Flakk Cannon - WIP
polycounter lvl 14
Hey guys,
Started working on a new piece for my portfolio. The concept is a warhammer style flakk cannon in a small jungle clearing. I've been working on the high poly of the cannon and this is what I've got so far. I'm still working on the main elements, primarily I haven't done the back of the barrels or the center where they attach. I'll keep posting updates as I work on it, any feedback is welcome during the process.
Added Reference.
Update 4:
Update 5: High Poly Completed
Update 6: Low Poly
Update 7: Normal Map and AO
Update 8: Texturing First Pass
Latest Update: V2 Textures
Started working on a new piece for my portfolio. The concept is a warhammer style flakk cannon in a small jungle clearing. I've been working on the high poly of the cannon and this is what I've got so far. I'm still working on the main elements, primarily I haven't done the back of the barrels or the center where they attach. I'll keep posting updates as I work on it, any feedback is welcome during the process.
Added Reference.
Update 4:
Update 5: High Poly Completed
Update 6: Low Poly
Update 7: Normal Map and AO
Update 8: Texturing First Pass
Latest Update: V2 Textures
Replies
- The top ammo boxes kind of end abruptly, maybe add some kind of end cap detail?
- I'm not sure putting the lower ammo boxes inside the mechanism is a practical idea, wouldn't they be reaching inside or have to raise the gun to swap them out?
- Gear teeth are hard to translate to low poly without chunking up the poly count. Maybe but a gear guard cover over the mechanism, for safety and... poly count. It also keeps the animators from killing you when you're gear ratios don't match.
Looking forward to seeing more, nice work so far, keep it up!
Make 'em count, boys! Wait till you see the white of their eyes!
Heh, yea. Doesn't seem too realistic. I tried a lot of ways to increase the clip capacity, but couldn't get anything I liked. The reference I'm using looks cool, be there are some elements that just don't make a lot of sense. Overall though, this is more about looks than function.
Heck, in DOWII, the weapons fire unlimited ammo, and never reload, so I figured I'm in good company. I had to use the copout of caseless ammunition to explain why there are no ejection ports (I made them, but they didn't fit anywhere it would make sense).
Edit: Added reference to my first post.
Big update this time. I think I'm getting close to finishing the high poly. There are a couple areas I'm still not happy with, such as the ammo clips and the vertical gear. Going to redo those areas, and go over the rest of the model for fine tuning.
Let me know if you have any crits or suggestions.
That's a good suggestion, I'll see if I can incorporate it. I kinda mixed and matched elements, its the base from a space marine aa gun, and the top of the ork gun. Not going to have any characters in the scene, but definitely going for something leaning towards orc style.
I think it might look a little more interesting if the legs had a bit of an angle to them instead of coming straight out flush with the ground.
I think I'm pretty much finished with the high poly. Redid several sections, most notably the gears, clips, and base proportions. I did a quick test in mudbox, and I was able to get some really cool damage and wear details, but that takes an insane number of polys so I'll be doing it piece by piece in mudbox once I'm ready to bake.
Next step is to make the low poly. I'm setting a rough goal of 8-10k tris. With the ingame size of this object, I think that is realistic for a FPS.
That was actually pretty difficult, and I had to try several different methods. I tried to do booleans first, but due to the curve of the barrel, the cylinders actually became oval shapes when they intersected with the barrel.
The method I ended up using was to subdivide the barrel edge loops until the topology was made up of perfect squares. I then added space between the squares, and deleted the squares where I wanted holes. Then I ran a smooth, which turned the squares into circles. I did it for one hole, and then duplicated it around until it made a strip, and duplicated and offset that around until it made the whole barrel. It ended up being pretty complicated, but gave the best result. That was the general method I used, I don't remember the exact details, but this is the topology after it was done.
Best of luck on the bake, cannot wait to see the results!
Ad what bolts are you talking about? That doesn't look like a 2K job per a leg. Carr to show a progress of the low poly :]
yeah this is the one thing about making game art that irks me. In a way your highpoly meshes need to be designed around the baking technology. Avoiding harsh angles in the normal map is key to having edges display nice lighting. Designs like this flak cannon- flourish off of being boxy and blunt- which is what normal maps don't seem to do very well, unless you have a lot of tris in your lowpoly.
I went through the baking process to try to head off any issues before they caused any problems, and ended up fixing up several parts. This is just a temporary bake with a quick and dirty uv layout, without the mudbox pass. I think the normal map ended up working pretty well, the only downside seems to be that some details are a bit flat in places, which an AO map should hopefully fix. The shading on the edges turned out pretty well without having to add any unnecessary edge loops, except for one place (the leg C bracket).
Some small details have been changed from the high poly, so it isn't an exact match.
All of the bolts, with the exception of that really big ones, do not need the caps at the bottom. The back end bots could be removed. The bolts at the back that are going in instead of out, can be removed and simplified to just those triangles. The bolts on the L near front, could be removed. The 4 bolts on the top surounding the big one, can be removed.
This is on the ground, and unless your presenting it in such a way that it needs such excesive detail, it still could be lowered polygon wise.
Next step is uv layout, mudbox sculpted details, and the high poly bake. I haven't nailed down the texture size yet, I'm hoping to get it all onto a 2k. It has a lot of unique shells that can't be overlapped, but it also has a lot of pieces that are duplicated around the model, so I'm hoping it will work out pretty well.
Rendered in Marmoset with AO in the Diffuse and normal mapped.
AO
Normal Map
18k tris...I'm ok with that, it looks like it's 18k. You don't see a stray poly on that thing, looks just like the high, and that is awesome. Can't wait for some color!
Haha thanks, I'm really proud of it. Took a couple tries to get it perfect, but on the final layout I had like 5-6 pieces that just wouldn't fit, but I refused to give up cause I was so close and spent like 30 mins tweaking and shifting stuff until they could finally squeak in and everything would have at least an 8 pixel spacing. One of the most complicated unwraps I've done.
18k tri's is really high though, i don't think any game would sanely have this sort of prop at that tri-count (unless the entire game is about shooting one of those things), but it works as a show piece.