Warhammer (the weapon, not the fantasy game)
polycounter lvl 4
Hi again everyone,
I've been neglecting my University work again and have this to show you.
It's a Warhammer, or War Hammer (maybe should be two words? Doesn't matter, you know what I mean!) and I stole the basic concept from this tutorial; http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=107
I was just watching it, seeing if it might teach me anything I don't already know, and whilst I picked up a few tips on Maya > ZBrush workflow, I also spotted a few things that worried me a little; the detail being sculpted in (particularly the scratches and cracks on the head) were far too small/steep to bake to a decent normal map, and the overall feel of the hammer was terribly boring; the skull for instance just doesn't look good. There were other bad habits being taught here also, like using a unique UV set for each section of the hammer. Needless to say, I wasn't best impressed with a tutorial about 'GAME Weapons' being so un-game-friendly. Now I'm no expert on game art, far from it, I don't even have enough stuff for a mediocre portfolio, but I thought I could do better, so I immitated the base mesh and did the rest myself, for a bit of fun, and here's what I ended up with;
...and here's the high-poly sculpt in ZBrush (I need more RAM like the desert needs the rain, seriously),
The whole thing took 2 'evenings'; Hi-poly on evening 1, low-poly and texturing on evening 2. Also, something I did learn (not from the tutorial, but from my own xNormal-based frustration) is that it's a good idea to bake normals twice; one with a low-poly with hard normals, and another with a low-poly with soft normals, then you can pick and choose which bits of the map look best for each part of the mesh and get a much higher quality normal map than you would get from just one bake.
Also I'm letting my old thread die because it goes on a bit about how much of a noob I am and it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments, which I'm not.
C&C are valued!
I've been neglecting my University work again and have this to show you.
It's a Warhammer, or War Hammer (maybe should be two words? Doesn't matter, you know what I mean!) and I stole the basic concept from this tutorial; http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=107
I was just watching it, seeing if it might teach me anything I don't already know, and whilst I picked up a few tips on Maya > ZBrush workflow, I also spotted a few things that worried me a little; the detail being sculpted in (particularly the scratches and cracks on the head) were far too small/steep to bake to a decent normal map, and the overall feel of the hammer was terribly boring; the skull for instance just doesn't look good. There were other bad habits being taught here also, like using a unique UV set for each section of the hammer. Needless to say, I wasn't best impressed with a tutorial about 'GAME Weapons' being so un-game-friendly. Now I'm no expert on game art, far from it, I don't even have enough stuff for a mediocre portfolio, but I thought I could do better, so I immitated the base mesh and did the rest myself, for a bit of fun, and here's what I ended up with;
...and here's the high-poly sculpt in ZBrush (I need more RAM like the desert needs the rain, seriously),
The whole thing took 2 'evenings'; Hi-poly on evening 1, low-poly and texturing on evening 2. Also, something I did learn (not from the tutorial, but from my own xNormal-based frustration) is that it's a good idea to bake normals twice; one with a low-poly with hard normals, and another with a low-poly with soft normals, then you can pick and choose which bits of the map look best for each part of the mesh and get a much higher quality normal map than you would get from just one bake.
Also I'm letting my old thread die because it goes on a bit about how much of a noob I am and it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments, which I'm not.
C&C are valued!
Replies
Otherwise, its looking good.