Phoenix Revolver

Fridock

Hi guys, i still keep practicing in making gun models. This revolver is the 2nd ever gun i made with all lowpoly/uv/baking/textures. I feel kinda weird that dDO did almost all job in texturing for me... I can't do anything as close awesome as this program does. Modeling done in Softimage XSI (i even managed to bake maps in ultimapper) - 6601 tris, 3746 polys. Sorry for the screens are being a little too dark.
The result:




Low poly:


High poly:

Bartalon

Great high poly and a really solid low. I'm wondering though if that many edge loops in the barrel and cylinder are necessary.

It is a little obvious that you used dDo for texturing, specifically around the label and the part on top of the barrel (looks like the Acid preset). I'm no expert in dDo but I would suggest going through and playing with the settings/masking a bit more to reduce the obviousness.

The revolving part is pretty bland right now, perhaps some scratches or added grooves might help fill that area in.

Tim270

Yeah texture just screams DDO at the moment, I would definitely consider working off some of that wear and focus more on the materials.

Fridock

@Bartalon thanks man, i decided to keep the geo on the cylinder and barrel because i really liked the way it looks, plus it gave me a good bake.

Funny thing about texture - at first i though that ddo is something that working with normal maps, and when i loaded my normal there i thought that it's going to add few scratches and bump noise and it was TOTALLY unexpected that it will do all the texturing. I was like - "What the hell? Who did all of this?!".

benc

I think your high poly is real nice, but your low poly could do with work on the poly / triangle distribution.

At the moment, I would guess that the little barrel entrance you have ( sorry not up with gun part names! ) where the bullets go when the come out of the 'revolver' part probably has about 200 tris in it, more then the grip? Thing how much better the silhouette of the grip could be improved with double the polys, or some extra bevels along the barrel to help the normal map do its thing.

Also you've cut in the one where the 'pin' would strike the bullet, but the front one is floating, to be honest you could probably just stick them both in the bake?

Please don't think I'm knocking your work though, for you second gun its damn impressive, I just think you could use your pretty high poly budget better. Maybe just consider it on your 3rd gun

Ben

DWalker

All of your cylinders seem to have the same number of sides, from the cylinder to the barrel to the cylinder release. In general, the pieces which will appear smaller in-game or are inset (such as the cylinder release during normal use) can use a much lower number of sides without losing any visual quality. If this is for a game (or even practice for making game props), set up a camera with the expected viewing angle & distance. Off-hand, I'd expect the cylinder to look as good with 32 (or at most 48) sides as it does now, the barrel in the 16-24 range, and the cylinder release could probably look good with 8-12.

Spend some extra polys smoothing the grip; the area near the back of the receiver as shown in the second shot has some notable blockiness that would be noticeable in an FPS.

The inset holes on and below the barrel can probably be left in only the normal map, especially given the normal viewing angle.

The trigger guard shape is a bit odd, but that might be in the design. The 4th shot shows some unusual highlights on both the trigger and the inner surface of the guard.

Fridock

Hello again. I decided to drop some other stuff i'm working on right here. So before that Phoenix revolver, i was working on a scope and now i "finished" it. Well to be honest i just got bored of working on it so here it is what i have achieved (i know there is more work i can put there).







I have a question - what normals should i use? Tangent or Object space? On that scope when i use the tangent version of normal maps it's all over smoothing errors, and no matter how many hard edges i add or how i mess with tangent settings in Softimage - it still looks crap. On the other hand the object space normals generated perfectly from the first try giving me nice and smooth result. I would use the Object normals all the time, but i don't see the other side of the coin (i red the polycount wiki on that matter and i'm still lost).

And how to make the glass of the scope transparent?