Old Sci-fi Gun

Klawd

Finally finished this videogame scifi gun I was working on in my free time. I still have lot to learn but I'm proud of this little result!
Hope you like it and give me feedback on what I could have done better!
Thank you.
Claudio

The highpoly is modeled in Modo's MeshFusion. Retopo and UVs always in Modo. Bake, materials and renders instead in Substance Painter.


New Version:

Daf57

Looks great to me - no crits. Nice work!

Kid.in.the.Dark

Hey Klawd,

This is a very nice start... in terms of execution I feel like this is pretty solid... my only critiques rely more on the colour scheme & weathering...

I feel the weathering is a bit too uniform, it doesn't really say much about the weapon... there's no story telling on it what so ever and looks like someone just decided to scrape every edge of the gun for an even edge damage across the entire gun... I'd suggest masking some areas out and breaking the uniformed weathering look of what I'm just guessing is a edge wear generator in Substance Painter. Some areas could do being untouched or damaged within reason. An example would be the area in between the ammo chamber and handle... it's been scratched along it's edges and even along the yellow piece's edges as well even though it's probably the most secluded section of the gun... it just doesn't come across as very believable is all.

In terms of the colour scheme I feel like it's a little dull, it's very red and then it's a bit black and then bits of random yellow... I suggest perhaps just playing around with ways to divide the gun up more? or even going back and adding more details across the body of the gun which will let you separate them later.

Either way, again this is a lovely start and shows promise

Keep it up! hope this helped.

Eric Chadwick

Looks neat! Retopo though is really really messy, if that's what the first wireframe shot is. Tons of superfluous edge loops. Looks more like a messy subd cage (which is fine as long as it bakes well). But this is weird for an in-game topology.

McGreed

The model looks good, however the lowpoly version needs some work. Something I notice is that you try to keep everything into one mesh, however you should look at how the model would be constructed in the real world, and separate parts. For example the yellow cylinder don't need to be merged into the base, it can be a separate part, and you can get a cleaner mesh. You can reduce a lot of the loops you have by doing this.

Magihat

Yeah it looks cool, really nice design but I have to agree on the topology. I am kinda curious how you reached that result, did you do it by and and then subdivide? If you are baking a normal you don't need all those beveled edges and if a surface is completely flat it needs very little topology. I think you can reduce the tri-count by a quite hefty amount and lose virtually nothing in terms of silhouette.

Klawd

Daf57 said:

Looks great to me - no crits. Nice work!

Thanks!

Kid.in.the.Dark said:

Hey Klawd,
...
Keep it up! hope this helped.

First of all thanks for the encouragement!
As for the wear&tear I guess you are right, I could have spared some parts. I just went with it when I imagined the gun to be really old, probably used by multiple people for decades. The paint peeling out by itself more than for the gun use. For the color scheme I'm not that good with color theory (yet?) :P I take the critiques, and I'll try and do better with the next piece (not going to work more on this piece since it's not really going to be in any game, but was just an excercise). 
Again. thanks, and yes, it helped

Eric Chadwick said:

Looks neat! Retopo though is really really messy, if that's what the first wireframe shot is. Tons of superfluous edge loops. Looks more like a messy subd cage (which is fine as long as it bakes well). But this is weird for an in-game topology.

McGreed said:

The model looks good, however the lowpoly version needs some work. Something I notice is that you try to keep everything into one mesh, however you should look at how the model would be constructed in the real world, and separate parts. For example the yellow cylinder don't need to be merged into the base, it can be a separate part, and you can get a cleaner mesh. You can reduce a lot of the loops you have by doing this.

Magihat said:

Yeah it looks cool, really nice design but I have to agree on the topology. I am kinda curious how you reached that result, did you do it by and and then subdivide? If you are baking a normal you don't need all those beveled edges and if a surface is completely flat it needs very little topology. I think you can reduce the tri-count by a quite hefty amount and lose virtually nothing in terms of silhouette.

Thank you guys, appreciate that!
For the retopo... ahem, really hoped no one would mention it 
Basically I did it by hand to practice with Modo's retopo tools (never used before). As I said to Kid.in.the.Dark the gun is not really going to be in any game, it was just a free time excercise, so I didn't bother to clean the resulting topology, since it also baked well enough. It ended up being around 40k tris (but indeed could easily be trimmed down to 25/30k if needed).

@McGreed , contrary to what it seems, the pieces are all separeted, the yellow knob for example seems not because the main body topology end up inward a bit, and I needed that little geometry to be there. It's more clear in this picture:

McGreed

Ah I'll see. You should consider looking into how to do low poly properly, as it would also make it a lot easier for you to do unwrapping and texturing, when you have less to work with, I imagine that unwrapping it manually could be a pain.
I'm guessing you took your highpoly model and reduced the polycount, but I think it would have been better to  retop it from scratch, instead of trying to reduce polycount without breaking it. When you have the highpoly model to refer to, making the lowpoly is a lot easier and you can avoid some of the tricky parts. And I think you could reduce it to below 15k polys. Do you use normal map at all currently?

Klawd

McGreed said:

Ah I'll see. You should consider looking into how to do low poly properly, as it would also make it a lot easier for you to do unwrapping and texturing, when you have less to work with, I imagine that unwrapping it manually could be a pain.
I'm guessing you took your highpoly model and reduced the polycount, but I think it would have been better to  retop it from scratch, instead of trying to reduce polycount without breaking it. When you have the highpoly model to refer to, making the lowpoly is a lot easier and you can avoid some of the tricky parts. And I think you could reduce it to below 15k polys. Do you use normal map at all currently?

The unwrapping took less than half hour actually. I'm well versed with UVs now, and Modo is quite good on that front too, it speeds things up pretty nicely. I did retopo from scratch in fact, it took a couple of days or a little more in total (between learning the tools, since it was the first time using them, and actually doing the retopology). Yes, there's a normal baking from the highpoly to the lowpoly. The lowpoly already has a lot of geometry by itself, but a lot more came with the bake.

Eric Chadwick

Personally, I would avoid showing that retopo in a portfolio, since it could communicate a lack of understanding about in-game topology limits. Here's a great example of a good retopo from @EarthQuake
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_Map_Modeling#Low-Poly_Mesh

Klawd

I guess you are right, I didn't consider it much of a problem, but I see it can be easily misunderstood.

Eric Chadwick

My apologies for beating a dead horse, but I don't see how it's an issue of someone misunderstanding. Art Directors and Lead Artists will be examining your portfolio, to see if you know how to model for games. Since you're using this gun as an exercise to learn more about game mdoeling/texturing techniques, I would think retopology would be a key part of it. Retopo for a game asset is meant to make the mesh work well in a game engine. This retopo doesn't yet. But it certainly could, with a little more work!

Klawd

Are you kidding, there's nothing to apologize. Bash away! I'm just grateful that you care enough to give advice. I'm going to remove the wireframe image for the time being. I'll see to fix it when I'll have a little free time, and then reupload to the portfolio

Klawd

Eric Chadwick said:

My apologies for beating a dead horse, but I don't see how it's an issue of someone misunderstanding. Art Directors and Lead Artists will be examining your portfolio, to see if you know how to model for games. Since you're using this gun as an exercise to learn more about game mdoeling/texturing techniques, I would think retopology would be a key part of it. Retopo for a game asset is meant to make the mesh work well in a game engine. This retopo doesn't yet. But it certainly could, with a little more work!

Pride got the better of me and I couldn't do anything this morning but to think about this gun topology. So I decided to clean it right away!
Now it's down to almost 26k tris. I could have gone further but seemed clean enough to me.

Klawd

Wasn't satisfied with the original materials, so I recolored it

Eric Chadwick

Klawd said:

Pride got the better of me and I couldn't do anything this morning but to think about this gun topology. So I decided to clean it right away!
Now it's down to almost 26k tris. I could have gone further but seemed clean enough to me.

 This is a lot better! You could go a lot further here though. Still lots of wasted vertices.

I circled a few. Why double edges? (or are they triple?) No need to continue edge loops across the in-game model. Total waste.

Just my opinion of course, take with a grain of salt, etc.

Klawd

Hi Eric, yes you are right. All those areas could be optimized further to save another few thousands polygons. But this gun is not really going in any videogame engine. I'll make a better job in the following projects! And this also thanks to your feedback, it was invaluable!