the stand alone modeling tool Groboto. I used the Hunter from Halo 2 anniversary as a test case for using MeshFusion in production. Aside from a few small issues I will detail later, using MeshFusion made modeling the armor for the Hunter very easy and enjoyable. I found as long as I broke down each part into simple base shapes, I was able to quickly build up a complex models.
Hunter armor from Halo 2 Anniversary
In this example I modeled a very simple boot shape. I then created two “cutter” shapes for the front and back of the boot. As you can see in the after image, the Boolean operation created a very clean cut along the front and back of the boot. If I were to do this with a box modeling approach I would have to worry about beveling edges and edge loops to maintain a sharp edge without affecting the surface of the underlying boot shape. MeshFusion visually shows how the Booleans are created with either a nifty 3D tree in the viewport or with a node based schematic view. The nice thing about this visual queue is that you can drag and drop new items into it or re-arrange how items contribute to a Boolean operation, everything remains live and editable. You can even alter the base shapes and everything up the Boolean chain will update.
Simple shapes combined to create complex results
Results in wireframe and viewport smoothing
View of final boot with MeshFusion 3D trees
I use the resulting MeshFusion mesh strictly as my high resolution model and retopologize my game model on top of that. The MeshFusion model is then used for baking Normal, AO, Surface ID and Cavity maps that will later be used for texturing purposes.
Final game mesh
The Good
- MeshFusion works with subd models: MeshFusion works with any subdivision model that is comprised of quads. N-gons are not supported and tris will slow things down considerably. MeshFusion also ships with over 40 preset meshes that can be mixed together.
- Real-time Booleans: Creating a Boolean with MeshFusion is not a destructive operation. Each Boolean remains live and each item that makes up a Boolean can be altered at any time. You can also change how an item contributes to a Boolean operation by dragging the preview item in the tree view or schematic view. Items can be additive, subtractive or intersect.
- Edit strips: Each intersection created by a Boolean gets a control spline created for it. These control splines lets you edit the width, profile and smoothness of each intersection.
- Output watertight mesh: The final mesh output from MeshFusion is watertight. This is ideal for baking clean normal maps. Watertight meshes are also a requirement for 3d printing which might be useful to some modelers. The transitions between the original mesh and Boolean does tend to add strips of triangles, however that does not really matter as the shading normals come out perfectly smooth.
The Bad
- Denser mesh creates smoother results: This is not a huge concern of mine, but I have found that some mesh items do need to be subdivided once or twice to create a nice result in MeshFusion. Since I use MeshFusion models as my high poly mesh, the polycounts don’t really matter. However, scenes do tend to get large with huge amounts of MeshFusion models. So how you manage your scene/s becomes important. You may want to split different parts of your model into separate files to keep files sizes down and interactivity up.
- Small holes in final mesh: I have noticed the odd missing triangle on some of my final MeshFusion items. This is easily fixed by selecting open borders and filling them with a polygon. Newer versions of the plugin should correct for this.
- Item organization: MeshFusion does not do any automatic grouping of mesh items for the user. This is probably my biggest complaint about the plugin. I end up with a few hundred mesh items in my scenes which took a while to manage. I would prefer if MeshFusion took items that comprise a MeshFusion Boolean and group them together.
- Price: MeshFusion is not a free plugin, it costs $395 on top of the price of modo. Depending on how often you do hard surface modeling, it might be too pricey.
This review is (c) of Microsoft Studios
...Finally, to keep this a 3D printing blog:
jhosin
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