[WIP] Winterizer - Ratchet and Clank

luge

So, I guess I should post this finally. running into a brick wall texturing it, but I also am having issues with my bake. my bake just looks like shit. the bake was done in xnormal. but I don't think i've messed with settings much in it, so if anyone has some good settings I could check out, post em please. This is a redesign also.

So, here goes...

Concept:


Screengrabs:

Maya:

Zbrush:

Textures:


Only the shielding for the angled gun was done in zbrush, and a small edging in the handle, which I didn't screencap. the other pieces were actually smoothed in maya and exported and baked. I baked in sections because in either maya or xnormal before, the baking would be sporadic otherwise.

P.S. I do not have marmoset or ddo/ndo... no money currently

Joost

The main reason it didn't bake well is that your edges are way too tight.

If I were you I'd put this project on hold and start with something a bit simpler to really get the high poly/ baking workflow down. Something like a knife or a simple gun would be perfect. Here's some tutorials to get you started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tgy0lBdJK0 and http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/next-gen-weapon-creation-part-1-the-high-poly-model--cg-782

check out this page if you run into any problems:
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?action=show&redirect=Normal+Map

luge

I'll take a look at the links, thanks for the info.

luge

just watched one of the videos... and it makes sense. as I've noticed in art. realistic doesn't work well with art, you gotta make it unrealistic to make it look realistic and believable. So yeah, I'll be putting the project on hold momentarily and working on getting the workflow down on some other objects and then i'll get back to this. thanks again.

Joost

No problem. You're right, exaggeration is usually necessary to make things look real
good luck with your next project, send me a PM if you want some feedback or need any help.

luge

will do.

blackdragonstory

I look forward in seeing the end result.

luge

Since I'm holding off on the actual point of this project and practicing my high poly modeling in an attempt to get to finish this project and it look good, I'll be posting my practice in here...

SO. yesterday, well, late last night, I decided to model a knife, went looking, found a bunch of cool knives and then sorted through them till I found one that I figured would be good to do for a first run/practice after watching those videos and looking into stuff a bit more thoroughly. And this is the knife I went with (had to turn the image to make get it at an angle to model from...):


I did run into a bunch of snags, one being my maya decided to be a dick and for some reason was crashing whenever I would use snap to point. eventually it stopped doing that and is now working fine again. And then I ran into issues baking the AO, the normals came out relatively fine. a few minor errors that can be fixed in photoshop... but the AO... for some reason was not accepting the edge padding, and was not baking the floating geo correctly. I did get a solid AO bake for the floating geo eventually. here are the fruits of those labors:

Low Poly without textures:



High Poly:



AO, Normals and Low Poly w/ AO/Normal:




I will probably revisit the high, I still have a copy of the model before smooth, and actually add the hole in the bottom of the handle. In total, the high poly took an hour and a half I think, aside from the constant crashing that is. Oh, and I'll also probably change up the otherside of the handle to keep it interesting... since I'm sure its not completely mirrored.

Neox

you are using smoothinggroups on your lowpoly, you need to split the uvs and move the islands apart to make that work with smoothinggroups, but also yeah try to use wider edges in many cases

also you should not model the indents like that |_| but like this \_/

luge

i actually did do the indents with a \_/, but I guess it wasn't exaggerated enough

And yeah, I get you on the splitting for the smoothing groups/smoothed edges. I remember reading that somewhere in an post about baking, but I just didn't do that I'll fix that.

And what do you mean use wider edges in many cases?

Neox

http://i.imgur.com/nZWDDs7.jpg that looks really steep, always try to look at it from a flat angle what you will not see there, can't appear in the normalmap

about wider edges
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=normal_edge_thickness.jpg
this

harricool

Luge..don't worry if you don't have marmoset or ndo/ddo. Udk, unity, cry engines are available for free for personal use. You can just showcase your model in any of those or you can still download 1 month trial version of marmoset or ddo/ndo crazybump..

luge

@Neox Ok, I get ya, but I mean, the normal map transfered pretty well, and I have been hoping into the side view to see how it looks so all is well so far. I get what you mean now about the wider edges. I'm keeping them as wide as I can without loosing too much definition. thanks for the input.

@harricool yeah, I know, I use udk fairly regularly. I've just been noticing a rise in the usage of ndo/ddo and marmoset for presentation and textures. I just felt I should mention i don't have them incase people go to recommend doing something in one of those packages that I don't have. thats all. I planned on doing renders in UDK as I normally would.

Joost

You really need to do something about your presentation.
Right now it's really hard to see anything but the outline of your knife.
Those maya viewport screenshots make your model look a lot worse than it is. I'd recommend getting the trial version of marmoset for now. There's also the xoliul shader for 3ds max. I'm sure there's probably a way to make your maya screenshots look better as well, but I don't use maya. You should also make your diffuse darker so it's easier for us to see the edge highlights. like this:

And yeah, you only need smoothing group splits where your UVs are split.

Neox

yeah thats what surprises me a bit this http://i.imgur.com/nZWDDs7.jpg doesn't look like it would end up as this http://i.imgur.com/OWYM4PB.jpg

luge

@Neox: Yeah, I get what you mean. looking at my one screengrab, it looks like a 90 degree angle, as if it shouldn't create that normal.

installed marmoset trial and did a quick render in it. messed with the settings a bit to try to show the edges. Also, in maya, there are no smoothing groups. we use soft/hard edges instead of smoothing groups. its essentially the same thing, just figured i'd mention.

Hopefully this helps. there are some errors in the normal and AO that I can clean up, but I think i'm gonna revisit the high later tonight and fix up a few things that are wrong with the blade and put the hole in the handle.

Thanks for the help guys.