using decal and custom vertex normal for vehicles?
polycounter lvl 9
Can i use custom vertex normal and decal for vehicle for example a tank or a aircraft? i see the tread for the use of decals to add higher details on the model and i read that starcitizen ships use custom vertex normal to add smoothness to the edges. i did try to make a high poly but i having problems adding a lot of edge loops. So is it a viable option?
Replies
Also to clear out something, when you use the custom normals/edgeloops method, you won't need a highpoly model. You only make a "med-poly" mesh, and don't bake in the most of cases.
wireframe
Is this better or should i just make a high poly instead and bake the normals. i making this for game in the same stile as battlefield so the model will be up close.
+ The smooth edged geo and modeled details allows you to not bake from a full highpoly, so you won't have a pixelated normalmap on a large scale asset (such as your vehicle, which would require huge normalmap if it would be baked). Also it saves time because of the no highpoly.
+ The smaller details can be still mapped/normalmapped onto a decal sheet.
+ Can work on any asset regardless of shape/size (Alien Isolation is a perfect example)
+ You can still use even unique texturing for the non-normal map textures, however such games usually use modular, tiling materials, and procedural materials.
- You need exaggerated bevel width to not get aliasing issues
- The decal technique require a special shader
- Both technique require the artist to have deep understanding in how the techniques works, to get out the most from it.
Games with similar or same approaches:
Alien Isolation
Star Citizen
Elite - Dangerous
Probably the newer GTA games for the cars
Most of racing games
- Reason for why the smooth edges technique is used on cars in racing games is that the cars are large scale models, with a lot of flat, smooth surfaces. And if they were use normalmaps for paneling etc, the compression of the normalmaps would be very visible because of the smoothness of the car body panels, and they would look very ugly and noisy. Also it would require huge resolution to use normalmap, and even then the compression would still destroy the look.
- Reason for why its used in space ship/simulator games is its because of the huge scale. It would be simply impossible to use enough big normalmaps.
When you work in a studio, they will tell you how they want to approach the graphics, except if you are the lead artist and technical artist. When you work on your own game, you can decide how you want, what fit your needs... So I think you can decide.
The textures i've used were very clean, but for experiment, i made a lot of tests on different bakers to see the results if i can bake proper curvature map to use in ddo. Only modo curvature map was near to proper one but still need some adjustment for black and white values.
If anyone knows a way to get proper curvature map for only smooth edge beveled medium polygon models (weird name, i mean no high poly and no baking), i'll be happy to know it. I didn't want to open a new thread for this question, but i'll be modelling only cars on my new job and researching techniques about this. Any help or resource is appreciated
I only found this technique but didn't test yet. Also more explanation about that would be really amazing.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2349398&postcount=148
Thanks.