Pomperi

Whenever I do bevels for my lowpolys I use the regular bevels in maya that creates triangles in the corners. 

This way each face has its own vertex corners, so that the bevel face will average between the flat surfaces. To set up the smoothing properly in this case, just smooth all the normals of the mesh. If you toggle the vertex normal display (Display>Polygons>Vertex Normal) you should get a result like this:

You can see that all the smoothed faces have averaged vertex normals, which makes the whole thing look smudgy. The best approach imo to set up the vertex normals properly is to base them on the face normals of the big flat surfaces. The way I do this is by selecting all the faces i want to base my smoothing on.

I then run a script that I posted here on mapcore () and it sets all the vert normals.

This will give you a correct smoothing, which works well with baking as well as for objects where you can't bake down individual normal maps for supporting the smoothing.

You should definitely check out the migNormalTools as HP pointed out. It has some really neat features, as well as a good interface for toggeling and controling the visibility of your normals

Hehe, thanks guys

kikette: Glad you like it!

I'm currently trying to re-write the script in OpenMaya to make it a bit faster. Also trying to come up with a good way to maintain hard edges, as it's quite cumbersome whenever you want to keep hard edges intact when setting up the vertex normals for a mesh. I think the best way workflow-wise is to set up hard and soft edges before manipulating the vert normals (meaning you would simply soften the whole mesh if you don't want any hard edges) then run the script and wherever there's a split, the vert normal will be set for each face individually.

If anyone have any suggestions, that would be awesome!

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to share a script I've done for Maya to quickly be able to set the vertex normals based on the face normals. I know there are a few ways to do this within native maya, as well as a few scripts, but I haven't been able to find one which averages the normals for verts shared by multiple selected faces. This can be quite annoying when setting up curved or round surfaces.

For 3ds max there's a great script called GetVertNormalFromFace which does this. What mine does is essentially the same but in Maya. Just make a face selection of the faces you want to set the vert normals for and run the script.

To run the script, just paste into the script editor as python and drag it to a shelf, or set it up as a hotkey

Here's the script:

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# - pompVertNormFaceAvg

#

# - Sets the vertex normals of a face selection,

#   averaging normals shared by multiple selected faces.

#

#

# - by Pontus Karlsson 2013 (www.pomperi.com)

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


import maya.cmds as cmds


faces = cmds.filterExpand(sm=34, ex=True)

verts = cmds.ls((cmds.polyListComponentConversion(faces, ff=True, tv=True)), flatten=True)

normals = [[], [], []]


for v in verts:

    conFaces = cmds.ls(cmds.polyListComponentConversion(v, fv=True, tf=True), flatten=True)

    shaFaces = list(set(conFaces).intersection(set(faces)))

    faceNorm = cmds.polyInfo(shaFaces, fn=True)


    for normal in faceNorm:

	    label, vertex, x, y, z = normal.split()

	    normals[0].append(float(x))

	    normals[1].append(float(y))

	    normals[2].append(float(z))


    x_avg = (sum(normals[0]) / len(shaFaces))

    y_avg = (sum(normals[1]) / len(shaFaces))

    z_avg = (sum(normals[2]) / len(shaFaces))


    cmds.select(v)

    cmds.polyNormalPerVertex(xyz = (x_avg, y_avg, z_avg))


    normals[:] = [[], [], []]


cmds.select(cl=True)

I hope someone finds it useful

Gratz Will! Nice to see you found your way to Crytek

Hey man! Stay strong and good luck with them bionic balls!

That scene is the bee's knees. Very very nice

Haven't posted any updates on this for quite a while, but I'm still working on it. Been redoing the turbine thing in the middle to make it a bit more interesting with finer details than the previous one. I've also started a highpoly for a monitor.

Done some more changes to the lighting and the materials as well:

fuckin hell dude, that's some serious hard surface modeling! Looks ace man

Didn't see this thread until now, 5 pages later Once again, big congrats, we're really happy to have you.

I hope you'll find a good place to stay. Shared house isn't that bad, it all comes down to what kind of people you get to share with, and that's always a bit random since people come and go. I pay around £370 for my room, and it's a decent size room in a 4 room house with living room and a big garden. The cool thing about living near the science park though is that most tenants are young professionals, often with different nationalities. My worst case scenario so far was a Lithuanian guy who was really high and stayed up all night watching recorded live performances of a band called Earth Wind and Fire with the volume at max. When I got up for work the day after he was still downstairs watching, laughing at how funny their clothes were.

I can ask around and see if there's anyone at work who's got a spare room, so that you can stay with frontier people and minimize the risk of getting utter weirdos.

Hahaha, my first thought as well

Really badass stuff dude! Nicely put together with a nice sense of location. My only crit would be that the rocks feel a bit blackened, spongy and monotonous. Reads a bit like old dry rubber. I'd imagine the black details to be less all over the place and more towards the bottom, and having some nice subtle hues coming through the material.

Like it a lot so far!

Mino: I agree about the materials. Seems like you're not the only one who think they look like concrete They are actually quite shiny with a high gloss and spec, but you can't really tell, especially with the bent walls as you never get a good viewing angle to catch the spec. Might also be the diffuse texture that's too noisy. Gonna see if I can get the materials right and will try to get a few monitors in there. Cheers dude

jaboo: Thanks man! Not 100% about the blue light. It gives a nice contrast, but it kind of gives the impression of being outdoors skylight caused by the atmosphere, which is a bit since it's in space and there are no windows.

ShadoW_: Cheers dude

JeanPaul: Hehe, I tried it out but I couldn't make it look right. Maybe I'm doing it wrong :derp:

Term!nator525: lol, you're not making it easy it for me

Some tiny progress on this:

Just dumped the highpoly of this turbine thing I'm working on into UDK. Unwrapping the lowpoly and tweaking the lighting again at the moment.

have a good one

jaboo: Haha you sure know your pipes thanks for the refs

Insane: I kinda like some parts of that lighting as well, it's just a mess trying to combine a nice high radiosity look some nice deep shadows, to get a nice sense of volume for the bigger objects. Will keep pushing the lighting til I'm pleased though. Did a new light test last night, not sure if it's in the right direction or not:

PogoP: Well, short answer is I don't still have some nasty seams to get rid of, but in general, the more space you give your lightmap uvs and depending on the lightmap resolution for the mesh, the better result you get. Tiling the textures and having enough padding for your textures (or simply turning of your mipmaps if you're feeling dirty) can also help, depending on what kind of seam it is you're getting.

That's cool jaboo, I'm totally getting one of them panels. I also intend to make the yellow blob in the middle into a more industrial piece, like a turbine or something like that.

cheers mate

Yeah, looks totally sweet so far! Looking forward to see where you're taking this with the textures. Keep us posted

Cheers guys Gonna try to incorporate more color in the scene, just don't want to add details that'll make it too busy. I've been thinking about getting some paralaxing details in there, just want to avoid too much grating as it's somewhat a typical sci-fi cliché . Maybe I could replace some of the floors next to the walkway with some good ol' grating.

Got some progress on this:

New lighting and some new pipes

And two of the pipe materials that i've set up with spec etc. Will probably do the same to the panels tomorrow.

Oh, yeah I forgot to mention it earlier, but you're right deceiver, it's the UDK

works here in the UK apparently

That's a very good point Jenn0, cheers for that

Small update on this, got some more diffuse texture work done

Been trying to get the light looking more interesting, but for some reason it looks worse for every change I make This is the new approach i tried, but to be honest i'm not really happy with it. It does give the scene a bit more of a focus point though when highlighting the yellow machinery bit... hmm...

Nice corridor man reminds me of a corridor

LOL

get back to work Pontus! seems like all the Frontier artists are doing some gritty stuff to contrast everything they are doing at work.

As far as the scene, looks good but needs a tiny amount of specular on the metal, it looks a bit like matte plastic. Im actually working on some nice clean models like that too.

There's only so much cuteness a human can take. None of the materials have any spec maps yet, want to get a bulk of assets in before I start polishing the whole thing.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I really appreciate it

Wanted to do something I haven't done in a long time, a classic space corridor : D

Spent around two weeks on this so far, so there are still lots of work left and lots of bits need texturing etc.

So far I've found it very stimulating doing some good ol' gritty stuff and not just funny looking cat statues. Would love to have you guys' feedback on this

Good job dude!

Not much to add really. A well rounded, content rich solid portfolio with simple navigation. My only suggestion would be to change the font for the text to a sans serif font to make it look less busy, but that's nitpicking.

the perfect game for the family home console.

poor kids playing their mario games the day after, not knowing where their parents had the wii-motes

That's looking brilliant warby! Very nice style

Color grading and Explosions - The Game

Looks pretty fun though, although a bit confusing

Thanks guys, glad you like it

I still have a few more Kinectimals pieces to add to it, but overall I'm pretty pleased with it. Pink banner isn't too gay or anything is it?