[HP] ~ 3D Sketchbook Thread

    Quote from Skjalg

    people draw concept art of textures now?

    It's more common than you might think. Lots of the Quake 4 textures were concepted out before they were modeled, we've done some of it here as well. You're looking at things that take a lot longer to create than they used to, so you get the same iterative benefits from concepting them roughly ahead of time that you would from a scene or character or what have you.

    Exactly, check this for example:

    http://www.autodestruct.com/concept.htm

    Lot's of work was put into Quake4 concept art, which is great.

    I should definitely try and replay Quake4 from start to finish one of these days, I was too much of a Quake3 hardcore fan to enjoy Quake4 when it came out. I should try and replay it, even if it's just for the awesome art.

    Quote

    ":2t0v8z5h]

    Yeah, I did that but I had to rush it so some of the areas were left intact. it's the downside of using lot's of flotaters. The normal maps comes out clean, but one must do lot's of clean up on the AO map.

    Could you elaborate on that?

    Quote from arhurt

    Yeah, I did that but I had to rush it so some of the areas were left intact. it's the downside of using lot's of flotaters. The normal maps comes out clean, but one must do lot's of clean up on the AO map.

    Could you elaborate on that?

    The trick is to separate concave floaters and base geometry in different IDs, render out one AO map for each ID, and then combine both in photoshop. Much easier than fixing this stuff by hand. The same technique can be used to fix convex floaters. Just render one AO map with everything (floaters included) and another one with floaters only. Hope that makes sense.

    What do you mean by floaters, geometry that isn't sewed one with everything else? Also, could you show us examples of AO errors like you describe?

    Quote from Minotauro

    Yeah, I did that but I had to rush it so some of the areas were left intact. it's the downside of using lot's of flotaters. The normal maps comes out clean, but one must do lot's of clean up on the AO map.

    Could you elaborate on that?

    The trick is to separate concave floaters and base geometry in different IDs, render out one AO map for each ID, and then combine both in photoshop. Much easier than fixing this stuff by hand. The same technique can be used to fix convex floaters. Just render one AO map with everything (floaters included) and another one with floaters only. Hope that makes sense.

    Actually Minos, there's a much much easier trick that I learnt yesterday. A friend of mine told me about it, so I haven't tried yet, but basically what you do is right click on the floater and untick "Cast shadows" AND tick "backface cull". This of course, if your rendering on Max, and this settings should be used to render the AO only, for the NM put those values to default.

    If your using xnormal there's also a way, go to the Ambient Occlusion bake properties and tick "ignore backface hits".

    Happy Baking!

    Oh and for those that doesn't know what a floater is, a pic is worth a thousand words so:

    High Poly with floaters:

    [Blocked Image: http://i47.tinypic.com/s4ckr5.jpg]

    Low poly (just a box with the normal map applied to it)

    [Blocked Image: http://i46.tinypic.com/2yzlzxu.jpg]

    wow ! thanks for this thread HP and dudes. Im definitely going to use this technique on my next model !

    also HP. awesome wall section! thats badass!

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