Looks great. The subtle additions of the dents works really well.
Are you baking this down? How are you planning on separating the textures/bakes for it? Huge objects like this have always confused me, because you can't really just smack them onto a huge texture map.
That is a very good question, and something I've been thinking about. I definitely plan to bake it down to low poly. Possibly only making 2 unique sides (right and front), and cloning them? The wheels/bogies and bottom compartments could definitely be cloned around.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Looks good! Made something like this for the game I'm working on. It's a killer to get those springs on the bogie represented well in the low-poly, without the polycount being insane.
Looks good! Made something like this for the game I'm working on. It's a killer to get those springs on the bogie represented well in the low-poly, without the polycount being insane.
Looks good! Made something like this for the game I'm working on. It's a killer to get those springs on the bogie represented well in the low-poly, without the polycount being insane.
Looks great so far!
Would love to see what you're working on. Have you shared it on here already?
Here's an example of a cylinder with an alpha on it. Wish I'd thought of it at the time! The normals take care of the form pretty well, as long as you won't be super close to it.
As for the game I'm working on, we released today, actually, on Steam, and I'll be updating my portfolio with the work I did very soon, but in the meantime, and because it's relevant, here's a shot of my coal hopper from "Alone in the Dark: Illumination". I did a few states of decay for them, and this was the most un-decayed one:
Here's an example of a cylinder with an alpha on it. Wish I'd thought of it at the time! The normals take care of the form pretty well, as long as you won't be super close to it.
As for the game I'm working on, we released today, actually, on Steam, and I'll be updating my portfolio with the work I did very soon, but in the meantime, and because it's relevant, here's a shot of my coal hopper from "Alone in the Dark: Illumination". I did a few states of decay for them, and this was the most un-decayed one:
Nice, thanks for that. I still haven't messed around with alphas and UVs, so I'll have to look into that. But I'm guessing it's pretty basic stuff.
Mine sat at around 53,000, so I don't think it's abnormal. There's a lot if detail, especially around the wheels. Since mine was for a real game, I had to do a few LODs, though.
On mine or Joopson's? Mine doesn't have any yet. It's been pretty slow going on my end, but I hope to start UVing today and will have some textures soon after that.
Ok, after putting this off for a while because things got busy at the office, I finally returned to UVing and baking normals for it. And as expected, it's really damn hard to get this to fit into 1 UV layout! I ended up using 2x4096 UV sheets. That seems excessive, doesn't it? It's still tough to get the normals to look good, even with that much space. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
Here are my screenshots so far:
I split the mesh into 2 UV sheets, 1 for the main car, and 1 for everything else. The normals used in Marmoset are 4k, but these are 2k to save screen space. See below:
Its a bit hard to tell whats going on with your normals, but it looks as though you've created a completely unique unwrap for all faces? There are a lot of objects that could be using the same uv space like the wheels and the sides of the car. Consider having some tiling trim bits, along with sepperating the coal into its own material.
It also looks like a few of your uv strips are at slight angles. You'll want to avoid this on straight objects as you'll get some anti-aliasing/mipping issues.
The modelling is great, but I think you can get much better results with a smarter unwrap. If you are worried about losing some of that unique detail, you can always vertex paint in some damage/wear in your shader.
Yeah, everything has it's own UV space. I was thinking I should tile some UVs on it, but I don't have much experience with that or vertex painting. Guess it's time I learned. Will that mess with baking lightmaps in UE4?
Also should an asset like this only use 1 UV sheet? and is 4k too high?
The way I uv'd mine was, the sides were mirrored, and the front and back were mirrored. I only textured one of the sets of wheels. In all, I used a 4096 for the train itself, a 1024 for the bogies/wheels, and a 512 for the couplers (connectors).... But, actually, I compiled the couplers and bogies into a 2048 texture atlas with some other smaller textures as well, to be a little more efficient.
So you bake it out, then clone the elements around/mirror them so they're using the same UV spaces.
Did you do any UVing for baking light maps? Or was it all physical lighting?
Yep, exactly. For the Lightmap UVs, I used Maya; you can duplicate the current UVs into a new UV set. Once I had the new UV set, I just used the default "Layout UVs" action, which takes your existing islands, and scales them all uniformly until they can all fit in the 0-1 space, and lays them out. Not ideal really, I don't think, but it was fast and looked good.
Cool, yeah there's multiple UV channels in Max that you can use for lightmaps. Just not sure how to connect that in UE4, where I will be assembling this scene.
in max just put your light map uv's on channel 2 then in unreal4, when you import the mesh make sure auto generate lightmaps is not ticked, and thats it - nice and simple
I got all of this to fit on one 4k normal map. Will clone the elements around in Max. Might enlarge the size of the bogie bracket in the UV to give it just a little more detail. Also need to fix some smoothing on the car itself.
Some progress on this! (finally)
All screencaps taken in Substance Painter, which I'm using for the first time. And some elements will be cloned around once texturing is complete, to save on UV space.
Still a WIP, so any and all crit is welcome!
Replies
Are you baking this down? How are you planning on separating the textures/bakes for it? Huge objects like this have always confused me, because you can't really just smack them onto a huge texture map.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
[IMG][/img]
Looks great so far!
Could you not use cylinders with alphas?
Do you have any examples of this?
Would love to see what you're working on. Have you shared it on here already?
As for the game I'm working on, we released today, actually, on Steam, and I'll be updating my portfolio with the work I did very soon, but in the meantime, and because it's relevant, here's a shot of my coal hopper from "Alone in the Dark: Illumination". I did a few states of decay for them, and this was the most un-decayed one:
Nice, thanks for that. I still haven't messed around with alphas and UVs, so I'll have to look into that. But I'm guessing it's pretty basic stuff.
No UVs yet.
On mine or Joopson's? Mine doesn't have any yet. It's been pretty slow going on my end, but I hope to start UVing today and will have some textures soon after that.
Here are my screenshots so far:
I split the mesh into 2 UV sheets, 1 for the main car, and 1 for everything else. The normals used in Marmoset are 4k, but these are 2k to save screen space. See below:
Again, any advice/crits are appreciated!
It also looks like a few of your uv strips are at slight angles. You'll want to avoid this on straight objects as you'll get some anti-aliasing/mipping issues.
The modelling is great, but I think you can get much better results with a smarter unwrap. If you are worried about losing some of that unique detail, you can always vertex paint in some damage/wear in your shader.
Also should an asset like this only use 1 UV sheet? and is 4k too high?
Here is how mine were laid out:
http://i.imgur.com/wwZDnYV.jpg (body of the car)
http://i.imgur.com/EaZmUBu.jpg (Wheels, bogie, and couplers)
Did you mirror the duplicate pieces in the model itself or in the game engine?
[ edit: here it is: http://i.imgur.com/vADK2wA.jpg ]
Then once I finished all the bakes, I assembled it, merged vertices, etc.
Did you do any UVing for baking light maps? Or was it all physical lighting?
The model is also looking great!
I got all of this to fit on one 4k normal map. Will clone the elements around in Max. Might enlarge the size of the bogie bracket in the UV to give it just a little more detail. Also need to fix some smoothing on the car itself.
All screencaps taken in Substance Painter, which I'm using for the first time. And some elements will be cloned around once texturing is complete, to save on UV space.
Still a WIP, so any and all crit is welcome!
also, the car I was using for texture reference:
Great work