Escape Vessell
polycounter lvl 13
Since i've just graduated, it's time to beef up my portfolio for work. Me and my roommate is having alittle modeling thing where we're both modeling the interior and exterior of some sort of space ship. His is a drop ship, mine is an escape vessell.
It's meant to hold about 8 people and supply a journey of about 4 months. I didnt want it to be minimalistic by any means, simply because i think it'd look cooler this way
Here's the blockout, and some concepty bits ontop of it.
I'm probably going to eventually build an environment around it. But that'll happen later.
I'm going to try to build up a fairly strong portfolio by september because im pretty sure that's when my contract with SOE ends.
It's meant to hold about 8 people and supply a journey of about 4 months. I didnt want it to be minimalistic by any means, simply because i think it'd look cooler this way
Here's the blockout, and some concepty bits ontop of it.
I'm probably going to eventually build an environment around it. But that'll happen later.
I'm going to try to build up a fairly strong portfolio by september because im pretty sure that's when my contract with SOE ends.
Replies
really looking forward to the interior. it'll be a lot of fun.
Looking good man.
But here's the HP finished, i'm going to start up the lowpoly asap.
First to again touch on what Zak said some of your details seem to small, mainly noticeable on the cockpit. You should over exagerate those so after you bake and it gets muddied down a bit by your engine it wont look so small and almost non existent.
You still have some puffy looking panels, on the front and on the back under the wing. Tighten them up as now they dont look like plates that are welded next to each other to form a nice seal. They look more like marshmallows.
As for the back door I dont understand how it would open/close at all. To be honest I cant even tell its a door. Just looks like a lot of cut in square designs to the back. Think you could push the overall design of the back more to make it more interesting and give some kind of clue that it is a door that would open and where/how it would do so.
The back underside of the wing looks unfinished and very uneaven. Most of the plates there dont seem to line up at all.
Also those weird little circle nobby things in the front, there are 6 of them on each side, 2 rows of 3. IDK what those are but they look odd and i personally dont like.
Overall its looking pretty sweet. Like the legs of the ship
I'm also unsure on if im going to normal map the majority of the cockpit window...or model it as i have now. I'll do a test bake and see which is best.
Enjoy
I'll make the changes to the highpoly that everyone suggested right before i bake.
Right now i think it's at something like 6000 tris.
It's been taking me a good while to make a good amount of progress on this bad boy. But I'm liking where it's going.
Here's what i have so far. Just the normal bakes, no AO and no texture just yet. There is still some minor normal map issues that I'll deal with, but other than that this is pretty much the normal bake. The texturing should go a little faster since i know exactly how i want it to look.
texture size is 4096x2048
polycount is 7k
fairly big...but it is a "hero" prop/vehicle.
polycount on it isnt high at all, texture size maybe a little but hey its for a folio piece, why make it look ugly.
overall I think the normals could be punched a little more. Maybe try overlaying your hp normal map at 50% (or 100%!, play around with it) on top of a copy of your hp normal to give it a little more punch (dont forget to fix the blue channel though). Will help out when importing to UDK as ive always seen normals get a little washed out in Unreal.
Im sure the AO will help make things pop out a little more too.
Cant wait to see some texture progress on this guy
GAH! No, do not do this, it will only result in artifacts and smoothing errors.
That really is a very stupid idea, it will fuck up... well, everything. Bevels won't look right, smoothing artifacts will be exaggerated. Just don't do it.
The baked lowpoly should look nearly identical to the highpoly, polycount and texture budget allowing. If you look back to your hp, you'll see that details are very flat on there as well, which is where you should fix that.
Also, that picture is awful for previewing. You blame it on a 'crappy max render', but you should never preview it that way anyway. Use Xoliul's or 3ps' shader, and preview it properly, the lighting in this is making it nearly impossible to see the normals. I bet if they were flipped we wouldn't even see.
I'm also going to change the color of the blue lights to white, keeping the glow blue to give it a florescent look.
Keep it up man!
Well, i've definitely learned alot with this. I'm probably going to try to start up one more sci fi vehicle to really try to ensure my workflow, then move onto to something a little more modern.
I'll add the Portfolio sheets on here as soon as i make them. Shouldn't be too far from this post actually.
Hope you enjoy.
The only 2 things I think would be best to change would be the cockpit glass and all engine thrusters.
The glass right now looks, well bad. Way to contrasty with the orange and yellow. Looked so much better in your shot from a few days ago because it was a darker color and the contrast wasnt so high. I would try and make it more subtle. Would also help out from a reflection map if you get it in UDK. Also there seems to be some odd smoothing/shading error on the window on the right hand side.
As for your engine thrusters I would add some color variation in there. Get some darker blue, light purple, dark purple in there to make it look like it is an actual engine burn instead of just one solid color/solid intensity.
Looks really nice overall though