Hey all, a question for you;

I'm just finished in Uni, and I really enjoyed the classes I took in OpenGL, and have some nice demos of lighting effects, dynamic cubemapping, volumetric shadows, global illumination, deferred rendering, and a few more topics, and I'm currently looking to get employed in this area, however I'm a really crap artist. I'm looking to put together a kind of demo reel where I show what I've done to send out with my CV, but the assets that I'm using in my demos at the minute look awful (most of them are implemented with one crate texture, a brick texture, a rigged human supplied to me by my university, and a checkerboard texture) and to be honest I'm not happy putting together my work like this.

I was wondering if anyone here would be able to point me in the direction of some Hi-Quality 3D meshes and textures that I can use for non-commercial purposes? I'd be happiest with some items that I can attribute the author for (Creative commons I think?) as the source code will be shared too, so the authors will receive full credit in all of the readmes and in the video.

I've tried turbosquid, but the stuff just looks like garbage most of the time. I like the idea of taking some assets from games I've been playing, but I'm not sure of the legality of it, or even how I would go about extracting assets from games.

Regarding formats, I have a custom loader for every format under the sun (except .MAX but I can re-export as FBX) so I don't care/

Hope you can help!

They're awesome. I assume I'm free to use them? I can't find any licensing info on the site. I came across tf3dm.com too, but a lot of the models seem to be ripped from games, is it cool to use that stuff? and if it is, do you know how I'd go about extracting some other assets from games I own?

Fair enough, thought it was worth asking. I'll stick to what I get on that site so.

Cheers.

Imrod is frequently used in tech demos:

The files can be found here: http://www.parkparkin.com/gallery/imrod_dw.html

That last asset is awesome, however I currently have nothing that would go well with him. I guess I could texture my water as lava, and try find a dark skybox, but I'd like a nice backdrop for him, he would make a cool scene.

As an aside, is there anywhere I can download animations that I can import into max for a rigged biped character?

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/data/meshes.xml Has lots of the standard graphics models (sponza, sibenik, dragon, buddha, etc)

tell me what you think about this, if you have the time, just the way i think about things...

even if your getting a job, become an artist yourself, and youll be more qualified for a more creative position! i always believed in that, and thats what i did... i dont agree with programmers making games. (which are toys, which are functional art for kids at heart) but dont want to get any art skills, because what are you going to do? screw up the look of the game by uncoordinated animation functions? i guess all youd have is some boring dirt shovelling job loading assets, theres no way they ever trust an unartistic guy to make a map editor, im positive, cause you dont know the tools an artist needs to make things look swish!

your scientific knowledge about colours, calculus (functions), tool internals, even the interface, will help you a great deal in even making a picture. and you see it every day, where a company will pick from a set of concepts and base scenes around the coolest concepts what artists supply the team... you can make your game drab and real, but it can be fun with funner colours, and thats what learning making colour pictures can help you understand how to do.

p.s. my little brother doesnt believe me, but 3dcoat supples you a load of greebles you can just plot together, for childlike mechanical modelling, like planes, desert buggies and futuro buildings, and its great for junkyards too... as long as you write a high to low converter, and thats good practice, cause they look dated now, but they are still the way to do it, normal map importing is WAY easier than a full displacement map importer, that would totally screw me around for 2 weeks making one of those, unless you go for a cheap impostering alternate method. (like plane blasting...) if youve got a fast computer you can even make quite a *largish* environment you can just brute force if youve got an average video card. (like a 760) always but the latest number on the left, before the right two, because its got the new model capabilities.

heres an example of one i made, it doesnt look that good up close but trust me i didnt even have to try that much.