An exercise in the importance of cross-checking your references coming up.
This is a scan from the manual of an official toy of the '98 GTS by Burago.
Note as illustrated:
-This drawing has FOUR exhausts, both the side ones from the droptop and the rear ones from the hardtop.
-Some parts of the car say RT-10 some say GTS. As far as I can tell it should say one or the other. There's also a reverse light strip that shouldn't be there on the GTS.
-Many of the lights are misaligned such as the back view indicator/reverse lights, the circular lights on the bumper seen from above. I'm not sure the top view is right at all, actually.
Not bad, a few issues. Car looks overall very unstructured maybe its just the reflections but it doesn't look like solid metal looks like flimsy uneven plastic
Tires have no tread details on them, care sits too high should be lower closer to tires.
The surface isn't quite smooth yet and it's exacerbated by a ridge popping over the horizon on the panorama I'm using as a skydome. It does make it look like poorly molded plastic. I'll put more time into that for sure.
I'm not going to tread the wheels for this part as the car is being baked to a low poly further down the line. The wheels shown here are mostly for ambient occlusion on the body. Baked separately, the wheels will have tread for that.
I think the issue with the tires being too low is more that the arches are a touch too high. At the moment, all that is exactly as was on a poster of the car which might be a bit inaccurate. If I raise the tires so the arches look right the sills look wrong.
The wells aren't covered yet. I'm saving that until I'm happy with the body shape.
Been doing some more work on it on and off. Mostly going outside(!?) before uni starts and trying to get some... administrative problems rectified.
Finally some underside work. This isn't great at the moment. It's based on a toy (decent size) because comprehensive reference of the underside is nigh impossible to find.
Oh, another thing - the brief says I have to normal map the car, but I can't find a recent game with a focus on cars that actually does this, instead using brute force polygon density to get the desired effect. Is this correct?
Oh, another thing - the brief says I have to normal map the car, but I can't find a recent game with a focus on cars that actually does this, instead using brute force polygon density to get the desired effect. Is this correct?
Games like GTA, or even Gran Turismo, do not use Normal Maps, i think one of the reason is the compression of the normal map doing bad with the reflections, or the cost of a normal map being too expensive and you can just use more polygons on the main chassis
The car is looking very good Are you planning on modelling engine and interior?
Thanks! I plan on modelling an interior, but I have to redesign the car in some way. For this I'm doing a WRC conversion so the interior will be bare metal and wires. Don't think I'm doing an engine at this point.
Working on some retopology. As this is a very high polygon game mesh (budget is 35-40k, Codemasters spec) but the texture map memory provided is small by comparison most of the curvature is coming directly from geometry not normal maps. This requires topology unlike anything I've done before... somewhere between subdivision modelling and "normal" low poly. I've noticed that triangles seem more predictable than quads.
Gonna dedicate the entire next week working and reworking and rereworking this topology into something less horrendous.
The main concern here is getting the reflections smooth.
Update: slooooowwly chewing through the retopology.
First, here's a comparison of painty materials in UDK:
The left and centre are two different versions of my world space spherical mapping technique, while the one on the right is a standard cubemap. The cubemap appears to be reliant on UVs? Odd, I always assumed it worked off screen space distorted by surface normals.
Some shots of the topology. Some parts of the model here are flipped in UDK due to some manifold faces confusing Blender's auto face flipping (working on it!) and when I took these screenshots I had been working on some close up detail so the near clip plane was a little close causing some of messy looking topology on the spoiler - you're actually seeing both sides of it at once there.
Great progress!
In regards to the reflection I'm not sure about the left and middle ones, some other shots with direct sunlight and more contrasted reflections would be good to check out. Yep, I think that cube map reflections are based on UVs and smoothing groups (I've done some recent stuff with it). However there could be another unheard way to utilize it (maybe).
The 2 reflection setups with the current cube map I can think of is to cube UV map the body of the car with a good smoothing group. Or you could set up tricky UVs based on the panels of the car (reflection will be a bit more seamless than current).
when i first saw your "modifications" i said why is he bastardizing the poor viper...but then i thought why the hell not. let's put missiles on the bastard. do it carmageddon style! :P
Thanks again. ^^
I have no taste whatsoever (not really an artist, probably not going into the industry at the end of this course) so why the hell not indeed!
So, lacking any taste or real artistic skill, I've settled for tasty instead:
Work-in-progress shots of the livery.
Work to be done:
-Sort out the side logos
-Smooth out some of the gradients
-Roof logo contrast
-Some alignments
-Bottom of door dark patch
-Move AO into alpha channel so it can be applied to the reflection
If you guys want a giggle, here's how it came out in the end after about another three weeks of work on it:
...eugh. Had to absolutely murder it to fit it in 4 1024x1024 textures.
only one more semester before I can move on to something else...
I only had 4x 1024x1024 to cover the entire car + interior + underside + engine bay, so they're not... typical:
Livery + bodywork AO for reflections (packed)
Dome reflection map
Normal + AO map for everything else (packed)
Detail maps - all four tiling greyscale textures are packed into the four channels of a single texture. Hides a lot of the low resolution texture ugliness. Selected using vertex paint.
Thanks for taking the time to look, I know it's pretty awful,
Replies
This is a scan from the manual of an official toy of the '98 GTS by Burago.
Note as illustrated:
-This drawing has FOUR exhausts, both the side ones from the droptop and the rear ones from the hardtop.
-Some parts of the car say RT-10 some say GTS. As far as I can tell it should say one or the other. There's also a reverse light strip that shouldn't be there on the GTS.
-Many of the lights are misaligned such as the back view indicator/reverse lights, the circular lights on the bumper seen from above. I'm not sure the top view is right at all, actually.
Tires have no tread details on them, care sits too high should be lower closer to tires.
You can also see right through the wheel well
I'm not going to tread the wheels for this part as the car is being baked to a low poly further down the line. The wheels shown here are mostly for ambient occlusion on the body. Baked separately, the wheels will have tread for that.
I think the issue with the tires being too low is more that the arches are a touch too high. At the moment, all that is exactly as was on a poster of the car which might be a bit inaccurate. If I raise the tires so the arches look right the sills look wrong.
The wells aren't covered yet. I'm saving that until I'm happy with the body shape.
Thanks for your input.
Finally some underside work. This isn't great at the moment. It's based on a toy (decent size) because comprehensive reference of the underside is nigh impossible to find.
Games like GTA, or even Gran Turismo, do not use Normal Maps, i think one of the reason is the compression of the normal map doing bad with the reflections, or the cost of a normal map being too expensive and you can just use more polygons on the main chassis
The car is looking very good
This was my source from PGR4 on maps:
A little preview of a paint shader I've been working on.
Playing with xNormal "perfect bake".
A modified version of the paint shader for normal mapped parts (above is not normal mapped.)
Working on some retopology. As this is a very high polygon game mesh (budget is 35-40k, Codemasters spec) but the texture map memory provided is small by comparison most of the curvature is coming directly from geometry not normal maps. This requires topology unlike anything I've done before... somewhere between subdivision modelling and "normal" low poly. I've noticed that triangles seem more predictable than quads.
Gonna dedicate the entire next week working and reworking and rereworking this topology into something less horrendous.
The main concern here is getting the reflections smooth.
Complete shot with WRC modifications:
Engine bay:
Old topology:
New topology:
First, here's a comparison of painty materials in UDK:
The left and centre are two different versions of my world space spherical mapping technique, while the one on the right is a standard cubemap. The cubemap appears to be reliant on UVs? Odd, I always assumed it worked off screen space distorted by surface normals.
Some shots of the topology. Some parts of the model here are flipped in UDK due to some manifold faces confusing Blender's auto face flipping (working on it!) and when I took these screenshots I had been working on some close up detail so the near clip plane was a little close causing some of messy looking topology on the spoiler - you're actually seeing both sides of it at once there.
In regards to the reflection I'm not sure about the left and middle ones, some other shots with direct sunlight and more contrasted reflections would be good to check out. Yep, I think that cube map reflections are based on UVs and smoothing groups (I've done some recent stuff with it). However there could be another unheard way to utilize it (maybe).
The 2 reflection setups with the current cube map I can think of is to cube UV map the body of the car with a good smoothing group. Or you could set up tricky UVs based on the panels of the car (reflection will be a bit more seamless than current).
Keep going!
keep it up!
I have no taste whatsoever (not really an artist, probably not going into the industry at the end of this course) so why the hell not indeed!
Work-in-progress shots of the livery.
Work to be done:
-Sort out the side logos
-Smooth out some of the gradients
-Roof logo contrast
-Some alignments
-Bottom of door dark patch
-Move AO into alpha channel so it can be applied to the reflection
...eugh. Had to absolutely murder it to fit it in 4 1024x1024 textures.
only one more semester before I can move on to something else...
Livery + bodywork AO for reflections (packed)
Dome reflection map
Normal + AO map for everything else (packed)
Detail maps - all four tiling greyscale textures are packed into the four channels of a single texture. Hides a lot of the low resolution texture ugliness. Selected using vertex paint.
Thanks for taking the time to look, I know it's pretty awful,