Car - Mustang (slightly stylized).
polycounter lvl 17
Hey, Splitting this apart from my other thread so I can get some more focused and valuable feedback related to the model itself. I'm going for slightly stylized look but not overly. It's gonna be more apparent in the materials / colors.
But yeah. I really need the feedback. Push me! Tear into me like a hot blonde virgin in a post apoc world. I haven't done many cars in my life and certainly not a standard one like this so I'm learning as I go and would really appreciate some thoughts of wisdom.
Here's a bunch of shots from varying stages!
This was a testbake. I did some changes on it to make it more round in the middle. Basically looks the same but without the low poly-look in the middle.
But yeah. I really need the feedback. Push me! Tear into me like a hot blonde virgin in a post apoc world. I haven't done many cars in my life and certainly not a standard one like this so I'm learning as I go and would really appreciate some thoughts of wisdom.
Here's a bunch of shots from varying stages!
This was a testbake. I did some changes on it to make it more round in the middle. Basically looks the same but without the low poly-look in the middle.
Replies
Maybe some things:
For the body, if you want it to look real good, don't try to win the fight with normalmaps in UDK (for car bodies, you pretty much can't). Just use a lot of polygons for it, and if you wanna keep it clean, no textures even.
The pattern of the treads on the wheel feels a bit chunky to me, almost nearing an offroad tire. I think it's the scale of the knobs or something. Not a big thing though. But if you'd have kept the tread for 2D-photoshop NDo stuff, it would be an easy fix to swap out compared to when you bake it.
Ah yeah I was thinking about going the "lots of polygons" route but today I started getting cold feet and was planning on going back to the NORMALMAP ALL OF THE THINGS-route.
I'll do some tests then i guess. About the tread I did it pretty closely matched to my ref which I can't put up right now but it might be true what you say. I think i actually searched specifically for mustang wheels... but that's no guarantee now is it?
What do you guys reckon is a good polycount? I'm thinking 25-30k with 2x 2048 textures. Interior and Exterior.
I had the same thoughts about higher poly count and no texture/normal map, but I ended up going the route of Normal Map All Things, because I was safer and familiar. Now, I'm currently debating to go back and add more polys, tweak UVs, and only have normal/diffuse/spec for the interior and the exterior just use shaders. I've found I'm wasting a lot of Texture space on the exterior when its just a solid color, AO, and a hacked cavity/edge map. Its really not worth the texture space. Also depending on your texture resolution you might end up with normal map artifacts due to subtle gradients in your High Poly. I'll be following this thread and looking for tips! Hopefully my thread can help you determine what works/doesn't work and get a rough poly count estimate (mines at 12,600 but that will increase a lot when i remove texturing from exterior).
I think I'm gonna normalmap some parts and just do crazy modeling on some but it's hard to say when I'm not actually at that stage yet. Whatever I find out and do I'll share it with you guys. I'll pop on over to your thread.
[Edit] Oh, yeah now i see that he used support edges on the extreme edges. Still, very nice stuff.
Btw, have you check out MIG normal tools?
While Cryengine is hot it does have to be UDK. It's for my little pet project you can find in my signature and that's UDK. I wouldn't have a snowballs chance in hell of doing all of that in cryengine.
I havent seen those MIG tools. Thanks man, I'll check em out!
1. feels like this area needs more loops to hold the shape if you know what I mean, literally a loop in the middle would stop it looking a little undefined.
2. I guess this is a design thing, but it feels like the stitching should conform into the corner of that shape rather than cutting off the corner. Up-to you though, (LOVE the stitching btw, cant wait to see how that comes out in the normals.)
3. the shape of the crossbar intersects with the seat geometry, might be nice to have the backside reflect the outer geometry so you get that impression of the crossbar being a separate element to the seat cushion.
4. I'm getting a weird seam down the middle, I don't use MAYA so im not sure if that's just because you've mirrored but not connected the 2 sides or what, im sure you've noticed it I was more just curious as to what causes it.
5. There is some wierd pinching here, I dunno if you could just relax that area of remove a loop so that the cushion is smoothed properly.
All round awesome other than that, I cant wait to see how this turns out!
Just notcied that my camera settings are a bit messed up, filteringwise, Will take a better shot later today. Just wanted to keep the momentum up!
Well. I'm still not 100% certain about going the polygon route so I'll be doing some tests. I bet I'll end up doing it that way but I still wanna try some approaches out. I intend to do a proper unwrap aswell since I have some funky plans for this guy.
I spent some time today figuring out and setting up rendering in Maya. To much of a hassle to bring it back into max where i normally do my renders
The chassi isn't high poly in this shot and is still being worked on.
http://i.minus.com/ibqnn3G8EwDjhm.jpg
You'll probably find you won't need masses of polygons in the bodywork to get a great looking car, whats it standing at poly wise for the bodywork at the moment? Could you post some wire frames so we can really get in there and give some crit
From what I can see so far, I think you could do with some extra edge loops / bevels around the edge of the door frames / windscreen along the roof line. You could change the edges to hard edges unless this is bad for UDK (I dont have any UDK experience
You also could do the same around the rear wheel arch, so it matches the front arch, harden edges / add extra loops to tighten the smoothing.
You also have some mirroring issues on the seat, you can see the seam and you look to have duplicate stitching, which is very nice by the way
What kind of lighting is this? Usually I need to add more polys to get such a nice shading, I don't get it!
How did you do the stitching on the seats? Looks really nice.
First off let me just say I'm not a big car person but the level of detail and form of this thing gave me shivers of glee.
As for the seam going down mirrored geo, yes it will go away once you combine both halves of the model and merge the verts down the middle. Sometimes you have to re-harden/re-soften the normals for it to go away after merging. I don't know why it happens, some sort of shading quirk I guess.
Also I want to know the same thing as dogzer - how are you getting such clean bakes?!
It lets you know you've got un-merged verts, which can be super useful if you don't intend to have un-merged verts. If you you get shading errors without a seam it'll mean flipped normals or double geo. It might not be pretty but it is pretty handy.
I've been a bit busy the last week with "things" *cough* diablo *cough* and starting a dreamjob.
benc: I'm smoothign that suckah up right now. I'll go the modelling route and sink another 5-10k into it
respawn: Cheers man! Yeah I'm aware of some of them but it's good that you noticed. Now I have to go in and fix them
dogzer / sybrix: I'm not doing anything specific to be honest. I'm keeping the high poly fairly smooth as you can see and just doing a standard normalmap render in maya. There's no other magic to it than that.
However, i must say that Maya is to good at showing normalmaps. Once I put it into unreal I don't get the same sexy results.
ikonane: For the stitchings I more or less grabbed one of the support edges from the seat and converted it into a curve. I then attached a bunch of instances premodelled geometry/stitches with 0.04 spacing i think it was along the curve. Whamo! Technology did all the work for me.
In some areas the stitches didn't bank/rotate correctly so I had to go in and adjust it by hand. Still. It's easier to rotate a few meshes than handplacing a thousand.
If you guys want I can try hooking you up with some mini-tuts. That was the current plan for my project anyway, to record some stuff while i work. I feel to damn awkward when i do it though so a five min clip takes a few hours to record but for this stuff I think images would do well enough... or i just have to overcome my issues!
So this is happening again. Need to finish it. Starting on the lowpoly soon. Woop.
This is just maya viewport 2.0 with three simple spotlights.
Look like a realtime cartoon render, one of my favorites
Don't really have anything else to say. Just wanted to bump the thread