Props

joe gracey

I originally wanted to put these props into a jungle camp type environment, but I'm having a huge issue with making tree's and such so now I'm going to put them into a old cabin. Well all the props except for the fire pit and tent will go into the cabin. I just need some good feedback on how the props look and of course what I could do to improve them. Thanks for the crits! [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image]

MoP

While they look good, your models have far too many polys if you ever intended to use them in a game. 5000 triangles just for a camp fire cooking pot and some logs is fairly insane.
It looks like you've bevelled loads of edges (for example the logs next to the fire) - that's the sort of thing that will never be noticed in a game, and if you think you're getting any sort of extra visual fidelity out of it, it's actually the sort of thing that you should be letting your normal-maps do.
Same with the knife - the lowpoly model doesn't need those extra edge loops around the handle, they're too small to show up in the silhouette and they aren't needed for shading purposes, the normal map should handle all of that.

Similarly all of the other assets have needless tiny bevels around all the edges, that's the sort of thing you just don't notice in a game, it's essentially a waste of geometry. Let your normal map do all that detail work, don't model out absolutely everything onto your lowpoly mesh, it's unnecessary.

The textures work fine and everything seems competently put together and nicely consistent, and it'd be fine just to use in a "show off" scene, but if you want to show a potential employer that you can work within a reasonable budget when modelling, then you should definitely try cutting back on the excessive polygon usage that I'm seeing all over every one of these models.

Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, I just wanted to get the message across - you're not adding any detail by adding those little bevels and tiny polys, and in fact it's just showing any potential employers your inexperience with working on assets of this type.

If you can learn how to make these props all look the same, using half the amount of polys per object, then I think you'll be on the right track. It's certainly a reasonable and feasible goal to aim for.

Good luck, I'd like to see more of your work, but in a more optimized and game-ready form

Flewda

I strongly suggest you use Meshsmoothing when making a high poly model. If you hand model it all, you are likely going to leave out some nice beveling/chamfering on one edge or another. If you set it up to run nicely with a meshsmooth, everything will be very smooth on the edges, etc.

I also suggest that after you do that, you use as few smoothing groups as possible on the low poly. I know it will look very strange by itself, but when you bake the normal map from a good high poly model (using few smoothing groups) the normal map will actually counter those groups, so that it looks as close to the high poly as possible, and doing that will also avoid hard edges/seams as you tend to get with separating all the smoothing groups.

Also, I am not sure what is actually going on with that blanket on the cot, but that is a lot of geometry to use with little to no representation of it. I don't see any need to have that much geometry on that thing.

joe gracey

Thanks for the crits mop and flewda. I understand what you are saying about there being to many poly's, but I have a hard time knowing where to put more poly's and where to skimp on them when modeling. I guess I'll know more the more I practice.

I want these props to look good so I'm going to go back and tone down the poly's a bit.

I've never tried high poly modeling using meshsmooth, but it makes sense now that I've seen so many great high poly models in the forums, that thats how everyone does it. Do you start your model with a high poly box or cylinder and mold it, I'm not sure how you would start the high poly model I guess.

I know that people here can be harsh, and that's what I'm expecting.

Joseph Silverman

You have some solid understanding of the basics, but you're really not using your normal/diffuse/spec maps efficiently together. I did a knife a lot like that here when I was trying to work out how to use normal/spec to get a good, appealing old metal. If you have any interest in how the maps/material settings looked, feel free to hit me up with a PM

Short version, though: Right now your spec map is pretty much the same as your diffuse map, desaturated. This is metal. Obviously the highlights are something more than just the color, aren't they? Think about it realisticly, and push the levels in a more sensible way.

3D-j

Joe, you got some great props started just need some fixes, mostly minor. You could get a ton out of these if you go back and make the fixes these guys have been talking about. It wouldnt be to hard to do and it may seem a little painstaking. I would suggest some Ambient Occlusion maps for them since you have the high poly version. There are some 3rd party apps that generate the map so you could search on google for them. They will help your other textures pop a little better. If you need help let us know what 3D package you are using and I or the others could maybe help you out with suggestions and tips. I would also check out some of the guys portfolios on here to get a better understanding of poly flow because they have some great wireframes on their websites. If you look closely you can pick up on a lot of tricks by just looking. I see some floating verts on some of the meshes and those could cause issues in engines that dont support it. I've been working with the same sort of things the past couple of months and these guys help a lot. Just keep it up man.

joe gracey

Thanks for the help 3D... I'm defiantly going to do an AO pass on all of my props, very good idea. Now when you say floating verts, do you mean floating geometry that isn't sewn together, because I'm not sure what you mean.

I really do appreciate the help your giving me.

Mark Dygert

As a whole they are an impressive amount of work! Anyone who can bang out this many props in a short amount of time deserves a pat on the back, considering most people work on a mailbox for weeks/months and they don't look nearly this good

Crits: (don't be scared by the amount of text, they are all tiny and aimed at making the details pop, nothing major)
I haven't read the thread so some of these might have already been covered. I also won't cover what you did right, because if I didn't crit it, I'd assume its fine in my eyes. Like I said, its an impresive amount of work and looks good.

<font color="orange">Lantern:</font>
- Detach the base and weld the hole shut saving yourself a few polys. You can then round out the main lower body because anytime you have two circles running that close together and their edge count doesn't match people notice the lower much easier.
- The post inside the lamp could be done with a 4 sided cylinder.
- The texture is chaotic, and the dark cloudy parts added to it don't match as they cross from piece to piece.
- The glass is pretty clean considering how dirty/decrepit the rest of it is. Does the glass have any kind of spec/reflection to it? Even faked/baked/hand painted, could help it read better as glass.

<font color="orange">Knife:</font>
- The red part of the normal map is missed rays and will do horrible things to the lighting on your final model. Its why the hilt is so dark and not holding its shape like it should. Check your control cage, or clean those details up by hand.
- Remove one of the loops from the 3 sets of double edge loops in the hilt.
- Rethink the point of the knife, way too many polys. I would remove every other edge loop and see how the shape holds up.
- The text looks odd, hardly touched by age. Looks very much like a last min addition.

<font color="orange">Table:</font>
- The material is looking like metal or concrete, mostly because of the highlights on the legs.
- The round spheres on each leg are not coming across to the final model at all. They are obliterated by the defuse. It's like you tried to make water stains coming from them but forgot to paint the round knob ontop of the water stain?
- The boolean'ed sphere detail is kind of cheap and a waste of normal map space in my opinion. I would toss in some scroll work using splines or nurbs, or just use the spaghetti or toothpaste option of the Advanced Painter script to sketch out some details. OR dig up the vector import/export plugin's and make some splines from patterns you find. Quick easy and uses the normal map to its fullest potential.
- Check your wood grain, instead of applying one big wood texture to the entire sheet, take into account that some pieces are facing a different way. Make sure to adjust your wood grain accordingly.

<font color="orange">Gun Case:</font>
841 tris seems pretty high. A lot of the finer details around the handle are very round but the details on the corners are blocky. If you optimized the handle/lock area I bet you would drop 100-200 tris easy with no hit to the detail.
- The texture space the handle restrains are using is HUGE. If you scaled it back, and increased the brass end cap sizes, the would pick up more detail in the normal and defuse. It might pick up some decent screw detail. You notice the end pieces before the handle details.
- Again check your wood grain. The front of the case is going a different direction than the rest of the piece.
- The black dirt detail on the left front edge doesn't carry over to the brass end protector. Either move the detail farther down or account for it on the brass bits.

<font color="orange">Gas Can</font>
- The normal map is doing something funky with the center ring'ed details. its almost like its inverted? Since that detail plays a big roll in the high polys silhouette you should model it in the low poly version. Removing polys from the top of the canister should give you enough polys to work with.
- Remove all the circular edge loops from the top of the canister, they do very little to round it out, most of that work is done by the normal map.
- Detach the top of the canister at the first edge loop behind the lip, and remove every other vertical edge loop to save even more polys.
- Text is reading very flat and "PhotoShopped". The bumpy rusty detail has no effect on it. Switch its layer from normal to overlay, or softlight. Build up a few layers with different settings if you need to.

<font color="orange">Tent</font>
- The weakest of the pieces, please consult some proper tent ref.
- Stakes on the canopy, really? They don't even line up with the posts.
- The canopy isn't modeled to show the tension each rope/stake would have.
- 1,160 tris, really? I can't tell where it all went?
- Are there center poles? How is the middle of the tent held up?
- Those ropes could be done with aplha textures (opacity maps) or at the very most be 3 sided cylinders.
- The spec map ignores the canvas tent part, ouch!

<font color="orange">Camp Fire Pit</font>
- Way too many polys in most of those logs. For that poly count you could have modeled a simple ash/hot coal cone and placed it in the pit.
- The burned logs are pure black, where are the white/gray chalky ash details?
- What about adding some glowing coals? you don't need to make animated fire planes or anything but some nice glowing coals would help the player know someone was here recently, it would also help "sell the fire pit".
- The rocks show very little fire pit detail. Ash falls on the rocks, as do other things that react with the heat and stain the rocks in certain ways.
- The rock texture and the wood look very similar.
- The outside of the pot is cleaner than the inside. You have evidence of one boil over, only one? If the pot is as old as the inside suggests it would have much more wear on the outside. People scrub the inside of the pot and neglect the outside. I'm not saying you can't have a dirty pot sitting over the fire, just make sure the gunk on the inside looks like a meal someone didn't clean up instead of how the outside would normally look.
- Normally you want a good hot bed of coals for cooling, but no coals are present...
- Heat discolors metal, and as close to the fire as this pot is, I would think there would be more discoloration and burn marks on the pot.

<font color="orange">Cot</font>
Great cot model, but that is the worlds rattiest blanket.
- the blanket could be optimized, and I bet the poly count would be cut in half.
- The white right next to the edge of the opacty map should be switched to a lighter shade of green. I think you painted it white to get that frayed look? but its too much and shouldn't outline large sections of the blanket. Especially when you painted some of the edges very dark.
- I wouldn't worry about an AO map when you could combine that into the defuse. I would much rather see a normal map bumping the rusty detail and providing texture to the blanket/cot pad over an AO map.

<font color="orange">Chest</font>
- 1,682 tris seems high for something so boxy? It doesn't open? for 1,682 tris I would expect to see an inside.
- Is it wood? Stone? Concrete? Metal?
- The edge protectors all have separate texture space but hardly any of them have a unique texture. Was this done only for the normal map? There are ways to overlap geometry and still get a clean normal map. You can stack all those pieces in one spot and move all but one when you render the normal map. You can stack them all and move one in front of the others in the UW (not UV) space.
- For the tri count I half expect to see tiny 5 sided cylinders for each round rivet? I'm just not sure wher eall the tris have gone =/
- The spec is ignoring the main body of the box?

joe gracey

Thanks for the amazingly detailed critique Vig! I have a lot to go back and tweak. I appreciate it a lot.