Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

m32 - FPS Weapon Wrapup

polycounter lvl 18
Offline / Send Message
kary polycounter lvl 18
Finally getting a chance to wrap this up and I'll need a bit of advice.

High Poly:

m32hp.jpg

There are a few spots that I might need to go back and rework, but it should be enough to start with.

m32wired800wide.jpg

Low poly as it stands now.

m32sidebysidepolycount.jpg

1) The cylinder revolves, so making that area reasonably smooth adds an extra hundred polys (6 areas to round). Most of the 40mm rounds have a shiny bottom rim, so the ammo would be adding a highlight to draw the eye. So that area seems worth putting in the extra polys, but what about the far end of the cylinder? Rounding that adds another 300ish polys.

m32_cylinderandfrontblock.jpg

The selected edges are what I was turning on and off for the smoothness comparison above.

2) Is that area reasonably well handled for the low poly? The bottom of the barrel protrusion should have a few polys timmed, but I am seeing a few hundred polys that could be pulled out, not 1500.

Quick spin here.

3) Does 8.5k sound reasonable for this grenade launcher? When I started I thought low 7000s would be easy, but most everything is rounded on this thing. If you look at it at 1980x1200 (like it would be in UT3) it looks jagged pretty easily.

Input on anything you spot is appreciated, more or less learning as I go on this.

Replies

  • Ott
    Offline / Send Message
    Ott polycounter lvl 13
    Really confused why any of the faces on the opposite side of the player are in there at all. Essentially, anything the player can't see could be removed. (Keep in mind the animation setup for reloading / weapon-swapping though.)

    If you had a "This_is_the_model_I_see_other_players_with" version, that would probably be a different, even lower mesh anyhow. You also have a lot of detail in the stock and the handle that wouldn't be seen much in an FPS either.

    You could easily get another 1500 if you cleaned all that stuff off.
  • Flewda
    Offline / Send Message
    Flewda polycounter lvl 17
    Got yourself a solid model there, both high poly and low. However, There are easily a few areas you could reduce the polycount on your low.

    One area you could easily cut back on is the fact that you modeled in the grooves onto the screw heads on the rear of the gun & sights. This is a good instance where a normal map is going to be able to fake this very well. You are staring almost directly head on to the screws, with a good high poly source, you'd have a very difficult time telling whether it's modeled or a normal map.

    Take a good look at the model, and find out what a normal map will be able to do just as well as geometry, and also look at areas that will not likely be visible on screen much. You have a bit of detail on the lower back of the stock, will that ever be seen on screen? If so maybe only briefly during a draw animation or possibly a 'pistol whip' animation. So most of those details can be rough in the model, and the rest done with normal maps. You'd be surprised how much you can get away with on a normal map. Obviously being a first person model you want to get a little higher detail in the geometry, but like I said, there are many things that even in first person, you wouldn't be able to tell was fake or real.

    Lookin really sharp though man. Looking forward to seeing this unwrapped and textured.

    EDIT: I agree with Ott about that, however, then I suggest before you even lay out the UV's, you figure out how you plan for it to be animated. If it's something simple and basic where it comes up, you shoot, you reload, etc. Then you'll be able to do that kind of stuff easily, but if you want to have some bizarre animations going on, it would suck to not have faces there you then have to add, and have no UV space for it, and would also have to reproject some stuff if you did squeeze it into the UVs.
  • bluekangaroo
    Offline / Send Message
    bluekangaroo polycounter lvl 13
    the hi poly looks awesome. lots of nice little details and stuff that can really be brought out by the normal map. I dunno its totally up to you if you want go by the contest rules and get this things tri count under 7000 but if you do I think you could totally cut a lot of polys. For sure you could reduce some edges from the end of the barrel and around the stock....both areas that the player arent going to see in first person view. BUT I dont think its necessary to axe all the faces you arent going to see in fps if you want to do somethin like a full turnaround and possibly have your low poly double as a 3rd person view weapon.

    One area I noticed....that little lip sticking out from the end of the barrel.....I think the normal map would easily take care of this although the only thing you would notice is the silhouette would be gone
  • JohnnyRaptor
    Offline / Send Message
    JohnnyRaptor polycounter lvl 15
    Yeah i agree about getting rid of all polys not facing the camera if this is a first person weapon, which i assume it is, as 7k is way too high for a 3rd person weapon. Also all the screws, bumps and dents and so on, they could also be normalmapped and could save u a lot of tris. also, the barrel doesnt need to have a hole, it could be completely solid, unless u actually see it in the loading animation from the rear, but you could fake this with a decent texture too.
  • pliang
    Offline / Send Message
    pliang polycounter lvl 17
    I see some pinch shadows around the bolts in the FPS view...
  • edwardE
    I think it's worth keeping the smoothed tubes at the front AND putting them at the other end - that's something that caught my eye when I first saw it - it seems inconsistent with the one end low and the close end high.

    After ridding backfaces (if you want to take optimizing that far) and normal mapping the screws and the like, I think it'd be worth the chip in the budget, even if you have to sacrifice some more polys in less noticeable parts of the model - these tubes are the main attraction.

    Looking really great so far - I can definitely envision this in an FPS.
  • Joao Sapiro
    Offline / Send Message
    Joao Sapiro sublime tool
    "Yeah i agree about getting rid of all polys not facing the camera if this is a first person weapon, which i assume it is, as 7k is way too high for a 3rd person weapon. Also all the screws, bumps and dents and so on, they could also be normalmapped and could save u a lot of tris. also, the barrel doesnt need to have a hole, it could be completely solid, unless u actually see it in the loading animation from the rear, but you could fake this with a decent texture too."

    yeah then you have to make a complete new model for the third person and the level of detail and having to use another texture ? why not letting it be there ? its not a couple hundred triangles that are going to make everything slowdown , its to showoff too dont forget, and he might want to be able to rotate the gun besides the fpv point.
  • JohnnyRaptor
    Offline / Send Message
    JohnnyRaptor polycounter lvl 15
    yeah you would have to make a set of lowpoly weapons to go with the regular 3rdperson characters, and a special set of weapons only for the first person view
  • Joao Sapiro
    Offline / Send Message
    Joao Sapiro sublime tool
    yeah thats why its retarded to use two diff textures just because of a couple hundrer polygons. defeating the purpose of cutting those polygons.
  • kary
    Offline / Send Message
    kary polycounter lvl 18
    Ott: What I gathered from the contest is that most people do a complete gun now (albeit low detail on the off side), because the polycount isn't as important as it used to be, and it keeps things free in animation.

    On that point:
    Milkor_MGL_16_SHOTShow2008_2-02-08.jpg
    Is what it looks like in the reload. When the sales guy was demoing the style you use for "18 rounds on target per minute" he; split the gun as above, raised it straight up, spent shells dropped to the ground, then faced straight down to load the next 6 shells, clapped it back together, then brought it up. For that animation you're going to see most of it. It's ridiculously elaborate, but it would be neat to see.

    Flewda: Good to hear the modelling should work.

    Thanks for the pointing out those screws, that is the kind of thing I don't have enough experience with. Looks like that would be a savings of 28 per screw, and I might have made some similar mistakes which could add up across the model.

    I have been trying to think through the animation (and what I'd like to do and what I can do are probably pretty different), but the core of it is good portfolio stills. Even if the renders look okay a jarring polycount is hard to get past.

    A pistol whip with 15 pounds of grenade launcher, ow :)

    EricV: Thanks.

    The lip would be a 50ish savings. I wanted to get some draft textures before deciding on that. I hoped it would pick up an interesting highlight, but as you say the normal map would do the same and you'd only see the barrel in profile at the top of a reload animation.

    I'll go back over the stock, that is well out of view and I've been generous with bevels.

    JohnnyRaptor:

    The internals of it are a bit up in the air. They count for fewer polys then I expected, and there is a position in the reloading when you could be looking right down the pipe. I'll look into it.

    pliang:

    I don't know that means. Is that the weird stuff on the single smoothing group low poly, or something wrong with the high?

    edwardE:

    I've been back and forth on that one, good to know it sticks out to you also. I wondered if that would be softened when it's textured (instead of flat white), but you're right, those are the star of the show. They'll spin, they're right in front of you, etc.

    Johny:

    Exactly, I'd like to get some 3rd person views out of it. Showing off would be cool, but that's probably a pipedream.

    I've wondered why the first person weapon wouldn't make a good highest LOD (assuming it is only a few hundred polys). It's likely still using the same size, and number, of maps that the highest 3rd person lod would.

    ... and posts are happening as I write this and I only had 20 minutes to post :poly105:
    ___


    I guess I want to have my 'rounded enough for a FPV' and 'look okay in 3rd person' too. I'll approach it with the FPV in mind, with a dash of absurdly complex animation. I'll try not to be too fussed by the overall count, but make sure I don't get develop bad habits (like modeling in the 't' of the screws, likely the barrel lip, etc).

    Thanks for the input.
  • MoP
    Offline / Send Message
    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Johny wrote: »
    yeah thats why its retarded to use two diff textures just because of a couple hundrer polygons. defeating the purpose of cutting those polygons.

    Johny, no... think about it.
    If there are 10 types of gun, each with a 1024x1024 first-person texture, you do NOT want to be loading 1024x1024 textures for the third-person versions, especially if you can stream in the first person textures. In fact it's probably more optimal to have a completely different texture for the 3rd-person weapon, at which point you might as well be baking down your firstperson's diffuse/spec anyway to a new layout. And TBH for this sort of weapon nobody will notice third-person mirroring, whereas they might notice first-person mirroring, so you would probably benefit from an optimised third-person model.

    Either way, it's a solid set of meshes here, and I agree that you should spend a few extra polys rounding out the cylinders, since they really are filling the view.
  • JohnnyRaptor
    Offline / Send Message
    JohnnyRaptor polycounter lvl 15
    also it rarely is a couple of hundred tris, but more likes a few thousand. but yeah, no doubt it is a great set of high and lowpoly model
  • EarthQuake
    MoP wrote: »
    Johny, no... think about it.
    If there are 10 types of gun, each with a 1024x1024 first-person texture, you do NOT want to be loading 1024x1024 textures for the third-person versions, especially if you can stream in the first person textures. In fact it's probably more optimal to have a completely different texture for the 3rd-person weapon, at which point you might as well be baking down your firstperson's diffuse/spec anyway to a new layout. And TBH for this sort of weapon nobody will notice third-person mirroring, whereas they might notice first-person mirroring, so you would probably benefit from an optimised third-person model.

    Either way, it's a solid set of meshes here, and I agree that you should spend a few extra polys rounding out the cylinders, since they really are filling the view.

    This is only really beinificail *if* your engine supports streaming, otherwise you're loading a 1024 AND an extra 512, which is just plain retarded when you can easily reuse the same texture. Not to mention the sheer amount of production time to create and maintain 2 seperate models and textures. What if the texture needs to be overhauled? Its just piling on more and more work for *very* little(if any) gain.

    Its quite easy to just make an LOD of your fpv model for third person, and even if your engine supports streaming you're better off doing this and just using a sized down texture for the tpv mesh, if you're worried about not having the FPV mesh and TPV mesh onscreen at the same time. What do you save, a few hundred polies and waste hours redoing uv layouts, baking redundant shit etc. NOT WORTH IT.
  • MoP
    Offline / Send Message
    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Sure, you could do that (in fact that's what I kinda meant), I was mainly pointing out that Johny's argument doesn't make much sense. He argued against removing polys or optimising the unseen portion of the gun in firstperson view, because that would somehow mean you'd have to make a completely different UV layout and texture for the third person or LOD models (which is wrong), and you're gonna have to make a lowpoly model for LOD or thirdperson for a game anyway... so basically what Johny said didn't make any sense.

    Anyway this is getting kinda offtopic and nitpicky, personally I think Kary is going well with this model, and his polygon count is about right so he doesn't need to worry about deleting the backfaces, I'm just saying you could do that without causing all the issues that Johny seems to think it would.
  • EarthQuake
    Word, i still dont think its worth while to delete unseen faces, its more production time, limits what you can do animation wise(what if you need a melee animation where you swing thing gun? etc) and really, lets be serious here. Saving even 2-3000 polys on a mesh thats up in your face, only rendered once in the grand scheme of things is not going to affect performance on modern hardware. You'de see more of a hit from rendering a few extra materials in the mesh, than saving a couple thousand triangles on fpv weapon.
  • kary
    Offline / Send Message
    kary polycounter lvl 18
    Interesting discussion, good to hear thoughts taking the process from FPV to 3rd person.

    ____

    m32_wiresat7644.jpg

    It came down to 7644, despite adding smoothness to the cylinder and keeping the potentially excess detail (butt and barrel) that I want to take a look at. The scope needs a 5th going over and I'll find more loose polys when UVing no doubt so that figure might come down. It sounds like a reasonable number though so I'm not going to obsess.

    I'll get started on the UVs tomorrow, just have to do a few sketches to figure out how to do eyelids before I start them.
  • kary
    Offline / Send Message
    kary polycounter lvl 18
    Maps are fresh from xNormal and MR (I can't get the simple AO tool to work for some reason), they're not fixed yet (1024 after click):


    m32ao-300x300.jpgm32_normal-300x300.jpg


    m32normalmapped.jpg

    The gun doesn't do justice to the level, but it's interesting to see what it would look like.
    _________________

    A lot of this stuff has been theory to me till now, so it was a bit of slow going, and redoing. Results aren't spectacular, but so far I'm pretty happy. Freakily enough I found a bunch of polys in the UVing and it's down to 7,517 now (where it shall stay :poly131:).

    Hopefully the layout isn't too bad. I haven't done anything that complex before and it got a bit cumbersome towards the end. I've got some stupid ratio decisions in there, but they're not mistakes I'll make twice.



    I guess the next thing to do will be to paint out the normal map errors, get new cavity maps out of that, and then start the diffuse and spec. Am I missing anything?
    ______

    Blown away by how fast xNormal is, 24 seconds for a 2048 of a 6.8 million poly model.

    Thanks again for the documentation you did in your contest entry EQ, it was a huge help.
  • LoTekK
    Offline / Send Message
    LoTekK polycounter lvl 17
    Oh hello, this is turning out raaather purty. Looks like you've managed to learn a hell of a lot with this one project, which is always awesome. Glad you managed to get an in-game shot, too. Shame you didn't manage to finish before the pc challenge deadline though! Nice job on the unwrap. Those UVs are packed/i]. :)

    Looking forward to the diffuse and spec.

    Also...

    karygun.jpg
  • jogshy
    Offline / Send Message
    jogshy polycounter lvl 17
    The 3.15.3 beta 4 has a bug that shows a "sorry the mesh set is void". To avoid it just use a stable version(3.14.6 or 3.15.2) instead of the beta.
  • MoP
    Offline / Send Message
    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    This is turning out really well. Looks great with the ambient occlusion and normals applied.
  • Flewda
    Offline / Send Message
    Flewda polycounter lvl 17
    Very nice projection man. Everything looks very solid so far! Can't wait to see it textured.
  • EarthQuake
    Looks great man, if you're rending AO from your highres you should just choose ambient occlusion in the maps dropdown, instead of the simple ao tool.
  • LEViATHAN
    Offline / Send Message
    LEViATHAN polycounter lvl 11
    Occlusion near the cylinder will give some problems when animated, keep that in mind. :poly121:
  • kary
    Offline / Send Message
    kary polycounter lvl 18
    Teck: Thanks :)

    It would have been nice to get finished in the contest, but I started modelling late and it was harder then I expected. I managed to pick something centred around round forms for a gun contest... clever!

    Hah that face is a happy accident, logical though:
    tecklawl.jpg
    It looks a lot more chipper on the right.

    jogshy:
    Thanks. I was able to get the simple AO from mental ray, and it is working in the older version too. Again huge thanks for the tremendous program.

    MoP and Flewda:
    Good to hear. I'm hoping the painting goes well, it looks reasonably simple, but there is a fair amount of it.

    EQ:
    I am actually following your PolycountWiki AO tutorial. I have a nice light exploded AO in there, but it has been completely smashed by the heavy 'low poly alone' AO that I dumped ontop. I'll fix the opacities and paint out the moving bits tonight.

    LEViATHAN:

    Good point. That band of shadow from the arm would look pretty silly in a spin :D There are a lot of moving parts here, even the safety switch leaves a little smudge lots of that stuff to think through.
  • Joao Sapiro
    Offline / Send Message
    Joao Sapiro sublime tool
    turend out REALLY nice cant wait to see textures !

    P.S - agree with leviathan.
  • JohnnyRaptor
    Offline / Send Message
    JohnnyRaptor polycounter lvl 15
    hey very cool dude! will be interesting to see what you come up with for the diffuse/shaders as in the real photos the gun looks quite bland/simple.
  • kary
    Offline / Send Message
    kary polycounter lvl 18
    Irritating week. Heat wave, a hard drive acting odd, and 1k in goods and services from my optometrist and dentist -- after I got out of the fetal ball I took a stab at wrapping this up.
    ...will be interesting to see what you come up with for the diffuse/shaders as in the real photos the gun looks quite bland/simple.

    It is, and mine are. I have taken some liberties in making a few bolts that should be matte black steel, but stayed somewhat true to the original. A friend, with a lot more 2d acumen, is doing an alternate skin and it's heavily worn and turning out quite well.

    I am looking for my textures to not detract from the model, and I'm still experimenting with them. The spec map is really interesting to play with -- the mottled flash of light on the scope, and the streaky highlight on the barrel, is what I was hoping for, but I'm still experimenting with the matte paint.

    m32MaxRender.jpg

    I have a spin animation, UE screengrabs, and the maps on this page. I'm not sure how to put flvs inline here or I would have.

    Thanks again for the help and encouragement on this. I will come back and tighten up the maps soon, but I want to get some environmental stuff nailed down. The environmental work around here lately has been inspiring :)
  • Sage
    Offline / Send Message
    Sage polycounter lvl 19
Sign In or Register to comment.