Sci-Fi Assault Rifle
polycounter lvl 12
Been working on this on and off for a week or so. Never done a gun before and when it comes to game art, I barely ever finish anything, so I'm determined to finish this one.
Here's a link to the concept I'm working off. I was told by some good artists on another thread in here that its not a good concept. I think I only realized that after modeling most of it. I'm going to finish it anyway. It's 2838 tris at the moment. Is that too low? Should I be aiming for something closer to 5k for something like this?
I changed a few details and left some things out on my version.
Here is where I'm at. First my High Poly.
And here is my low poly with the preview bakes. Still gotta do some of the low poly parts.
I've worked a bit in 3D art for production but I'm pretty inexperienced still with game art, so any advice would be appreciated.
Here's a link to the concept I'm working off. I was told by some good artists on another thread in here that its not a good concept. I think I only realized that after modeling most of it. I'm going to finish it anyway. It's 2838 tris at the moment. Is that too low? Should I be aiming for something closer to 5k for something like this?
I changed a few details and left some things out on my version.
Here is where I'm at. First my High Poly.
And here is my low poly with the preview bakes. Still gotta do some of the low poly parts.
I've worked a bit in 3D art for production but I'm pretty inexperienced still with game art, so any advice would be appreciated.
Replies
if you've never done any sort of highly technical, mechanical piece of game art before i highly suggest picking out a real gun with lots of reference and making that as your first project. the designs are usually excellent and will have tons of reference so you can get as close as possible and learn how guns actually work in the process. here's a gallery of many many real gun pictures if you want some to pick from: http://www.pixagogo.com/DeicideNBF
but if you insist on finishing it...
your high poly's edges are too thin. when baking, edges need to be softer than you think on the high poly to get nice thick bevels, so your edges don't alias like they do now on your baked mesh. when you zoom out, the edges should be nice and smooth for a good long time. here's the chart again: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1725586/crits/edgewidthmodel.jpg
your tricount should be as high as it needs to be in order to make curves look round (and some other stuff, but that's not too important right now.) first person weapons in modern games range anywhere from 4000 tris to 12000 depending on the title, but the most important thing is to have spent enough to where your round shapes look round.
I think I'll up the polycount, and I see how softening those edges helps. Thanks for those links.
Haven't had much time for this lately, so only just finished the baking. The middle part of the gun - where it has the painted arrows in the concept -gave me some trouble. The normal map seemed to come out wrong there, but I tried and couldn't fix it.
Going to start on the texture now.
Still need to work on the textures and figure out how to do an AO bake again.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Any crits are appreciated.
Thanks for the comment. I'm going to start a new weapon soon. I know about the bad concept issue; I'll be sure to pick a better one next time, and I'll work on getting the edges right. Thanks.
Nothing like helpful advice...
Try adding some more 'life' to the texture. Some dirt and grime, and some worn edges would help.
i work in audio and get this issue a lot, music composition always trumps the sounds quality and mix, so if the band im working with wrote a bad song it doesn't matter how much work i put into it, and it doesn't matter if i give them the best instruments and mics to use, it will still be a bad song just a polished bad song.
but that is also why unless they do Pre-production on there tracks and figure out what works and what doesn't, and get the execution of there parts down, to near perfection i wont take the job on.
so the whole polishing a turd phrase is a bit over used in music production.
All I can gather from what you're saying, is that if you don't like a song, then you won't take the job on. That's just subjective criticism. From my knowledge, the phrase "can't polish a turd" comes from having to take something that is shit, and improve it.
For the record, that's not a shit concept. It may not be amazing, but it's a concept that I can understand, and appreciate.
If a band came along to you with crap guitars, practice amps, poor quality leads, mics, drums, cymbals etc, then I'd understand what you're saying. You can't make a crap guitar and amp sound good, no matter how good you are at music production. They're objective facts, poor quality equipment sound poor.
So what you're actually saying is that if you think a band (concept) is poor, you won't take the job. No matter if other people think it's a great band (concept), you let your personal opinions get in the way of performing your job.
I work in the games industry, and get concepts handed down to me that I don't approve of, but I get them done. If however I got great concepts handed down to me, but I had to use Google Sketch-Up, and MSPaint, then I would have problems.
Granted, but most of the UK charts fall into both of those descriptions for myself, but evidently my opinions aren't shared by the music buying masses.
In fact, in my opinion a large portion of entertainment media is crap. But that doesn't mean that the people making it are responsible. I'm pretty sure that the cameramen who work on Big Brother, or Jersey Shore (to name but a few) are skilled technicians, even though they have to work from such a crap concept, and end up still pumping out crap.
That said, I also wouldn't be afraid to change some of the less visually appealing/logically designed parts of the concept. I can't help thinking that an ammo belt feels like the exact opposite of futuristic and like a magazine would make more sense. You've already strayed from the concept in smoothing out those ridges on the top of the casing and what I can only assume is the grip at the bottom, and that feels like an improvement (though you may need to replace it with some other detail there like a rail that other attachments could be added to).
Any chance you could give us some other angles? Does it actually look like a big box from first-person view, as Racer445 said? (Just to avoid any confusion, I'm expecting you to put a camera in position to fake first-person for a screengrab, not get it into an engine as a functional weapon for the sake of showing it off)
Visually, to me, the relationship between the shapes of the gun doesn't make sense and it makes the whole design kind of not click for me. It's like having a howitzer-sized cannon to fire .22s.
Also, you have a "Danger high voltage" warning right about where the shooter is going to be resting the side of their face to get a cheekweld. Not something that would inspire a lot of user confidence.
And yeah, not sure what the little tube with the danger symbol was supposed to be.
Tonysladky, thanks for the great feedback. Here's a shot of it from a FPS view.
My advice is this; Don't ever get discouraged by criticism, it just means you are pushing yourself in areas you lack. And I really agree with Racer445. You should def try doing a real firearm, you will learn so much.
Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
And yeah, I'm going to either do a real gun next or at least a fictional gun that was designed by a good concept artist.
cheers.
The first-person view is also making it hard to ignore the lack of believable transitions between surfaces. For example, the scope looks like it's just sort of sitting on top of the stock and isn't really attached in a sturdy manner. You might want to consider adding in some brackets to hold it in place or setting it into a groove of some sort.
How do you feel about wear and tear? Was the plan to make this a new gun right out of the box, or were you planning to add some scratches and dents to make it look used? If you don't mind going really worn and beat up (like it's not the future armies using this gun, but future gangsters or bandits), it might be cool to just sort of wrap some cloth around the battery pack. I keep thinking I'm seeing cloth anyways when I look at the first person version, and it would help with GarageBay9's concern about the shooter shocking himself on the battery pack.
I didn't even notice that hex-grid overlay until you showed it in first-person. Now that I see it in first-person, it feels like it's too much, or at least too much in certain areas. It looks cool really faint around the grip in the side view, but it needs to be toned down or removed completely from the scope and the battery pack.
Thanks for the feedback though, I'll keep it in mind for future work.
http://polygoo.com/
For that I was just using a plain Blinn shader in Maya. I didn't have a target game engine; that was just rendered in Maya 2012's viewport 2.0.
I've never been able to get the Xoliulshader to even load in Maya 2012. Don't know what I'm doing wrong with it. When I start my next asset I'll try with it again or use Marmoset.