[Portfolio] Low-poly oriented reel

_Aurel_

Hey guys, I heard this was a great place to get some good critiques, so I'm sending a link to my website to get some feedback on my creations. I'd appreciate any kind of feedback on it, from my modeling to my texturing. Thanks!

Link is www.johnhawkins3d.com

cholden

Canned response here:

Putting your diffuse in crazybump or nividia's filter does not equal normal maps. Desaturating your diffuse does not equal specular maps. You have to learn how to use these materials before you use them in your portfolio. It requires work, not clicking a button. You can search this forum or post individual pieces for feedback on how their creation process should be handled.

The site itself is fine, as is the demo reel.

cptincognito

I'd say my immediate reaction is that the models and textures could be a lot lighter without much loss in detail, especially at the camera distances you're showing things off at. Either zoom into the model (plaver eye placement) to show off your texture resolution, or reduce the texture space.

Selling yourself as a low poly artist, you need to impress people with efficient use of resources, because that's what's important when you're shopping for a low poly artist.

Also, your beauty shots aren't lit in such a way as to show how your normal maps affect the model.

Jeremy Lindstrom

I'd rework the 'scene' you have created it looks as if you just added to some more buildings to the Digital Tutors environment creation dvd

_Aurel_

Thanks for the feedback!

I think you're all right in that I did go crazy with the UV space on my maps by having them all 'unique' when I could have overlapped the ones that touch each other and shared common surface detail.

Anyways, I took a look at a couple of tutorials on how to make better spec and normal maps. I think I came away with a better result then what I had earlier:

http://johnhawkins3d.com/pueblo_render1.png

renderhjs

the polygon count is crazy - I see way to many spots that could be fixed and by that reducing the polycount without any or much changing the actual shape.

normal map looks like bump map,- why then even add it? Did you just used them because everyone is buzzwording about it? - ditch stuff that dont make sense like the normal map.

The difuse texture could use more variations in it- use textures and blend them with what you have now. Some more dirt, chalk, mud,... anything that gives that monotome (or duo-tone in your case) more variations in color range and variation.


also would you mind posting smaler pictures,- the last one is 1900*1600 - certainly not everyone will be able to see it the way you do

Ott

Way too many excess iterations in just about anything.

Why are you collapsing some geometry, but floating others? Float the two levels from each other and save yourself a few hundred tris.

Lighting is your friend. Even a very simple 2 lights in there, one primary source with shadows and one light with more subtle brightness would make this actually look like 3d. You won't even get all that awesome spec and normal detail without lights.

As stated before, your specular and normal maps look like button clicks, not an actual understanding of what a normal or spec can do.

Instead of using 1 2048x2048, break it down into re-usable texture sections and pieces. I would also suggest overlapping a LOT more.

Regardless of what tutorial you were watching, you still don't seem to understand specular or normal maps. Both of them are near identical to the color map with inverting, desaturating, etc and not spending any actual time in the specular. Do you not think that metal would reflect light differently than stone or wood?

I would focus on one small section or floor of this and try to nail that first, before trying to knock out an entire building.

Autocon

The chains on the sign should be made using a plane and an alpha if your going for low poly. Modeling each link in the chain is burning so many unneeded polys.

Also pretty much every cylinder you have is eating up a ton of polys, with this if your going for low poly could could get away with 6 or 8 polys for each cylinder.

As stated before break up the texture map so you can start tiling the texture. Right now its just a huge waste of space to have each side layed out.

_Aurel_

You're right. I've run into an issue where by shrinking all the UV's into their own space instead of figuring out how to overlap and share space with them, I ended up losing detail from the smaller size (for diffuse maps), and not being able to get much detail at all when trying to create a normal map. As for the spec map, I do need to work on that a lot.

Is there any specific tutorials you can point me to that helps you on creating good spec and normal maps? I've browsed a few on this forum that seemed helpful, and I looked at the one at modwiki.com, but I feel like I'm still missing the fundamentals.

Thanks for the feedback all. This is helping me out a lot and I really appreciate it.

P.S. One of the reasons why I tried to connect as many verts as possible was that a while back when I imported objects Unreal2.0 I was told that lighting in that engine works off of verts, therefore you should try to have the least amount of floaty connections as possible to get the best lighting result. Is that even true, or even applicable anymore?

Ott

Get a newer Engine.

While some engines require collapsed and closed meshes, there are plenty others that accept open geometry. Either way, with the amount of bad triangle stripping you have in your mesh, it wouldn't light well in the Old Unreal either.

Even on that note, you wouldn't want to bring an object of this size into the game as a single mesh either, unless it was a backdrop / distance piece.

Make a board extrusion, a door, a few wall pieces, a few floor pieces, a few stairs etc. and now you can make 100 different variations of the same style of building, it would light better, you can devote more texture to individual assets....etc...etc....Modularity. Learn it and love it.

WayneAdams

plus one for metroid theme'd music.

CounterSeal

I don't recall exactly where I saw it... but there was an environment artist from Epic who detailed how they constructed the architecture modularly in Gears of War. If you want to make environments, modularity is almost always your friend.

Regarding your spec and normal maps: Specularity is never truly just black to white. That's why simply desaturating a color map in Photoshop or Crazybump doesn't always give the best results. My tip is to never use Crazybump for your spec maps, just don't... stick with Photoshop. The first thing I tend to do is mask out parts of the texture map that will have similar specularity levels and apply a hue/saturation to a certain level... but never 100% to complete desaturation. Sometimes you might even want to change the hue a bit too depending on the type of material you're going for. There's alot of trial and error in this, and it takes time to develop an eye for this stuff.

Same principles apply to normal maps. Ideally, we'd all be sculpting every single piece of geometry for normal mapping goodness, but that is not time-efficient for most environment objects. When using the Photoshop NVidia filter or Crazbump, you're usually going to want to "prep" your color map in one way or another. Game-Artist.net has a great tutorial on it: http://www.game-artist.net/forums/support/6126-mini-tutorial-normal-maps-how-not-do-them.html. That tutorial should tell you what you need to know. I look forward to your improvements!

BradMyers82

First off, good job posting this on polycount when you did. There is nothing worse than doing like a year or two worth of work to only find out you were doing things wrong.

So my advice (and I say this pretty often now) take to heart everything people have said on this thread. Start a WIP thread here of a low poly scene and get critiques as you go. If you keep at it, its only a matter of time before you work out all the kinks.

Good luck!

Kawe

Your reel should start off with your best work first and I think the better stuff comes later. If I were you I'd remove the jail thing all together. The bird is pretty cool.. some obvious UV seams down the middle on the bird's back. Both the saloon and the steampunk house are a lot better than the first two items on the real imo. Sure they don't have fancy normal mapping but hey.. who cares.

One thing to be careful about is how many polys you spend on those round parts. Im pretty sure you could cut down the polycount on those quite a bit.