UV seams and Ambient Occlusion

Axi5

EDIT: As I thought I was being a little too dumb and realised that my poly's lengthways were missing an awful lot, I collapsed, re added some more geometry and turbosmoothed again VIOLA problem solved very very happy.

On a side note I didn't realise this forum was primarily 3D and 2D game art oriented when I was trying to produce an asset for primarily video production, but thanks to Respawnrt I have a much clearer idea of how this would look as a game asset too. Thanks for the help. end edit.

Hi there,
this is my first post on the forums and I'm really hoping to be a permanent long term member here

anyway skipping to the juicy problem I hope someone can help with.

I have a model of a missile in 3DS max(modelled in 100% quads and includes support edges for low poly to high poly smoothing). I'm in the texturing stage at the moment, I've done a diffuse map as a test and that works fine (I'll explain a little bit more later). I decided to re-do my whole texture job as I wasn't happy with my original UV co-ordinates which were a bit messy and didn't use as much space in the 0 1 box as they should.

I also then added a turbosmooth modifier and baked out an ambient occlusion map from the high poly in order to mix with my diffuse in Photoshop (I heard that this was a correct workflow but if I merged diffuse with ao within max I'm sure it would save me all this trouble).
So far so good, it creates dark edges on some of my seams but I can get rid of them with some small touch ups in Photoshop no problem. My biggest problem is this weird warping artefact I get with turbosmooth, now earlier on I mentioned I'd already done a test diffuse map, during this test I ran into the exact same issue I have right now.

A screenshot is here:
http://gyazo.com/9ac448fd404b06b7c3ae39acc9798775

Basically, the occlusion is warping in towards the center of the polygon due to the way turbosmooth works. I ran into this problem during my test too, I found a work around here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=4920905&postcount=46

It worked perfect for my test diffuse map however when I try it with my ambient occlusion map I'm getting this weird banding artefact now:
http://gyazo.com/aef8e3c02f0cc715c30521b9a3779943

It's also another problem I had in my test but I didn't know what caused it and it seemed to fix itself after I messed around with the texture itself.

I'm really really new to texturing and still a little new to Max and I learn a new feature every day or two. Any help with my organisation in this would be appreciated too, from what I've heard from other forum posts this seems to be the way people say to do things but I can't hep but feel it's a little too complex.

Thanks for reading
-Axi5

respawnrt

I think a good idea would be to post pics of : low poly, hipoly, uv map, low poly with ao baked all this showing some perspective with the model(not cut zooms).Some wireframes would also help too.

Axi5

respawnrt wrote: »

I think a good idea would be to post pics of : low poly, hipoly, uv map, low poly with ao baked all this showing some perspective with the model(not cut zooms).Some wireframes would also help too.

Hi thanks for the response
a few more screenshots, low poly and high poly in each:
Top:
http://gyazo.com/331800cf5f5580b23c40b9df7f17c365

A perspective:
http://gyazo.com/529a776160bff9a109ea3d481ef43d42

Right (just the nose)
http://gyazo.com/de557f2659f85a4ab42db03215b2af0c

AO baked from high poly (background) onto low poly in foreground:
http://gyazo.com/b832800daf83a8049e7216e663ae1533

Uv Unwrap:
http://gyazo.com/8c9f30525a63d42195a954fd3f9f030e

Despite the amount of research I do, I constantly feel like I'm doing things wrong and making rookie mistakes, so if you see something even midly like "woah kid what are you doing" I'd like to know to improve on it, even if it means re-doing all of it haha

Anything else you may need please ask, not sure how much help these screens are

Thanks a lot (:

respawnrt

Right, i would make all the geo you have into a normal map bake (those skinny extrusions).That uv layout looks overkill for what simply should be an easy model .That means you use and averaged cage projection for normal map and ao etc etc.Here's my uv and low normal mapped take on your rocket.


Also in the future make those circles a straight line so you don't waste uv space with them.

Axi5

Again thanks for the reply
If I was making this for a game I'd probably do what you do from projection mapping but as this hasn't really got much more of an end goal as it does to stick in an assets folder awaiting to be used one day I was hoping to have a low poly like yours and a high poly, it's when I'm converting to high poly that the textures have their problems though.

It's just that irritating banding problem I seem to have that I have a problem with, I'm just really bad at finding a work around for it like shown here:
http://gyazo.com/aef8e3c02f0cc715c30521b9a3779943
where those grey areas wrap around the model shouldn't exist, I'm unsure why they do. For the last few hours I've just been painting around edges in photoshop and removing some black edges that the mr_ao render to texture created, it's nearly there:
http://gyazo.com/266bbca19d7ae0aa3821e0106cc44456

Then I add the other layers in my my diffuse:
http://gyazo.com/568e90856a5a8c44482f54bc5da0426f
as you can see I get a kink in that blue band from the turbosmooth modifer, so I apply the fix that I've been used to:
http://gyazo.com/9537e6e1dcc22cccce49fd61d56dc31b
As you can see the blue band has fixed itself but more anomalies have appeared.
Sorry if I was unclear before, your method would be perfect for a game engine but this is being made like an asset for film maybe? so maximum detail would be best, if the poly data is there I'd be happy with it.

Although looking at yours, yes mine is probably overkill and would best be suited for extreme close-ups, which again could potentially be what it's used for (: I have many many versions of this particular asset from the basic cylinder right up to this stage (96 in progress snapshots)

EDIT:
Just did a check, without the ambient occlusion on my diffuse the diffuse works fine, but with the ambient occulsion layer in photoshop active it creates those odd marks, I really don't know what it could be, it doesn't look anything like it in photoshop.

Mossbros

I've had this problem in the past using 3D's max also, never resolved the problem.

Would also like to hear an answer from someone if they can help .