High Poly Vehicle Concept
polycounter lvl 10
My newest high poly project. The Warthog from halo is cool but I wanted something that could seat more and looked more badass. I also wanted to try to combine the H1 hummer with a Lamborghini Reventon, Dodge Truck, and of course the Warthog. What do you guys think?
Replies
the rockers are a bit of a let down overall.
Is this an original concept that you designed in 3d, or did you have a 2d reference for it? I think the vehicle suffers from a few poor design choices, and honestly, I'm just not buying it as something that could exist, like Halos warthog. The model seems too random in its dispersion of detail. Also, if this is for games, your bevels could probably be a bit softer, or the detail isn't going to show up well on a normal map.
Altogether, I think you have a good silhouette, and the model looks very cool. I would go back and rework the design, add a bit more, and tweak it here and there, and you could have a pretty neat portfolio piece. Lastly, the green is a bit much, I would either desaturate it a bit, or make some of the details a different color on the same material to break it up a bit.
Looking forward to seeing improvements!
So I made a few changes to The Panther. I added a roll cage and I also changed the wheels so that they looked more utilitarian. Let me know what you think.
Same goes with the roof mounted and the front bumper mounted lights. They aren't round.
Made a few more changes. Smoothed the lights and the tires and I changed the mount for the gun because the old mount was a flimsy humvee mount that wouldn't have supported such a firearm.
My computer is four years old.
2.8 GHz Dual Core AMD
8800 GTX Nvidia
4 GB RAM
So I can't make anything too high poly. Also I am only making this high poly enough to get a good normal map for a low poly game version that I am going to make.
If it's a game asset though anyone reviewing it in a portfolio piece would know it was left unsmoothed to get a proper bake, in that case it would just go to show that the artist knew how to get good bakes.
This literally makes no sense at all. Left unsmoothed to get a proper bake? What? Never have I ever heard of anyone not smoothing their high poly model to get a proper bake. That is the whole point of making the high poly in the first place. To give the appearance that there is more geometry and detail in the lower poly in game model than there actually is.
Why on earth would you build a hp model and leave yourself hard edges unless hard edges is what you wanted in the design. Round things like tire rims are round.
The tires look better now but previously they looked like crap. They weren't round. You could count the edges on them. Even for the low you should try to hide them better and not be able to count the edges on the tires.
I don't know your work flow but if you cloned the tires I would delete all but one and then re-clone them as instances. Helps max and how it handles the geometry in memory. Same goes for anything else that is repeating.
Added bonus of doing it this way is when you work on the master piece all the others automatically get updated.
First of, i love the design you made. Really sci fi with out going over the top! The roll cage was a good add to the door and interior. But i think you actually need something more, somthing like this?
Don't want to be an asshole. But have you even tried meshes higher then 1-2 millions? I had a very similar setup a while ago.
It was an intel Q6600 2.4Ghz, 6Gb ram and a 800 GTX. Pretty much the same. And i managed scene as big as 5 million in viewport. You got some serious issues if you can't fit a million or two in there..
As i said, it looks great. But you have some disturbingly hard edges and jagged curves on the car..
Good luck!
Yes I have tried meshes around 1 to 2 million polys and Max would crash on me every 5 to 10 minutes and my computer would crash every half hour. The model wouldn't even open on the school computers it would crash before it could start. All in all a huge pain in the ass. When I get it up to the 700k to 800k polys it starts to have trouble rotating around the mesh and Max starts crashing occasionally so I don't like to go above that.
I agree that the roll cage seems like it is missing something that it should have something more, but this wouldn't work. If that is covering the door how are they supposed to get into or out of the vehicle quickly. If I am going to cover the door like that then I might as well put armor plated doors on it and give the occupants some protection.
Thank you for your input though. I appreciate the effort and positive feedback.
Okey, yeah well. I work in Maya so i can't say anything about that. Sound really strange to me though.
Doesn't all racer cars have that kinda net for protection, and is made so that you can rip it open quick and get out.
As for the HP. You could split everyhing up into sections and make the higher subdivs for them. Bake them, and then compile it togheter in a new scene. Could work (:
Not really, the roundness of the shape from a baking perspective is conveyed perfectly by the smoothing of the object, without pushing it into a shape that does not match your lowres. Your highres mesh need only be high poly enough to convey the shapes you ACTUALLY need to transfer, in this case the roundness of the wheel well need not be transferred it will be conveyed perfectly by the smoothing of the low poly irregardless.
Smoothing it would only yield missed rays and wobbly normal maps.
Example:
imperator_dk; you should not use that method. It will just greatly emphasize the edges and make it much more noticeably low poly from every angle.
Generally people tend to get too close to the model after baking, but really take a step back and it looks fine. Much better than what your result would show. If that is not the case, then just add more edges to the cylinder.
edit; jaxeller, I would highly recommend you not do it like that.
Added a more robust rhino push bar and brush guard.
Have you thought about maybe adding some barbed/razor wire for extra massochistic effect?!
+1
I love that you've included a roll-cage in the interior, alot of people forget to include that, but its a must in any all-terrain vehicle!
As has been noted in other threads (IE: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154) its better to understand the problem in the first place, than to do silly hacks like this. This "solves" the issue at the expense of making it look like a crappy lowpoly cylinder, certainly if our highpoly and lowpoly look exactly the same noone would ever have any issues with bakes! =P
A. High res modeled with details that "match" the roundness of the low(without treads)
B. High res modeled with details that "match" the roundness of the low(with treads)
C. High res modeled to look good(without treads)
D. High res modeled to look good(with treads)
I've included the without tread versions because the outer shape gets the same result with treads, as the roundness comes from the treads themselves.
wires:
bakes:
So, i'de like someone to explain to me how this "not smoothing" method makes anything better, in these examples every aspect of that method looks worse, and only helps to accentuate the jaggedness of the low res model. Even at accute angles where there should be a big advantage, this method seems to look worse.
So, my conclusion here, is this method is of such limited use that is a huge waste of time to even bother doing. In addition to looking worse, modeling like this is a pain in the ass, and more destructive than keeping a nice clean sub-d mesh, which is easier to edit.
Adding the padding shouldn't take too long but rebaking is going to suck.
If you decide not to add padding/rebake don't show the UVs in your portfolio. It will probably only cause minimal issues for your view port grabs so nobody will know.
The textures feels very blurry and no detail is really shown. Your scratches is pretty random to. Go back and search for some nice damaged/weathered/painted metal and mimic that.
Your specular dos very little for you atm. You should also add a gloss map.
Your normal map seams to a 512. UDK does that if you put the normalmap to DX5 compression for example. You should use uncompressedNormalmap for it instead.
I wonder, did you fix your bakes and UVs?
I cleaned up the bakes, but I didn't change the layout of the UVs. I had a few industry pros take a look at the layout and they said it looked great.
Secondly, you could always trying bumping up the intensity of your normal maps in UDK. Duplicate the normal in the material editor, and combine its R and G channels into the original normal again, and see if that has a noticeable visual effect. You could do a similar thing in photoshop, overlay the normal onto itself without its blue channel, and see if that helps at all.
Worked on my material definition a bit. Might not use all of these materials but definitely most of them. Also I looked into the compression settings for my textures in Unreal and changed them. I got much better looking results. A big thanks to everyone who helped. I will post a new render of the vehicle when I have the base textures put on it.
Reworked the textures as suggested. Currently I only have two 2048x2048 diffuse textures on it just to give you guys an idea of where I am taking this. I plan on reducing the texture size to two 1024x1024 textures before I import it into Unreal. I still need to go in and add scratches where appropriate and add a little grunge here and there as well as a spec and normal map. Let me know what you think.
I think you should go up to 10,000 triangles for the low poly. The tires are too noticeably low-poly as well, they need more polygons to appear more rounded, and then you could bevel the edges so the normal reads more accurately.
Make a texture more like the old ones at 2048x2048, but brighten them and work on them to add more material definition for all the surface variety.
Are you working from reference pictures to make your textures? If you aren't, you should.
Start thinking about how to detail your texture in relation to how the environment will affect it. Dings and scratches on the metal bumper, dirt on the tires and wheel wells, scratches where brush might be scratching the vehicle... and accentuate all those scratches on the specular map. Since the scratches would scratch away paint and the top layer of the metal, revealing the shiny metal underneath.
After all this is a 'war machine', look at tanks, they are not exactly 'shiny' and the paints are very dull and have little to no specular.
So in imo, flat is better, shiny ware machines are just for pretty