Interceptor [WIP]

Slave_zero

At the moment I'm working on a portfolio piece. It's an interceptor based on an concept from homeworld II. I'm looking for any kind of crits and comments to improve the work.

So far I've completed the highpoly model (mostly) and did a lowpoly mesh with about 4500 tris. I've started to unwrap the UV's and did some first baking of the normalmap to see how it works. I'm aiming for a 1024 texture.

Below you can see the original concept, the lowpoly wire and lowpoly with normalmap.








I'm some kind of uncertain about the following subjects:

I did an high-poly version with some bolts on the surface. I thought this would give more details and better normalmap results. I'm unsure if the ussage of the bolts favor the model. What do you guys think? Also I doubt that they will be much visible on a 1024 Texture. Didn't try it wo far, but thats next on the list.

I thought about doing some additional sculpting in mudbox, to create some scratches and bullet holes on the surface. It did't worked so good, because I'm lacking experience with sculpting. I had a very hard time to keep the solid look of the surface while adding details. Any advice about this? At the moment I'm planning to combine my baked normalmap with a few normalmaps created from crazybump.

Here are 2 shots from the highpoly model. The first one shows the bolts I was talking about.




I hope you like it so far.

SnarG

Not only would I keep the bolts in the normal, I would increase their number. Aircraft tend to have their panels heavily riveted to prevent accidental dislodging and causing some catastrophic failure. See these refs:

http://www.composite-arf.co.uk/images/p-51%20wing2.jpg
http://flickr.com/photos/m2w2/272079723/

Any small details you put into a diffuse, normal or specular will add to the overall effect, even if the res means it doesn't look perfect it will still hint at the surface detail.

As for dents and scrapes and such I would say create a very simple height map and crazybump it, and then blend it making sure to mask out any details that shouldn't be deformed by the dents like rivets, panel edges, etc. This method is often faster than trying to sculpt in subtle variation by hand, which requires a heavily sub-divided mesh and hence more rendering time.

I can spot a few ngon's but I think you've got a pretty good looking end result so far. Hope some of my ramble helps.

Slave_zero

Thanks for your suggestions. I think I will stick to the bolts. Here are some test-bakings I did. The first one uses an 1024 texture, the second one a 2048. With some rework in the highpoly model I could make the bolts stick out a little more, so they are more visible in the 1024 texture. With the diffuse and specular it will be nice closeup detail.

SHEPEIRO

nice- but i think you need to rethink the way your making the high poly panels, you never really see panels built like that (i know its sci-fi but getting a realistic feel is important) i would suggest builing each panel separetly, some of which should be edge to edge(gap b etween would be weaker unless the armour is extra armour(nose maybe)) and some should overlap possibly around guns etc.

the rivet bolt things would be in danger of looking steampunk id suggest making the area around the rivet depressed

Tumerboy

listen to shep, he knows what he's talking about.

Slave_zero

hey there some updates from the project:

@ shep:

thanks for your advice. I looked at your portfolio and I think I know what you mean. I tried to rework a small area of the model in the way you suggested. I experienced that it would require a major overhaul of the whole model. Which would really take me some time. So I decided to leave the plates as they are. but will definitely consider your advice on my next high-poly model.

I spend the last days on cleaning up the high-poly mesh, mainly because I saw some small areas with weird geometry.
I also placed many and I mean MANY bolts on the surface and ended with about 3200 bolts for one side of the aircraft. As pointed out by Snarg this is number isn't really a realistiv bolt count on an aircraft, but those 3000 bolts are quite heavy on my machine, so I'll not increase the numbers.
I'll post a picture of the bolts during the day.

But now to the next problem:

Trying to bake those bolts and the surface into a normalmap is kind of hard. I experienced that nm-baking in Maya takes much longer when you increase the number of source meshes. To reduce baling time i combined the bolts into one bolt-object. This worked out in my first test with about 500 bolts.
Unfortunatly with increased numbers of 3200 Maya seems to crash as soon as I'm combining the bolts. At least I don't get any responses for quite a while. So I guess it's crashing. As a second attempt I tried to combine the bolts in groups of ten. (Which would take me quite a while). This works for the first ten bolts, but the other remaining bolts disappear during the operation.

Finally I tried to bake a seperate normalmap without the hioghpoly-surface but with all the 3200 bolts. As I expected Maya crashed when loading the bolts into the source-mesh list of the transfer-maps dialog.

So finally I'm really pissed of, because it took me a while to place all those bolts on the surface and now it seems that I#m unable to get them into a normalmap.

To keep going I see the following possibilitys:

- getting some bol ts by drawing a heightmap and crazybumping it into a normalmap to merge this with the surface-normalmap withour the bolts.
- I don't use any bolts at all and try to don't think of all the wasted time I spend on them
- someone here has a suggestion how to make this work (Maybe it's important to say that all bolts are instances, so it makes editing easier).

Snader

might be a silly thought of me as i hardly have any experience with normal maps and such, but would it be possible to take one bolt's normal map, and then copy/paste that in photoshop as a multiply layer or something?

Slave_zero

I think this would be possible. This equals more or less the approach of just adding the bolts by a height map and bring it all together in ps. Your idea is quite nice, as the form of the modelled bolt would be represented more acurate than on a simple height map.

Up to now I tried to combine two normalmaps in ps. The result is ok. Not as nice as with fully baked bolts. I'll try out your idea and see if the results are better.

SHEPEIRO

use xnormal, much faster

beware of texture stretching when pasting maps, as that will make them loook uncircular where a baked one would be perfect. baking would also be better as you could get an accurate ao map out as well, by doing it this "hacK" way you will end up with slightly poorer result and in the end i dont think you will save much time.

with high to low workflow learning to work propperly and do things the right way is very important, at first it will be slow but your efficiency will come with everynew model. doing hacks doesnt help you learn in the long run.

Proxzee

I wouldn't put bolts on a spacecraft. It makes it look less high tech. Why would you bolt panels onto the outside of a frame for spacecraft? The panels have to be airtight and layered with anti-radiation material. There aren't even bolts on modern aircraft. The things are welded together and polished.

edit: here's a link to a high rez image of an F 22, one of the most modern fighters today. Check out how seemless it is.

http://www.afmc.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/070709-F-2383G-002.jpg

The hull is welded together, and the paneling is a result of the individual pieces being manufactured seperately.

Slave_zero

@ shepeiro: yeah, your right I hav never tried to bake the nm-maps with x-normal. I hope this will work for the bolts. If it fails as well I see no other option than haking the bolts into the final map.

@ proxzee: I see what you mean but when you consider an spaceship: there isn't really anything which may cause friction on the hull. It would be more important tto shield the craft from radiation, micro-sized space-junk and enemy fire. Those plates can be considered as additional shielding, which may be replaceable if damaged. But anyway I agree that the bolts reduce the high.tec feeling a little, but on the other hand to me they seem to fit with the bigger plates and stuff.

Anyway. I'll try it tonight or tomorrow in x-normal. If nothing helps maybe I just leave the bolts out.

Slave_zero

Hey guys,

I finally managed to combine those nasty bolts and bake the normalmap. Although it has still some areas where some tweaking is needed its getting forward. Upt to now I try to fix the said issues and try to bake some ambient occlusion. I'm not sure why but up to now Maya only put out a white occlusion map. But I'm keeping at it. I'll try the ex-normal-occlusion as well.

Slave_zero

So I started with the texturing with steady progress, such that the texture-work is ready for some first comments. I post a pic from the under side soon.

At the moment I'm still with an 2048 texture. Iin the end I'll do some test if I can reduce it to 1024.

I hope you like it.

odium

Why not paste the bots on by hand AFTER the render to texture...?

Slave_zero

I tried this when creating the normalmap. As Shep pointed out before you easily get stretchings such that the bolts apear not round but oval. This problem occurred with those bolts when pasting them. When trying to fix the problems with normalmap baking I finally managed to bake everything in one render tot exture process with xnomral.
At the moment the bolts maybe seem not stick out enough. Maybe I can fix this later on

Slave_zero

so here is the underside of the spacecraft. No progress with the texture so far, but this rendering is done with a neutral white-colored light.



At the moment I'm trying to find a nice engine for presenting the stuff. Maya-Hardware isn't the best, as my graphics card refuses to produce some shadows. The x-normal-viewer also isn't the best choice, as I can't find any controls to adjust the highlights of blinn material.

It's probably the best idea to finally buy a version of UT3 or cryis and use their enginges for presenting stuff.

Slave_zero

Update:

Did some minor details on the texture map, added specific lights for the engines and the lamp.

I don't know if it is realistic to expect the model having three dynamic lights within a game engine. Additionally you would need two more for the main guns. Does anyone know how many lights would be reasonable?

Please note that the secular is not final. For my taste the specular effects on the dark plates and the brighter ones don't differ enough. I want the dark plates to appear quite matt in contrast to the brighter plates.

Second thing:
I tried to experiment with different colorshemes. When I started texturing and did some lighting I experienced the a greeninsh texture giving strange render-results when using colored light. So at first I did the blue texture. Now with a second attmpt I feel that the green texture looks quite good as well. Although green colors don't make too much sense when cruising through space. :poly108:

What do you think which is to prefer?

third:
Added an engine effect. It's just a static effect, so no cool twists or bends depending on ship movements, but anyway it's just for presentation. I'll use a curve or a bend modifier to suggest some twisting of the particle tail.

Finally:
Not so much action in my thread: So Still I'm interested in suggestions to enhance the textures.

Slave_zero

So I finally managed to create me a shader newtork in maya which promotes a seperate glassmap to control the intensity of the reflected colormap for each pixel.

I found it strange, that the software renderer from maya takes the specular color to control reflectivity of the material. Instead when usign the hardware renderer and an reflectionmap the specular color does not control the reflections on the surface. But anyway I found a way arround this.

So after tweaking the maps a bit further I consider this piece done. I've learned many things about normalmap baking and high poly modelling. Thanks fo the sugestions and critics.

In the end: FINAL PIC:

Armonio

The nose looks like a duck, but I like it and I think it gives it a sense of uniqueness.

Firebert

That shading network really added a little extra kick to it there :thumbup:
I like the one render with the canons blazin'!
Personally, I gotta agree with the earlier comment about the panels. The corners are so rounded that it just takes away from it. Zoomed out, it is not as noticeable, but up close it does take away from it. Really good work though!

Ott

Can you post your maps? Right now the biggest issue I can see is that I feel like your spec isn't doing enough for your normals.

dejawolf

that looks great! not 100% close to the concept (a bit bubblier) but i still like it.

i tried making a nice looking spaceship, but then i started thinking too much.

Slave_zero

Hey there I'm glad you like the final results.

here are the maps: