Thanks for the advice. Here's an update, I got the other side modeled. I kept the holes in the trigger, my idea was to transfer the normal map info I get from the highpoly on to a plane. Is this ok to do? Just about done here with the highpoly, but wouldn't mind getting some last minute critiques.
Yeah you could put it onto an alpha mapped plane easily enough. Just remember you're going to need to duplicate the plane and flip it, not just turn off culling, for the lighting to be correct.
Much improved overall man, now get to work on the lowres!
[edit] Also one thing you should always pay attention to, the width of lines on details like screws and such, often times this stuff gets modeled seperately and then thrown on, so just make sure you're not modeling things with such fine detail and lines that it wont show up with the resolution you're going to have in your texture. So sometimes you need to exagerate the ring around a screw, and things like this so they show up and are readable.
Alright I got a question about optimizing correctly. What would you say would be the proper way to optimize this? Target weld a bunch together making lot's of triangles? or what?
honestly i think the thing is too flat. While the normal map will add a lot of detail it wont change the overall shape and silouette of the gun and thus I would do the switches and a few other areas.
You modeled the inside of the barrel. WHY? FPS you wont ever see that. Close it off and you will save a ton of tris there.
Also the reason I saw add the switches as geometry is because in a game sometimes players can switch things on the gun and well it's hard to do it with texture instead of a model.
Other than that I would say you could possible smooth out a few more areas here and there. Is the ammo clip removable? If so then you should round out the bottom part on the gun to match the high poly as close as possible.
The thing you should think of and worry more about for next gen development is texture size. You can get away with a higher poly weapon than one with a larger texture.
I would say safely that this weapon could be in the 2250-2500 tri count range. That is what I have seen a lot of.
You should try and get everything in 1 smoothing group if you can. If you're getting crazy smoothing errors then you can use some extra tris to help with that by cutting along edges or using inset.
This is going to be pretty much imposble to do well with one smoothing group and a tangent space map, if you went in and added the extra geo to all the places you'de need to to make that work it would end up trippling the polycount.
Making some good progress on the normal maps. Jesse, I changed the barrel however I'm still going to normal map the switches since I'm not planning on having it in a FPS, it's just a portfolio piece.
I'm getting a lot of pixel ugliness in the normal map. EQ I know you were saying exaggerate things so the normal map comes out, but what could I possibly do here?
Also the grip is normal mapping strangely, is it a smoothing group problem? I don't know the theory of smoothing groups, I just turbo smooth and auto smooth stuff till it looks decent.
Lastly, should this thing be 1024x1024? or 512x512? I don't know what next gen standards are for something like this.
As for not using it in an fps and using it as a portfolio piece you still should build things the "right" way or to atleast try to match what other people are doing on level of quality.
As for the texture size. Every single thing I have done for fps weapons has been 2048x2048.
-handle / grip likely a smoothing group issue. change the group on the faces that are between the handle and the side of the gun (underside)
-pixelation is probably from your render settings. Make sure you are using max 2.5 star as your global supersampler and Catmull-Rom as your Filter... (all under render tab in render settings)
Jesse's probably right about the render settings, but if you're like me and you're lazy, good old smudge tool with a one pixel brush and a steady hand would help it as well.
haha yeah so far it's been mainly 360/pc games. I am pretty sure they will get down resed later but for your portfolio I would do nothing less than a 1024.
Yeah, every gun i do here uses a 2048. That being said you should think more about the distance you'de see this at then anything. You dont want to go too high res if you're not going to see it upclose, because any of those little details you model to show up in a highres map will get washed out from a medium distance. So always try and think of how a certain peice will read. Good rule of thumb is that if its getting all aliased and hard to read on your highres, its going to be the same on your low!
If this was a first person view model here would be my specs: 3-5000 tris, 2048
and third person only model would be 5-900 tris, with a 512
Remember if its a FPV model, all of those switches and screws that protrude out from the highres you're going to want to have in the lowres as well, theres nothing more boring than having the side of the gun be totally flat because you're relying on the normals map for all of your detail, add to that generally shity mipmaping you would see in FPV and you have a big ol bag of ass, no matter how cool it is from the side. Also keep in mind bits closer to the back of the gun(Closer to the camera) should have more polies and/or higher res textures if its something like say, iron sights that you can actually look down in the game, that stuff needs to have much more geo and texture space than stuff that will be farther away, and anything that is behind the camera(buttstock, etc) should have very little geo. Remember, guns are on the screen nearly 100% of the time, victim to very close scrutiny and closer than any character you'll ever see, which argueably means they should be treated as the most important characters in the game(dont skimp on the polys and textures!) and are generally the closest connection you actually have to the player character in a fps, as a player.
The errors you have there are most definately from smoothing groups. And yeah as jesse says, play with your AA/supersampling settings.
Great critiques guys, thank you. I'm doing the normals in much smaller sections at a time now, and it's looking much better. Added the geometry for the switches and such. Normal is 2048x2048.
Quick question! So the normals were flipped when I brought it from xNormal to max. So I had to flip green in max. Is ok to do? Will this complicate with engines?
Progress:
Oh and 8FtSpider, that was one of the pics I used when modeling earlier.
No, it's lit by 3 spot lights. I'm just going through and creating the normal map piece by piece because I was getting some bad results doing it all at once. I'm by no means done with the normal map. Here's more progress.
Edit: I know, your probably thinking why the heck am I doing it this way? It's the only way I've gotten good results so far.. I just take each piece and photoshop it till it looks right then move on to the next piece. Maybe you can shed some light on what I'm doing wrong, or is this a good way to go about it?
What you had at first, although you had a few errors, was WAY better than what you're doing now. You dont want the entire map to be a flat blue, you want the normals to compensate for some of the smoothing, but you cant have too harsh of edges because theres only so much it can handle. The way you're doing it now is definately way worse, adding toooo many smoothing groups and breaking things up too much.
The errors you had you can fix by either adding in some extra geometry there, or by spliting some of your edges up with smoothing groups, but not all of them! Only fix what you have errors with, the rest looked way better.
Alright, well, I don't understand what I'm doing, I can't get good looking edges. Here's my process, I import the highpoly and lowpoly into xNormal, and make the cage from the lowpoly version. like so:
Then I tweak the cage a bit and save it. Generate it and get all sorts of wierd things going on which I circled in red. I realize I got a relatively good normal map a couple post ago, but it's by doing the same procedure I'm doing now.
(With this normal map I combined all the small details I had in my last nomral map)
I'm confused and need help. Is there a way to make a cage with the highpoly and be able to transfer it to the low poly?
Make sure you tick on the "use cage" check in xnormal. Really i never use the cage, i just set the trace distance with xnormal, its not needed in most cases. I just seperate peices that will intersect in the low&high(just move them a bit so they dont trace on each other), because even if you have a good cage you cant fix those sort of errors.
The shading error above seems a bad exported(or averaged) vertex normal.
Caution with the 3dsmax2obj exporter that comes with 3dsmax ( it messes a lot the normals). Try to export it better as SBM or ASE if you use 3dsmax. And remember to triangulate, ResetXForm/Collapse in max and "freeze transformations" in maya just before to export.
Sure you check the "use cage" option or the cage will be ignored. Try also to enable/disable the "discard backface hits" options as Earth said. Also try to check/uncheck the "smooth normals" for the lowres model and check the "closest hit if ray fails" to avoid errors.
Thanks for the feed back guys, I fiddled around with the settings and got some better looking normals, still had to edit it in photoshop, but at lease it's looking somewhat decent. Jogshy you said for me to "remember to triangulate" I don't understand what that means. Could you explain? But I did reset xForm and all tried all the other suggestions you gave me.
[ QUOTE ]
Jogshy you said for me to "remember to triangulate". I don't understand what that means.
[/ QUOTE ]
Triangulate = make sure your mesh contains only triangles as faces ( not quads, ngons, nurbs, patches... )... That's done in 3dsmax just applying an "Edit mesh" modifier on the top of the stack (in case your base mesh is not already an Editable mesh). If you use Maya do a "Triangulate" from the mesh menu.
Quad faces should be ok too... but caution because some programs and exporters flip the fourth vertex order(to keep triangle strips coherency)... so perhaps can give you problems.
N-gons(polygons with more than 4 points) are a no no currently ( because are hard to triangulate automatically due to non-convexity, holes in the middle, etc ).... I don't discard future support tho.... but currently = a headache.
So I recommend you to triangulate/quadrangulate manually because, if not, the program will automatically do it and some shading/edges errors can appear.... and, after all, almost the 100% of the 3D engines manage triangles only...
This does not mean you cannot work with nurbs, subdivision, ngons faces... but you should triangulate/quadrangulate them just before to export to xNormal(this is also valid for other programs and 3d engines too).
Btw, you need to know this mesh format info too:
- 3DS. Does not keep the original smoothing groups ( because can store only one normal per vertex ).
- LWO. Does not contain vertex normals. Uses a strange smoothing group system.
- OBJ(from 3dsmax2obj exporter). Sometimes exports bad the vertex normal for "hard" surfaces like a cube or a rectangle.
If you export models from 3dsmax better use the .ASE, FBX, COLLADA(dae) or use the included .SBM mesh exporter for xNormal.
Awesome, thanks so much Jogshy. This is all making a lot more sense. I think I'm done with the normal map. Key word there is "think". Also ran an AO map on here too. Critiques welcome. Gonna start texturing tomorrow! Woo hoo!
Well done persevering with this and learning all the hurdles that have to be overcome when first dealing with normal-maps
This looks cool now, and I'm certain the next time you do a normal-mapped highpoly object, you will be able to get good normal-maps much quicker and easier because of what you've learned here.
(caution with coarse angles... setup normals there(marked in blue color) smooth )
instead of making those planar triangles? In that way the normal map aspect will be enhaced better... but will increase the polygon count too much I bet.
I see something strange with the trigger:
Is it not a box? It looks like a "plane". Cannot see its "volume"
Also noticed you added a cannon end that doesn't appear in the original design:
Perhaps you could boolean-subtract it from the top part to create the original bullet cannon. Notice also the top part(black) is a bit shorter than the bottom one(light brown), so the end of the cannons does not form a perfect vertical line.
You could add the aiming point at the end of the cannon too... I don't like the preys to escape easily due to my rabbit pulse
It's looking much better! How did you solve the issue you were having with the smoothing groups? I can't see the difference in the wireframe.
For the trigger, rather than alpha mapping that, since it will rarely be seen, you could just use black holes and actually model the shape - using an alpha map for such a small detail is a waste - the alpha channel is much more costly memory and rendering-wise than a few extra verts.
Thanks for the kind words guys, it's very encouraging. Jogshy, the buttons are beveled actually, might be hard to tell from the screen shot. For the trigger I was planning on doing an alpha but Ghostscape is now telling me other wise (Thanks for the tip, although could you explain why? that doesn't really made sense as to why it would take less memory). So I'm going to model that in. And the bullet cannon is actually a flashlight, but I'm not entirely sure what your suggesting to me on that.
So I'm pretty much done with the first go around of texturing. I definitely want to dirty it up and make it more battle worn. Any ideas? tips? tricks? I'll take them all cause I'm still a little weak on the texturing side.
Always appreciate you guys helping me.
Progress!
And if someone can give me a link to the closest thread or tutorial that explains how to do regular spec and color spec that would be awesome. That's next on my agenda.
Simple, using a alpha channel or and extra texture (same res as the old one) will double the memory needed due to the difference in compression/extra file using an alpha channel. DXT1 = no alpha or 1 bit "black and white" alpha. Works when you don't need or can afford a separate channel/texture.
DXT5 = 8 bit alpha channel (what you want here)
Just model the trigger but leave the holes for the normal and diffuse to sort out.
An RGB image is 3 channels of 8bit grayscale images for the red, green, and blue channels. You can see them in photoshop if you want. Adding an alpha channel is going to increase that to 4 channels, or effectively increase the texture size by 1/3rd. If you use a 1bit alpha it's much less wasteful as its only a 1 bit channel isntead of 8, and thus much smaller, but at that texture resolution it's probably just as efficient to model the actual trigger. Besides, when you model it, it will look better - in the few moments you do see it, keep in mind you're going to be seeing it from a 3/4ths view and making it paper thin will not look as good as painting black holes.
So I'm still trying to figure out how to do color specs. I think I'm pretty comfortable with black and white specs, but adding color is hard to grasp. What I've gathered is you can invert your diffuse and then darken and tweak it. Is this correct? If not, please correct me.
The diffuse is pretty awesome, but I don't like the spec at all, it isn't doing anything. Take a look at your ref, the kriss is actually a fairly shiny gun in many places.
yeah spec isn't doing anything also your scratches and chips you have here and there should be showing up in your normal map as well. Nothing too heavily chipped but a little damage shown here and there would be nice.
Also dropping this in the roboblitz editor would be nice to see.
that looks way better man !! now where the specular encounters something that usually doesnt shine ( grime, materials that barely have shine, just be sure to paint it almost black ( not black thou) and some scratches be sure to put them on the specular too
keep it up ! you have improved imensely and this is turning out GREAT.
now this is really starting to come together and I would say you are almost there man. I think a few more high lights on the spec to push the scratches a bit more will bring them out more. maybe not though. i would have to see.
Replies
Much improved overall man, now get to work on the lowres!
[edit] Also one thing you should always pay attention to, the width of lines on details like screws and such, often times this stuff gets modeled seperately and then thrown on, so just make sure you're not modeling things with such fine detail and lines that it wont show up with the resolution you're going to have in your texture. So sometimes you need to exagerate the ring around a screw, and things like this so they show up and are readable.
You modeled the inside of the barrel. WHY? FPS you wont ever see that. Close it off and you will save a ton of tris there.
Also the reason I saw add the switches as geometry is because in a game sometimes players can switch things on the gun and well it's hard to do it with texture instead of a model.
Other than that I would say you could possible smooth out a few more areas here and there. Is the ammo clip removable? If so then you should round out the bottom part on the gun to match the high poly as close as possible.
The thing you should think of and worry more about for next gen development is texture size. You can get away with a higher poly weapon than one with a larger texture.
I would say safely that this weapon could be in the 2250-2500 tri count range. That is what I have seen a lot of.
I'm getting a lot of pixel ugliness in the normal map. EQ I know you were saying exaggerate things so the normal map comes out, but what could I possibly do here?
Also the grip is normal mapping strangely, is it a smoothing group problem? I don't know the theory of smoothing groups, I just turbo smooth and auto smooth stuff till it looks decent.
Lastly, should this thing be 1024x1024? or 512x512? I don't know what next gen standards are for something like this.
As for the texture size. Every single thing I have done for fps weapons has been 2048x2048.
-handle / grip likely a smoothing group issue. change the group on the faces that are between the handle and the side of the gun (underside)
-pixelation is probably from your render settings. Make sure you are using max 2.5 star as your global supersampler and Catmull-Rom as your Filter... (all under render tab in render settings)
Jesse's probably right about the render settings, but if you're like me and you're lazy, good old smudge tool with a one pixel brush and a steady hand would help it as well.
If this was a first person view model here would be my specs: 3-5000 tris, 2048
and third person only model would be 5-900 tris, with a 512
Remember if its a FPV model, all of those switches and screws that protrude out from the highres you're going to want to have in the lowres as well, theres nothing more boring than having the side of the gun be totally flat because you're relying on the normals map for all of your detail, add to that generally shity mipmaping you would see in FPV and you have a big ol bag of ass, no matter how cool it is from the side. Also keep in mind bits closer to the back of the gun(Closer to the camera) should have more polies and/or higher res textures if its something like say, iron sights that you can actually look down in the game, that stuff needs to have much more geo and texture space than stuff that will be farther away, and anything that is behind the camera(buttstock, etc) should have very little geo. Remember, guns are on the screen nearly 100% of the time, victim to very close scrutiny and closer than any character you'll ever see, which argueably means they should be treated as the most important characters in the game(dont skimp on the polys and textures!) and are generally the closest connection you actually have to the player character in a fps, as a player.
The errors you have there are most definately from smoothing groups. And yeah as jesse says, play with your AA/supersampling settings.
Perhaps, a bit late, but I ran across this in /k/ and thought you might appreciate it.
It's looking good.
Quick question! So the normals were flipped when I brought it from xNormal to max. So I had to flip green in max. Is ok to do? Will this complicate with engines?
Progress:
Oh and 8FtSpider, that was one of the pics I used when modeling earlier.
Edit: I know, your probably thinking why the heck am I doing it this way? It's the only way I've gotten good results so far.. I just take each piece and photoshop it till it looks right then move on to the next piece. Maybe you can shed some light on what I'm doing wrong, or is this a good way to go about it?
It would be a lot easier to do and you would get better results that way.
Also make sure you do an AO map
The errors you had you can fix by either adding in some extra geometry there, or by spliting some of your edges up with smoothing groups, but not all of them! Only fix what you have errors with, the rest looked way better.
Then I tweak the cage a bit and save it. Generate it and get all sorts of wierd things going on which I circled in red. I realize I got a relatively good normal map a couple post ago, but it's by doing the same procedure I'm doing now.
(With this normal map I combined all the small details I had in my last nomral map)
I'm confused and need help. Is there a way to make a cage with the highpoly and be able to transfer it to the low poly?
[edit] Also try turning on/off ignore backfacing
Caution with the 3dsmax2obj exporter that comes with 3dsmax ( it messes a lot the normals). Try to export it better as SBM or ASE if you use 3dsmax. And remember to triangulate, ResetXForm/Collapse in max and "freeze transformations" in maya just before to export.
Sure you check the "use cage" option or the cage will be ignored. Try also to enable/disable the "discard backface hits" options as Earth said. Also try to check/uncheck the "smooth normals" for the lowres model and check the "closest hit if ray fails" to avoid errors.
Hope it helps.
Anyways, here's progress:
Jogshy you said for me to "remember to triangulate". I don't understand what that means.
[/ QUOTE ]
Triangulate = make sure your mesh contains only triangles as faces ( not quads, ngons, nurbs, patches... )... That's done in 3dsmax just applying an "Edit mesh" modifier on the top of the stack (in case your base mesh is not already an Editable mesh). If you use Maya do a "Triangulate" from the mesh menu.
Quad faces should be ok too... but caution because some programs and exporters flip the fourth vertex order(to keep triangle strips coherency)... so perhaps can give you problems.
N-gons(polygons with more than 4 points) are a no no currently ( because are hard to triangulate automatically due to non-convexity, holes in the middle, etc ).... I don't discard future support tho.... but currently = a headache.
So I recommend you to triangulate/quadrangulate manually because, if not, the program will automatically do it and some shading/edges errors can appear.... and, after all, almost the 100% of the 3D engines manage triangles only...
This does not mean you cannot work with nurbs, subdivision, ngons faces... but you should triangulate/quadrangulate them just before to export to xNormal(this is also valid for other programs and 3d engines too).
Btw, you need to know this mesh format info too:
- 3DS. Does not keep the original smoothing groups ( because can store only one normal per vertex ).
- LWO. Does not contain vertex normals. Uses a strange smoothing group system.
- OBJ(from 3dsmax2obj exporter). Sometimes exports bad the vertex normal for "hard" surfaces like a cube or a rectangle.
If you export models from 3dsmax better use the .ASE, FBX, COLLADA(dae) or use the included .SBM mesh exporter for xNormal.
This looks cool now, and I'm certain the next time you do a normal-mapped highpoly object, you will be able to get good normal-maps much quicker and easier because of what you've learned here.
Nice one!
Just a few things:
These "buttons"
won't be better to "bevel" them as
(caution with coarse angles... setup normals there(marked in blue color) smooth )
instead of making those planar triangles? In that way the normal map aspect will be enhaced better... but will increase the polygon count too much I bet.
I see something strange with the trigger:
Is it not a box? It looks like a "plane". Cannot see its "volume"
Also noticed you added a cannon end that doesn't appear in the original design:
Perhaps you could boolean-subtract it from the top part to create the original bullet cannon. Notice also the top part(black) is a bit shorter than the bottom one(light brown), so the end of the cannons does not form a perfect vertical line.
You could add the aiming point at the end of the cannon too... I don't like the preys to escape easily due to my rabbit pulse
For the trigger, rather than alpha mapping that, since it will rarely be seen, you could just use black holes and actually model the shape - using an alpha map for such a small detail is a waste - the alpha channel is much more costly memory and rendering-wise than a few extra verts.
So I'm pretty much done with the first go around of texturing. I definitely want to dirty it up and make it more battle worn. Any ideas? tips? tricks? I'll take them all cause I'm still a little weak on the texturing side.
Always appreciate you guys helping me.
Progress!
And if someone can give me a link to the closest thread or tutorial that explains how to do regular spec and color spec that would be awesome. That's next on my agenda.
DXT5 = 8 bit alpha channel (what you want here)
Just model the trigger but leave the holes for the normal and diffuse to sort out.
Quick link to why this is:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/DXT
So I'm still trying to figure out how to do color specs. I think I'm pretty comfortable with black and white specs, but adding color is hard to grasp. What I've gathered is you can invert your diffuse and then darken and tweak it. Is this correct? If not, please correct me.
Here's my WIP spec (Big file): http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h201/VeryKeen/spec.jpg
Here's Progress:
Diffuse: http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h201/VeryKeen/diffuse.jpg
Spec: http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h201/VeryKeen/spec-1.jpg
Normal: http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h201/VeryKeen/newnormal.jpg
Also dropping this in the roboblitz editor would be nice to see.
Here we are:
Spec: http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h201/VeryKeen/spec2.jpg
Also Jesse, I did normal map the textures. It's kind of hard to see from far back but here's a close up.
EDIT: Also Jesse, I'll see if I can get it in roboblitz soon. I've been meaning to dive into that program for a while now.
keep it up ! you have improved imensely and this is turning out GREAT.