Locker door lp help

S_ource

I have made this hp locker and is going to move onto the lp. And for the vents on the door i'm wondering what would be best. I want to model them so you can see through, but that might be a bit overkill? Another alternative is to use alpha but i don't think that would be good to use alpha for such a thing. Maybe its just best to do the lp flat and maybe with a bump where the vents are? If i make a whole with geometry i think it will be hard to get a mesh that got a decent polycount and also bake well. The scene its for is thought to be a fps scene and is going to ba a portfolio pice so no real limitations on this. So anyone that have a suggestion on which is best and maybey some tips for edgeflow if its a complicated geo.

JamesWild

All depends on your engine/target platform. In a lot of cases (if there were many of these in the scene) the vents might not actually be modelled at all. It doesn't look to me like modelling holes or using alpha will matter much. Unless I'm misinterpreting the shot above, the gaps are so tiny you wouldn't notice if they were just textured on.

EarthQuake

Like James says, in most cases the vents would not even be modeled into the low, let alone the gap. From the player's perspective it wouldn't even be visible anyway.

Just let the normals take care of the vents. Its the perfect sort of simple detail a NM can do well.

S_ource

Okey thanks for the answers, then i will do the vents only with textures.

S_ource

Is this good or is it to much? Its for a udk scene going to be several of it.

JamesWild

This is your low poly yeah?

Not really suited to games. Quite a few loops that'll add almost nothing once normal mapped, and several concave ngons.

Consider how much screen space it'll take up and that polygons are used to define the silhouette of the model.

JamesWild

S_ource

I understand what you say, but i'm pretty sure your model wont bake pretty well? And the knob is modeled separate.

Paunescu.Daniel

i think it will bake quite well. If you use the latest version of UDK and bake the normals with XNormal it should look fine.

S_ource

This is how it looks with everything smoothed and baked used xoliul's shader. Used 3dsmax for baking. And i have also looked at cs go's props and i don't think its a problem to add some extra roundness to the corners maybe one less loop then what i have now (in my first lp img)

JamesWild

If you're using UDK, bake using XNormal because this is less of a problem. (look up synced normals)

In any case it's much better to use both a UV and normal split on 90 degree corners. You don't get the gradient issue and you also have split vertices there anyway if you've cut the UVs up so performance is identical.