The greatest challenge I ever tasked myself, seriously
polycounter lvl 11
MY FINAL RESULT FOR THE DEADLINE:
From ashes into fire. After crunching many hours at Global Game Jam in sweden designing, balancing and making props. I now change my focus to my environment portfolio.
(for those intrested here is our final result: [ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of2Xim4MeoY"]FLATLINE - YOUTUBE[/ame])
NOW BACK TO BUSNIESS
We will have an assignment in gamedesign school which gives us total freedom what to do in two weeks. I want to become a environment/hard surface prop artist in the gaming industry, my main foucs right now is to make a kickass pieces to my portfolio so I might "attract" some jobs!
So me and some classmates were scrolling the interwebz and we found this concept art by mike doscher which I fell in love with. I just knew I had to put this on my portfolio as a 3d object.
I found this picture a week ago, so I've been doing some research as in how many meshes Im going to divide it up to and how it would walk and how other hidden parts would look.
I also made a list of what I will work on these two weeks and some important information.
16 000 tris polycount limit (could be apped up)
UVTEXTURE- 1024x1024
DIFFUSE
SPEC
NORMAL
(so its more optimzed to be in a game, like a fps etc)
2 WEEK PROJECT
MONDAY-
MODELLING - BLOCKOUT- STOMACH-BACK
TUESDAY-
MODELING - LEGS
WEDNESDAY - HEAD
THURSDAY - ARTILLERY
FRIDAY - PROPS
SATURDAY - ERRORDAYS FIX MODELLING
SUNDAY - ERRORDAYS FIX MODELLING
MONDAY- UVMAP
TUESDAY - TEXTURE
WEDNESDAY - TEXTURE FINECOORDINATION
THURSDAY - LAST FIXES
FRIDAY - MARMOSET
Tomorrow I will do the portfolio-do-whatever-you-want assignment and I am really pshyced (which is really weird because I have only sleept for 7 hours this whole weekend).
But I am also kind of worried, because its a lot of stuff that must be made this week. Any form of feedback about modelling, textuering, planing or cool tricks I am all ears. I'm going to post my progress everyday to keep me extra motivated!:D
From ashes into fire. After crunching many hours at Global Game Jam in sweden designing, balancing and making props. I now change my focus to my environment portfolio.
(for those intrested here is our final result: [ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of2Xim4MeoY"]FLATLINE - YOUTUBE[/ame])NOW BACK TO BUSNIESS
We will have an assignment in gamedesign school which gives us total freedom what to do in two weeks. I want to become a environment/hard surface prop artist in the gaming industry, my main foucs right now is to make a kickass pieces to my portfolio so I might "attract" some jobs!
So me and some classmates were scrolling the interwebz and we found this concept art by mike doscher which I fell in love with. I just knew I had to put this on my portfolio as a 3d object.
I found this picture a week ago, so I've been doing some research as in how many meshes Im going to divide it up to and how it would walk and how other hidden parts would look.
I also made a list of what I will work on these two weeks and some important information.
16 000 tris polycount limit (could be apped up)
UVTEXTURE- 1024x1024
DIFFUSE
SPEC
NORMAL
(so its more optimzed to be in a game, like a fps etc)
2 WEEK PROJECT
MONDAY-
MODELLING - BLOCKOUT- STOMACH-BACK
TUESDAY-
MODELING - LEGS
WEDNESDAY - HEAD
THURSDAY - ARTILLERY
FRIDAY - PROPS
SATURDAY - ERRORDAYS FIX MODELLING
SUNDAY - ERRORDAYS FIX MODELLING
MONDAY- UVMAP
TUESDAY - TEXTURE
WEDNESDAY - TEXTURE FINECOORDINATION
THURSDAY - LAST FIXES
FRIDAY - MARMOSET
Tomorrow I will do the portfolio-do-whatever-you-want assignment and I am really pshyced (which is really weird because I have only sleept for 7 hours this whole weekend).
But I am also kind of worried, because its a lot of stuff that must be made this week. Any form of feedback about modelling, textuering, planing or cool tricks I am all ears. I'm going to post my progress everyday to keep me extra motivated!:D
Replies
Are you talking tri's or actual quads for your limit?
Either way, 1024 seems kind of low, seeing the size/complexity of the object (large shapes such as the plating, combined with then a lot of small details).
I would personally go for a 2k atleast, remembering that you probably want people to look at that and go "wow that looks nice", and not "looks kinda okay I guess for that texture size).
Later on you can always scale the texture down if you want.
Also make sure to instance/copy as much as possible, for example the "handle bar" on the leg plating can be the same one as the smaller green on top of the vehicle, and can be copied to the turret plating.
These sort of small things do add up very quickly in getting as much texture space as possible.
+have you thought about using a gloss map?
Anyway, good luck with the project, looking forward to the end result
joeriv: I count my polycount on tris. But I have changed my limit down to 16k tris because: 1. Our teacher gave us a polycount limit and lot of my I details about will be solved by photoshop normal mapping. Hopefully I will not go over the limit, but if a mesh piece absolutley requires it, so be it
I agree! I will change my texture to 2048x2048! I really don't have any arguments by choosing 1024!
Yes, the instancing and coping will be make this whole project easier. Which I really niiice
No I haven't even thought about using gloss because I'm farily new to materials and stumble across new maps here and there, after reading about gloss and watching some examples I will surely try it out once I get my spec going!
Heres my WIP for today! Now I will go make some lunch for tomorrow 8)
2 weeks is pretty quick.
Hm, what does polycount think? Do I need to change anything?
Oh and my polycount is more than 22k tris. So I will raise my barrier to somwhere around 30k, Because its farily impossiable for me to make nice geometry and still holding the 16k tri count. ...goddarn cylinders
I am infront of schedule and its feels nice because I want to tweak textures the last week. Anybody seeing some issues with the model, maybe not following the concept or etc
I dig your ambition, man
I'e got one question right now: are you building the high poly version now for maybe ZBrush sculpt? I don't really know how you are planning the workflow so I can't really comment on your poly limit at the moment.
I usually don't care about poly limit when I am creating the base mesh which I will be importing into ZBrush.
But, yeah, if you explain how you are planning the create this exactly, that would be helpful to give you some feedback
Have fun!
Thanks Elod
I totally forgot to type down my way to model this mech-tank! Well this is my workflow
1.
Concept - references, gathering info
2.
block out and low poly modelling in Maya
3.
UV-map in maya
4.
Make UVsnapshot from Maya and add normals through nDo2 or nDo
5.
Diffuse and spec in Mudbox/Photoshop, and possibly testing Gloss maps!
5. Rendering in final in Marmoset (((:
Just UVmapping everything! Nothing really fancy going on because I find UVmapping manually on hard surface is often the best instead of using Unwrella or Roadkill. I get stuff done directly instead of doing iterative work and fixing the automated UVmapping.
Should I split my all of my textures into 4x1024 or should I keep using one 2048?
If I would go for the 4x1024 plan my idea is to seperate the texture to
one 1024 to head & perhaps a leg
one 1024 for alpha body parts
one 1024 for legs
one 1024 for the artillery
Is this the right approach?
another aspect might is that you can use the space much better. you dont have to pay attention to the borders of the smaller maps which you could imagine as "do not cross"- lines in the middle of your big 2048 map...
I also agree with the previous posters, you should probably stick to using one 2048^2 texture instead of splitting it up. It'll make it easier to pack your UV's more efficiently and give you a bigger overview of your texturing. You could also mirror a lot of stuff and just use decals to break up any obvious mirroring issues, that might help you reduce your texture usage.
Other than that it's really looking promising and I look forward to seeing the end result.
Binopittan: I edited my workflow scheme so it more clear! (I was kind of tired when I wrote that post I guess x)) I am going to make the normal maps in nDo!
Anyone has some good tips when organizing UVspace? My work method here is that I start with just ripping unwrapping everything and I used a texel density script to fix the texel denisty (duh) and then used maya layout function to give every limb/mesh its own little part in the UVspace.
If anybody has suggestions or other methods that could be more effective, Im all ears!
(I might want to send this mesh to mudbox also and look after ugly n-gongs :I
FINALLY (ALMOST) DONE WITH UVMAPPING! Im just gonna do some check tomorrow and then paint in mudbox and go nuts in nDo2!
I started some basic dirt and stuff for diffuse and played a little with spec and added some normals from nDo2. But I still got plenty of stuff to do!
and our teacher expanded our deadline to monday. So I will have loads of time to tweak! (and/or concepting on the next portfolio piece, which will be something environment focused)
I made some ntoes what stuff I still need to do
If there is any stuff I should add, please tell!
Here are my final pictures of the mech
My polycount is 34k and I have used diffuse, spec and normal texture
It has been very fun working with this vehicle and Im ready to challenge myself for the next assignment >:) which will be an some sort of environment, (something tropical I think)
(suprise is still under development, it just needs a little bit of work
If you spend some time refining all of your texture maps, you could have a really nice portfolio piece.
Render out some AO and Cavity maps! Give the thing some character with wear!
Aga22: Yes, that is correct, the ladder goes right through the whole grid platform. I might want to change the whole layout for the stairthing and possible put it somewhere else
Brandon Kern : I actully have cavity and AO! But from your reaction I should do a research of how to do them properly! I will look up into it!
BARDLER: I will! Thanks for the recommendation! Once I'm done with my environment assignment and a little bit more stuff I will come back to the Gunwalker and walk with it through the tutorial!
Here is some colorschemes I made, which one does you guys prefer?