The random model thread!

kanine01 ; Your asset looks great but why do you put more resolution in smaller part and not bigger one ? The main purple part looks very low poly compared to the rest =s

Kikette is right. If anything should be the other way around especialy since the player will see more from the back of that gun then the front (which most likely he will never properly see ingame).

this is a gun ? i was thinking more like a sci/fi fuel dispenser

It's a plasma torch. I've gotta try harder on getting my topology and polygon distribution more solid. Also yes, I totally should be using a smaller texture for it. I'm moving on to a more extensive project, so I'm going to put that to use. Thank you for the constructive criticism!

You are working hard and improving fast, keep it up

Some baking exercise in between:

[Blocked Image: http://mathiswidrat.com/images/hardsurface/halodoor_01.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://mathiswidrat.com/images/hardsurface/halodoor_03.jpg]

Looks good but isn't that just a carbon copy of an existing Halo 4 door? I've seen it before. As a baking test this is ok but be careful about putting it on your portfolio. You don't want to be accused of plagiarism.

Quote from PogoP

Looks good but isn't that just a carbon copy of an existing Halo 4 door? I've seen it before. As a baking test this is ok but be careful about putting it on your portfolio. You don't want to be accused of plagiarism.

You're right, it's based on a door from halo (that guy in particular). Said so on the description on my website, so I hope there won't be any problems.

I see a few baking errors... did you set your low poly to 1 smoothing group by any chance?

You might also want to consider nDo for this kind of stuff, I don't see any shapes there that couldn't be made faster and easier with nDo. If you want to really practice baking, go bat shit crazy with the hipoly and get the most mileage out of it possible, right now you only have some simple shapes that take a lot more time to bake than to do by hand in nDo

nDo is not just for tilable sci-fi panels, you can use it pretty much for anything environment related.

Ouch, so much baking issue =s I think you should fix the shading of your lowpoly first by tweaking smoothing group or adding Hard edge. I guess you smoothed everthing and throw the result into Xnormal but it's not the best way to get a nice render. By doing this, you get lots of triangle and gradient into your normalmap and it'll never be enough to fix the shading of your object.

About the texture, try to have some fun with the specular map. It'll reveals nice details with light and gives a stronger ID to your metal than a Generic colored Sci-fi metal.

[Edit] Oups ! i didn't see your post minos. Sorry =s

Guys, I'm on my way to bake a normal of my x-com rifle but as I'm reading I'll gonna make it wrong Should I set smoothing groups to 1 and add support edges so the gradients will be fine or maybe set custom smoothing groups and get hard edges - maybe there' a better tool to bake? xNormal will do the job?

x normal is great, at this point without seeing you LP it's hard to say, but i would think that the rule of thumb will be make hard edges and uv splits

Quote from seir

Guys, I'm on my way to bake a normal of my x-com rifle but as I'm reading I'll gonna make it wrong Should I set smoothing groups to 1 and add support edges so the gradients will be fine or maybe set custom smoothing groups and get hard edges - maybe there' a better tool to bake? xNormal will do the job?

I think that if you want to add geometry, make directly a bevel instead of a support loop. It'll help your final object to be a little more defined on edge.

When your object is well baked, hard edge or not, you won't be able to see any Uv seam at the distance your object is supposed to be seen =) Personaly, I do 2 baking, one with a splitted cage on hard edge to be sure that the projection is coplanar to my faces (it avoid subtle gradient that become noisy with compression) and a second one with a 1 piece smooth cage to get back my information where I had gaps with the first bake. It takes about 5 min more to do, but the result is just perfect.

The hazy knowledge of normal map baking, that age old aspect of env art

Quote from Minos

I see a few baking errors... did you set your low poly to 1 smoothing group by any chance?

Nah no way, I might should have said earlier that most errors get more visible caused by the cubemap. At first I got much more artifacts because the tga compression sucked bad^^ You also see errors at the second Ao+Nm screen?

Quote from kikette

About the texture, try to have some fun with the specular map.

Yeah currently there's no real spec at all, thx for the hint

And I didn't want to use nDo for this model because I worked quite a lot with it earlier and had some things in mind that I wanted to test without nDo, that's why everything was done with a highpoly. But most things would be easier/faster with nDo, true

Edit:

Thought you guys would like to see the Nm itself so you can give me some more specific feedback?

Oh, and a small version of all 3 maps can be found here.

[Blocked Image: http://www.abload.de/img/tex_door_01_nmmessw.jpg]

You have so much gradient on surface supposed to be flat ! This is why I think you should tweak a bit the normal of your low poly before baking. You'll tell me that normal map should fix gradient issue since there's a gradient too, but as you see in what you get, it isn't enough =s

Quote from kikette

I think that if you want to add geometry, make directly a bevel instead of a support loop. It'll help your final object to be a little more defined on edge.

When your object is well baked, hard edge or not, you won't be able to see any Uv seam at the distance your object is supposed to be seen =) Personaly, I do 2 baking, one with a splitted cage on hard edge to be sure that the projection is coplanar to my faces (it avoid subtle gradient that become noisy with compression) and a second one with a 1 piece smooth cage to get back my information where I had gaps with the first bake. It takes about 5 min more to do, but the result is just perfect.

You combine them in photoshop then if i understand correctly? It's pretty much what i tend to do, one bake with cage one without. The cage bake for edges and the other one for perfect finer details. I read it's a bad habbit tho, especialy bites you in the ass when you have to change things afterwards and rebake because of the extra work. So i'm trying to get better and doing my my cages and bakes without having to rely on photoshop. Not quite there yet but i'm getting better with every model. Just recently i learned about blockers. For some reason i never saw this mentioned anywhere. Made me feel like idiot.

Blockers? What do you mean?

You should be able to generate a decent normal map in most situations using just one bake.. Though sometimes it does require 2 if you need to explode your mesh. Especially for AO.

You know how often you get ugly artifacts from the bake picking up wrong stuff in tight places especially when you bake meshes that are not exploded? Blockers are simple planes that you put inbetween these tight spaces of your model then export as separate mesh. In xnormal right click on your low poly and load the blocker file. It's one way to get cleaner bakes, avoiding stuff that needs to be cleaned up in photoshop otherwise and saves time because you can get away with without having to explode a mesh where this method works just fine.

Oh that sounds really cool. Do you have any example images? I'm interested in looking into this!