Warhammer 40,000 Warzone
null
Hello! First Polycount thread!
I'm modeling a diorama and this is the one of the first "hero" (more details) buildings that will go into it. I'm a huge Warhammer 40,000 fan, so it's going to be an Imperial Warzone.
Modeling in 3DMax. World will be made in World Machine and the engine will be the CryEngine. Renders will be Marmoset until the world is in a little more finished. 3D Coat for unwrapping.
The first part of the project is a Plasma Obliterator. Real life model looks like:
Here's the building being constructed:
No UVs yet. I've got a few questions going forward.
1. The building is highly instanced- colored areas are the original pieces:
I bought a copy of Substance Designer and Substance Painter during the last Steam sale. Does substance support instancing?
2. I'm wondering if I made a smart model poly wise. Model is 35870 polys. I'd like to put most of the high poly details in via Substance (rivets, scratches on the normals, etc) so I don't have to do hard surface modeling in Max. I'm not adverse to it, but it will take longer. I think this model is around the 2nd read with some areas moving toward the 3rd. http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/primary_secondary_and_tertiary_shapes/primary_secondary_and_tertiary_shapes.htm
If I went to 3rd and 4th read for the super high details, would most of that be in Substance or a mixture of Substance and high poly modeling? I'm used to making a high poly model and baking those details down to the low poly so, I'm a little unsure on how to add Substance into the workflow.
I modeled it as per the original, but the decorations are pricy- the little skull alcoves near the barrel are 7600 polys by themselves. I'm not adverse to that since a gun is pretty much like a face on a building, so the detail is close to the "face". Still, I'm not sure if that many polys is a great idea.
Any advice or suggestions on the next steps would be greatly appreciated!
I'm modeling a diorama and this is the one of the first "hero" (more details) buildings that will go into it. I'm a huge Warhammer 40,000 fan, so it's going to be an Imperial Warzone.
Modeling in 3DMax. World will be made in World Machine and the engine will be the CryEngine. Renders will be Marmoset until the world is in a little more finished. 3D Coat for unwrapping.
The first part of the project is a Plasma Obliterator. Real life model looks like:
Here's the building being constructed:
No UVs yet. I've got a few questions going forward.
1. The building is highly instanced- colored areas are the original pieces:
I bought a copy of Substance Designer and Substance Painter during the last Steam sale. Does substance support instancing?
2. I'm wondering if I made a smart model poly wise. Model is 35870 polys. I'd like to put most of the high poly details in via Substance (rivets, scratches on the normals, etc) so I don't have to do hard surface modeling in Max. I'm not adverse to it, but it will take longer. I think this model is around the 2nd read with some areas moving toward the 3rd. http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/primary_secondary_and_tertiary_shapes/primary_secondary_and_tertiary_shapes.htm
If I went to 3rd and 4th read for the super high details, would most of that be in Substance or a mixture of Substance and high poly modeling? I'm used to making a high poly model and baking those details down to the low poly so, I'm a little unsure on how to add Substance into the workflow.
I modeled it as per the original, but the decorations are pricy- the little skull alcoves near the barrel are 7600 polys by themselves. I'm not adverse to that since a gun is pretty much like a face on a building, so the detail is close to the "face". Still, I'm not sure if that many polys is a great idea.
Any advice or suggestions on the next steps would be greatly appreciated!
Replies
Progress made! Here's a shot of the hard surface modeling on one of the side struts for the high to low baking. Things of note:
1. Most of the surface noise/weathering will be done with Substance.
2. The skulls/skeleton will be from the zBrush high-poly model, so I didn't do anything to them here and they look neglected in these shots.
More soon! Comments and critiques welcome!
looking forward to this
Substance let's you modify your texture on the fly, with whatever change you want. It does not have instancing as Unreal Engine has, but once you make a material, you can put into other materials and use masks to separate them. You can also go really in depth and make your own fx-nodes, and way more. At the beginning, if you want to change a value or property of you material, simply copy the node that has the original value and leave floating in your graph to plug it back in. With one click, then you can export your graph with whatever change you made.
For my robot, I did the scratches and some dent's in Zbrush. You can make procedural details like that in Substance, but for rivets, the easiest way would be to use substance Painter. They have an example brush that has a screw as a sort of stamp that already has all the PBR values applied to the various layers when you place it. Go fro mthere, I would say.
The poly count I guess would come down to what this is for. If it's effectively a building in relation to player size, you are well within appropriate limits. Some of the details seem to have too many polis in relation to their size or silhouette. For the Skull alcoves near the barrel (the small ones at the top?) I would zbrush the skulls, and retopo a very low poly on top of it. Enough to capture the silhouette, but with way less density thatn what you have now. Unless they animate, there is no reason for that much poly density.
Sorry again for my late feedback, but keep working on it, man. Its looking great!
The alcove skeletons were retopoed down, but it looks like I need to be less precious with them. Hard choices!
Also debating if I want to put the turret the turret top (back shield/gun/round gun base) on it's own sheet; effectively 2 texture sheets.
More hard surface modeling done, this time on the upper side of the canon housing.
Details:
I had to remove some stuff when I finished because it was looking too busy. Everything is in relation to everything else, so I had to keep the look/feel of 40,000 and still give teh eye areas of rest on the model.
BUT, now I'm back on track! I'm currently learning Substance Painter. It a huge wonderful monster and it's got me rethinking my workflow. I spent a lot of time making extra detail pieces for the high poly model. Thread plating, rivets and other what not. However, when I picked up Substance (thanks Steam!) I find that I can do most, if not all of it by drawing directly on the normal map or just finding a smart texture.
On one hand, that's super cool, on the other hand it's a little disheartening that all the time I spend working on this was possibly misspent. I guess not every studio is going to have a licence, so it's important to know how to do things multiple ways.
First up, I learned how to set up my model for export. The first part was to set the faces to particular materials. Making each material a different color helped keep me sane. Bronze, Painted metal, bare metal, bone, rubber, and an emissive material (red and blue).
I'm still learning SP so I'm not sure if this was the most efficient way of doing it, or that was an over complicated process.
The next part was to "blow up" the model in the way Substance painter likes to do it, which is is breaking up the model into parts and using a special naming convention. This avoided map baking artifacts.
After finding the materials/smart materials and all the maps bake, it's time to see what we got.
Not bad, but too blue. I kept going back and forth over bare metal or bone and eventually went with bone. The sword was going to be another material but after trying a few, I settled with the same metal I was going to use in other parts of the building. This model is very busy, so I didn't want a lot of different colors running through it or it was just going to be a mess.
Looks like the high poly detail are working so it's time to add the emissive.
Taking it all and putting together:
Not bad! There's some hard edges and smoothing groups that need to be fixed when I put all the different .objs together, but I'm happy where it's at right now.
Things still left to do:
- Weathering- dirt on the bottom, soot around the barrel.
- Edit the textures for some more personality. Heat damage the barrel, chip away the paint in places, more edgware.
I do have some questions if folks are familiar with Substance: Is assigning up the low poly .obj model faces into different materials the best workflow? I'm a little confused on how to select parts if I import it all as one material. I'm learning this on the fly, and I don't think I've grasped the complete big picture yet.Thanks all! More soon!
One thing that I don't think you translated well - the skeleton holding the sword. The hood is too far back on its forehead, making the head look large and weirdly childlike - difficult to fix now, so I don't blame you if you decide not to. Otherwise I love all the little details and excited to see where this ends up.
Updated! Done except for critique.
Added:
Ground dirt on the base.
Edge dirt pooling in various areas and crevices.
Cuts/scrapes/dings along the base of the building.
Chipped paint getting less and less as we move up the model.
Weathering on the bone.
Some extra normal map add-ons for visual interest.
i think some of your weathering you need to scale down bc it it making the model feel small
also if you could do a gradient for the plasma glow like a darker blue on the edges and then going to your bright blue but i love piece man so much good work here!
@Cglewis- Thank you very much! Are you referring to the light brown ground dirt along the base? I'll look into the blue gradient and see what I can do.
The dirt on the base looks more like dust, and i guess that is because its color is so bright, maybe try putting something more dark in there and adjust the roughness so it creates contrast between the gold surface and dirt. Also because of this maybe try and push the color of metal (gold) just a bit towards the lighter.
Paint damages could maybe use more love, now it looks like the miniature/plaster with paint chipped off (which wasnt the point right?) and if it were it should be green underneath (green stuff ftw
Now, regarding the burn damages... it sure is tricky because the uvs are mirrored but try going with subtle burns, just add random blackened areas black and matte (and non metallic) with soft brush (or add clouds to mask and play with the settings) and then go in with the brush and even out the mask if hard obvious seams occur.
Thing with mirrored parts is they are mirrored cause they are same, in this case the cannon would heat up evenly and thus cause even (not perfectly but bare with me
In all this C&C i forgot to mention this but the piece looks great, great attention to detail.