Student looking for critique please. Simple Bookshelf Model using Maya and Substance Painter.
polycounter lvl 6
Hello. I am a self guided student looking for critique. Hoping someone can point out any obvious things I am doing wrong. I have been building a bookshelf. Modelled in Maya, textured in Substance Painter and rendered in Maya with Maya Software. Subdiv0
This is at about 5000 tris but is built to be subdividable. Is that too many? Subdiv1
I feel like the texture looked a lot better in Substance. The Renders appeared lighter. I am also not sure about how to properly bring the normal maps over. the appear extremely tessellated so I turn the bump down to like 0.04. Is that what I am supposed to do?
Any Critique at all would be very helpful and appreciated.
This is at about 5000 tris but is built to be subdividable. Is that too many? Subdiv1
I feel like the texture looked a lot better in Substance. The Renders appeared lighter. I am also not sure about how to properly bring the normal maps over. the appear extremely tessellated so I turn the bump down to like 0.04. Is that what I am supposed to do?
Any Critique at all would be very helpful and appreciated.
Replies
You've got the cabinet done, so that's a good start.
What wood do you want to use?
Oak, Mahogony, Bark, "fake" wood.
Dirt inbetween the edges, maybe the Shelf part would have spots where books, vases or something else been sitting there.
How about chiping of some edges in mudbox, Blender or Zbrush?
Your shelf/cabinet is flat. Textel density seems off, you can tell by how the wood fibers seems bigger in some places and smalle in other.
Have fun and remember references is really important!
So first thing is about the polycount, 5K may be too much for something that's mostly blocky and square-ish, however you said that its made for subdivision (high poly) so its no big deal since that "low poly" should be optimized either way when you are done with making high poly.
Rendering with maya software is not.. recommended, because it will mess up normal mapping and generally will not show a bunch of stuff you've made in substance (gloss, metal/spec)
Now, my advice would be to just render the final renders in substance (if you dont have marmoset, if you do then use that
About bringing the normal maps in maya (from substance) you need to change the texture type in material from bump to tangent space normal map, then it will display correctly in the viewport, also you need to mess around with renderer, i forgot exactly which one was it but there is like 3 of them so... ( but try viewport2.0 first
Now for the material itself and the wood texture, wirrexx has the right idea, just take a good look at the model he provided, and also you can go and find pieces that have marmoset viewer or sketchfab viewer > study every bit (including the geo) and apply that to your model.
Right now the direction of wood in some places is off (top part should be horizontal) find reference images and see how the bookshelves are put together and where are seams usually put and that "technical" stuff and try to implement that in the model.
Cheers.
Generally the more detailed the joint the stronger it will hold and the more expensive the piece of furniture will be.
Also the wood grain on yours doesn't seem to change much at all. Look at this reference of different types of grain https://handcraftedbyandrew.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/grains.jpg
I know it's easy just to slap one UVW modifier over the whole model but this type of detail will help a lot.
I have separated each piece of wood in the structure so that it is logical instead of the carved out look. I rearranged the UVs so the wood grains work better. I also found where the density was off with the texture and fixed that.
I rendered in Marmoset this time as suggested. I attempted to take it into ZBrush and wear down some edges but the normal maps looked off and then I read that you are not supposed to change the silhouette. Does that include bevelling and chipping? I ended up doing wear in substance painter instead.
Any further critique is appreciated and thanks so much for all the help so far.
Probably the only thing I personally see at this point is more nitpicky so feel free to put it aside but your original model had that top flare structure that I think suited it well, without it the cubby space seems like a fancier feature than a bookcase with this silhouette would have.
Again though that’s something that doesn’t really impact the model quality so feel free to ignore it.
One thing i would try and tweak, that may or may not influence the "realism" is, try to lower the normal map intensity, right now it looks like it has a heavy coat of glossy paint, that was smeared on it with a wide brush in an "i dont care" way <which is fine, totally fine, but try to add some variation in gloss and reduce normal map intensity, see if it looks better, may or may not but i think it will
Cheers and once more good work (and happy new year