Modeling velcro?

mystichobo

Probably a rather weird question, but what is the best way to model velcro for ingame use (using cryengine, but generally would be fine :P).

I'm modeling a Remington 870 MCS shotgum for a unannounced mod, and it has a velcro attached shell holder on one side, and I thought it would be interesting to use this in the reload animation.

MoP

For a firstperson gun if it's right up close and you want it to look awesome, I'd use alpha planes, just strips of opacity-mapped parts lined up next to each other.

Not many polys, very easy to do, you just need to model one velcro piece in highpoly, instance it in a long line, bake that down to get the normals/opacity, and use that on a set of lowpoly planes.

PredatorGSR

I don't think I would ever attempt to model velcro, something like that would be done in the texture/crazybump. Doesn't seem like a very effecient use of time.

mLichy

Yeah, I agree that crazy bump or something similar might be good enough. It depends how close the camera gets, but I would crazy bump it first and see how it looks before wasting time modeling something u might not even be able to see.

Just my 2 cents

Mark Dygert

Hair/fur and bake?

MoP

Well, my take on it is, if you're gonna see it up close in first person, doing something the way i suggested isn't going to take very long, it isn't going to be very expensive (a few alpha-tested planes), and will probably look considerably better than a flat texture when animated (nice parallax motion).

Admittedly I probably wouldn't do it myself in a FPS weapon model, but if you wanna show off and do something awesome then it might be worth it.

Mark Dygert

The view angle needs to be taken into account also. Since it's a first person view weapon there's a good chance the silhouette will read better with a few alpha tested planes, vs a flat box which would look better from more of a straight on angle.

mystichobo

Vig wrote: »

The view angle needs to be taken into account also. Since it's a first person view weapon there's a good chance the silhouette will read better with a few alpha tested planes, vs a flat box which would look better from more of a straight on angle.

It's going to be in the cryengine, and it will be viewed from a couple of different view points, from the rear when using it, and side o when reloading/adding attachments. could I create a box with alphas for the fibres, and just scale it in on itself, while keeping the UV scale the same, to get the layered look?