World War 2 Jeep
polycounter lvl 7
It's a world war 2 Willys Jeep. My progress on it has been off and on and you probably remember seeing pictures of it in the WAYWO thread. It's a subdivision model so I guess after I finish modeling the next step is burning the normals onto a mid-poly mesh (is that the right term?). I had bigger plans for this model but now it's just for practice.
Replies
More to come as I try to make a game model out of this thing.
The bake looks ok, seams to be some small shading errors.
Tada
Also, here's a 1946 CJ2A (amazingly, according to the website I clipped this from, this thing still runs.)
I have quite a few more reference images too.
Yeah you're right, here's some improvements.
And i agree with bbob
Yeah, and it's not all one piece, there's a frame underneath that I'm doing separately, as well as a punch of smaller parts that I won't even bake. However, I know what you meant, so I separated the windshield from the body.
Question - do I need to make smoothgroups on normal mapped models?
I also think it would be a good idea to make the hood a separate part. And possibly the sideskirts, lights and the grille as well.
Cars are a different animal than map props or guns. Redundant polies are sometimes necessary to make the shading and reflections look good.
I am going to use normal maps and/or smooth groups, so I have absolute control over the shading and reflections despite the topology of the model. And so I've greatly reduced the polygons.
Part of the model will be baked for normals. Part of it will be textured without baking. The part that I won't bake will use smoothing groups, while the part that will - will not.
I know, huge empty space... working on it.
Edit: you should also try not to unwrap the tire tread as one long strip, instead go for 6 or so segments that share the same space0
You've got 24 LP segments, say your Highpoly has 60 repetitions. 4*6 = 24 and 10*6 = 60. That means if you split your LP unwrap up in 6 (overlapping) parts of 4 segments, you need to bake 10 HP repetitions to get it to match up.
Yeah, but I didn't know I could do that in xNormal. I was going to paint a gray-scale bump map and use the Crazy Bump demo to convert it.
That's what I'm finding too - especially if there's a UV map or modeling issue getting in the way of normal baking. You can fix one thing without the risk of messing up another. The normal map above is actually a combination of three separate bakes - the windshield, chassis, and wheel. I had to do some last minute poly pushing on each one of those to improve the bake (believe it or not, it was worse, lol)
Thinking I was ready to fix the normal map artifacts, I popped it into 3D Coat. Something was very, very wrong.
So I tried a DirectX material..
Then I imported it into Unity...
Then I tried Xoliul's shader....
Unfortunatly, it turned out the entire map is trash and I'm not sure how to fix it. I guess I'm going to have to make smaller polygons and more of them, as well as smooth groups... cause except for the crease on the tire it looks great compared to the rest of this.
lhazard, I have the mounting brackets for that in another layer. I wasn't sure if the canvas roof is standard on all jeeps, so I made the assumption that it was, but on mine it's folded and tucked away. I could add it I guess... I mean, I bought zBrush earlier and I haven't used it seriously since. Maybe I should.
Also if you can spare the polies, I would model in at least the big headlights to make them stand out more.