art test feedback/help!

How are you going to do the oven top thingy? In the highpoly its very detailed and 3d, in the lowpoly it's a box??

Also I'd suggest skipping the intendations on the body (the small gaps separating the door and stuff) and put those polys on the top part instead. I think it's too small detail to be noticed, and is better off being put into the texture.

Quote from deceiver

So I'm doing a little art test a for a Modeler position at ubisoft toronto, and was wondering what you guys thought of it so far:[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4121855/crits.jpg]

So gotta bake the high poly version back there on the 400 tris model. Usually, you should have the model all on one smoothing group right? Cause of my geo though, makes lotsss of black spots and I can't really chamfer any edges as I'm pretty close to budget right now. I should probably just redistribute it evenly so I can get cleaner single smoothing group? Right now, there's different ones and hard edges on the sides.

Anyways, gonna catch a bit of sleep, been working on it for the better part of tonight.

I don't agree at all. It's very case to case based. But when I model hard surfaced stuff like this I tend to want to keep the lowpoly smoothing as close to the highpoly look as possible. Meaning using hard eges/different smoothing groups. Yes it can get more expensive vertex count wise, but IMO it's a question of visual quality a lot of times. Sometimes you can get away with a lowpoly with only one smoothing group/only soft edges and counteract that with the normal map (you would get a lot of large gradients in the normal that will counteract the convex smoothing on your lowpoly). However, depending on the engine and what kind of lighting you have the shading on your object can look absolutely horrible. And I've seen this in a lot of games... Like pillars that are supposed to look sharp and coarse, but instead end up looking like they've been at the bottom of an ocean for several hundred years

There's also another big advantage to not have too many big gradients in your normal: You can create additional lod steps a lot easier without having to always match the exact convex smoothing you have on your first lod. I've also seen this in a lot of games where the lowpoly has probably been using only one single smoothing group and then in the additional lods chamfers etc. has been removed totally changing the shading on the object resulting in very ugly lod popping

I'd pretty much keep the smoothing you've got going there on the low, except for the front side of the handle that should be smooth.

Also if you have any hard edges like you do know you need to split those in the UV to prevent the normal from bleeding over creating a seam (sorry if you know that).

As magnar said you could probably remove those smaller lines and keep those to the normal, and instead perhaps spend those polies on creating an inside that you can see through the glass (I don't know if you're allowed to have transparancy (glass) though).

Good luck with this anyhow. Your highpoly looks nice

I agree with Philip. I never understood why people have their low poly models in one smoothing group, unless you are working on a highly organic mesh it will look horrible. The normal map also looks ugly as hell and becomes a lot more difficult to edit in photoshop because of all the large gradients.

Regarding your low poly I'd do the following:

- If you can use two maps for this, use one for the body and another for opacity mapped details

- You can save polies on the handles by using simple planes with opacity map instead of cylinders

- You can remove a few edge loops on the top part (like the one crossing the model in the middle). You could also remove the bevels on the top part, you can suggest that with the normal map.

- Do what Philip said and model the interior with the polies you saved!!

Good luck!

What about doing the burners as two planes intersecting in an X, then using transparent textures.. sorry its been a while since I've modeled and I'm not up on the nomenclature.. Basically like how you'd do trees back in the day. That'd only consume 4 tris per burner, plus whatever for the center part. It would also allow you to use fewer polys on the burner surface, since you could just have one big flat plane there instead of broken up.

Forgive me if this is all a completely stupid idea, like I said, its been a long time

I'll echo what's already been said.

Definitely don't want to use one smoothing group for the entire object. A good thing to remember is that every gradient you see on the lowpoly will appear in your normals and in this case, that would be bad.

As Philip has said, using additional edge loops on areas you want no gradient does a very nice job. Obviously this would probably put you above your budget so you simply add an edit poly modifier in your stack > add the extra loops where needed > bake > remove edit poly modifier > apply proper smoothing groups to lowres game model.

Here's what I would probably change (some have been said already):

- Make the front of the oven one face, the normals and AO should take care of the indents.

- Make the stove top one face, remove the bevels, use 6 sided cylinders (might not be enough) for the burners.

- Using planes that are alpha mapped might do the trick for the burner rails, as Twiz has suggested.

- The back piece that is above the top of the stove can also be a single face, the normals will catch that small bevel.

I'm assuming you're following a reference they gave you, correct?