The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!

It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!

https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament

Best Of

Re: LOW-POLY ART

Movie cars, Low Poly style

Nostalgia factor:)

Sketchfab:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/movie-cars-set-0eb3d51a7704449a9477fc1993e55826

RobertRamsay

4 ·

The surface of the softened corner (on the second iteration) is fairly smooth but it doesn't have a single, continuous curvature. This is because the shape is created by blending several curves together. It's a bit counterintuitive but the center of that softened corner is actually being flattened by the three shallow round overs that all converge around that point.

Below is an example that shows how the basic shape would be made by grinding off the pointed corner and rolling the part along each of the three edges, that originate from the points of the starting triangle, to create the round overs.

Each iteration of the model has a corner shape that's based on a different machining process. The image below shows the basic topology and the tool shapes they were derived from. From left to right: The first has a continuous curvature that's based on a sphere. The second has a blended curvature that's based on three shallow, intersecting curves. The third has a continuous curvature that's based on a single, steeper curve.

There's a few different ways to approach modeling the shapes. Most of the simple curves can be generated with standard bevel / chamfer operations or modifiers. On this particular shape the round over along the bottom is always slightly smaller than the radius on the back.

The workflow in the previous examples becomes more application specific when it comes to sketching shape profiles with just edges and vertices. In applications that support this, it's possible to develop some of the shape profiles by either inserting primitives that are just vertices and edges or by duplicating existing edge geometry without attaching it to any faces. Which opens up some additional possibilities for previewing and lofting edges in a mesh edit without having to work with splines, NURBs or Booleans.

This edge and vertex only, primitive based sketching workflow is what's shown in the first post about the rod clamp.

https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2742787/#Comment_2742787

Of course this approach has it's own set of drawbacks that will need to be carefully managed. Most of which are related to unintentionally creating unwelded duplicates or non-manifold geometry but that's to be expected with any unconventional workflow that's trying to mimic parametric sketch based modeling functions. So there's a relatively narrow path where this type of modeling make sense and it relies heavily on application specific tools or modifiers and working with incremental snapping to real world units.

Here's an example that shows how duplicating the edges from the existing curve can also be used to quickly sketch the corner profile but will leave behind non-manifold geometry when the corner vertex is deleted or dissolved. In applications that don't support this type of workflow it will be necessary to look at alternate modeling operations like boolean subtraction, lofting splines, etc.

One of the previous questions about this workflow was whether or not the faces had to be created individually by hand. The short answer is: No, there's tools for locating non-manifold geometry, filling edge strips with faces, converting n-gons into triangles and converting triangles into quads. So the discussion about click count and hot keys is mostly within the context of filling non-manifold geometry and converting n-gons into organized faces. https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2749130/#Comment_2749130

Below is an example of how non-manifold geometry can be resolved to organized topology with a series of simple operations. Select by feature can be used to identify all non-manifold edges. Face fill can be used to close the non-manifold edges with N-gons. Face select mode can be used to select the corner n-gon and the attached edges. Triangulate faces can be used to turn the n-gon into triangles. Tris to quads can be used to turn the triangles into quads that are organized by features like face angle and shape angle.

All of these operations can be done in one or two clicks, depending on how many parameters need to be adjusted. These tools are fairly reliable so there really isn't much need to manually create or adjust faces in most of the shapes here.

Most of the time the support loops can be created with bevel / chamfer operations. Modifiers provide some additional flexibility for previewing and adjusting the edge width on the fly. Though there's going to be certain shapes where there just isn't enough room for support loops. That's a point where either the base mesh needs to be adjusted to make room for the loops or the modifier needs to be applied so the overlapping geometry can be removed.

Another fairly efficient way to add support loops around certain types of complex shapes is to use a series of inset operations. Working through one side of the support loop at a time and having direct control over the selection tends to make it easier to avoid creating overlapping support loop geometry.

The example below shows how this process could be done. On some shapes there just isn't enough room in the corners so overlapping geometry is inevitable. This can usually be cleaned up with merge by distance and vertex dissolve operations. The left over edge loop around the bottom of the chamfer can be removed with edge dissolve.

This particular corner shape was built to mirror specific processes so it's not representative of anything other than itself. As far as workflow goes the vertex + edge sketching might be a little bit off the wall but the rest of the modeling operations are fairly standard. There's lots of different modeling tools and that means there's different ways to approach creating this shape or something that looks similar. So after a certain point the whole conversation moves from the technical to the expressive.

It can be tempting to try to resolve smoothing issue by moving lots of geometry around but the problem is that once something moves far enough out of plane it's pretty much over. Any modeling operation that comes afterwords just inherits the inaccuracy of the starting shape and the errors will just keep piling up on top of each other.

There's definitely a time and place for manually cutting in support loops to organize topology flow, moving vertices to compensate for smoothing artifacts and conforming geometry to clean primitives to restore curvature but for most shapes it doesn't have to be the defualt method for generating a clean result when subdivision is applied.

Mathematically generated shapes created by primitives and tool operations tend to be more accurate and consistent than geometry that's created by freehand modeling the shapes. With a lot of hard surface objects it's important to preserve the accuracy of these underlying shapes and avoid introducing any undesired surface deformation.

That's why it often makes sense to rely on tools to generate consistent shapes and whenever there's major issues with artifacts or the accuracy of a surface it's probably worth looking at resolving any problems in the underlying shapes first.

FrankPolygon

7 ·

Sketchfab Spotlight | October 2021

A collection of the latest and greatest pieces from Sketchfab users

Sean VanGorder

5 ·

Re: What are you working on 3D? 2021

More images on my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/R3bvKW

JaySmitt

4 ·

Stray meets Liam Wong - UE5 - fanart

A personal project inspired by the game Stray and the photography of Liam Wong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BJ8Lq06uRw

Ognyan

7 ·

Re: Show your hand painted stuff, pls!

TUG BOAT

A prop I did for my GA275 class with teacher Don Ott
Modeled in 3ds max, textured in substance (AO baked in Max) Renders done in Iray.

Project-Based on Art by SiChen Lin

Thanks for looking

Malcolm_Raynal

9 ·

Re: Show your hand painted stuff, pls!

Hey Guys, I'm totally new to this community, this is my first post here. Hope you enjoy

This is a hand-painted robot I made using 3ds max, substance painter, Quixel suit and V-ray.
You can see the full project's details in my Artstation and Behance Pages.
Any comments or critiques are highly welcomed

arefma

5 ·

Re: [FINISHED!] [UE4] Havana - Overwatch FanArt Environment Study [FINISHED!]

Hey!

We're back at it again, this time with a smaller update.

We were busy with creating smaller sci-fi-ish normal decals that can, and are going to be re-usable throughout a bunch of the assets on the scene. Those include all of the cars, gas station, ticket booth and more.

- Firstly we went trough the whole scene again and noted down which ones we need. We created them and compiled into 1 single 256x256 texture.

- All it was left to do was create an asset to test it on, and what better candidate than the decal-rich gas station?

- On the image above one could see the placement of the different decals we created.

- Here is the pump with and without the decals material in UE4

- There was a cool effect going on on the pumps, where the texture was animated. We manage to replicate this effect by using a Panner node on the emissive inside the shader editor
- The speed and tile parameters were exposed for us to easily tweak the effect. This could be seen in the gif bellow

.. which brings us to our completed decal-friendly emission-animated Gas Station!

Off to the rest!

ArcaneOwl

4 ·

Re: [FINISHED!] [UE4] Havana - Overwatch FanArt Environment Study [FINISHED!]

Hey Guys!

We're back with an update.

As we are all aware, sadly, a lot of things were (and still are) going on, so including this and other client work we managed to get back to the scene with a bigger update.

Regarding the scene, a bunch of stuff was added:
- New juicy materials including some metal trims, bricks, tiles, walls etc. Upgraded the master material so that we could paint R,G and B vertex paint to almost every material desired.
- Different kinds of decals including dust, dirt, edge with normals, dripping and rust leakage, posters etc.
- Finished and made the ramaining buildings: factory, machanic shop, main theater building and more
- Made interior of other ramaining buildings too
- Some inside jokes, aswell

Here are some of the current in-game screenshots

- Examples of edge dirt/dust decals and how beneficial they are to the depth and livelyhood of the scene:

- The way we painted materials with vert colors:

We made some particles too!

- Theater ornaments:

- Doors!

- And last but not least, some new materials:

Be sure to follow our progress on instagram too:
https://www.instagram.com/arcaneowlstudio/

Thank you for your time guys!
...Till next update

ArcaneOwl

3 ·

Re: Decal technique from Star Citizen

wirrexx wrote: »

Wow, this technique seems awesome unfortunatly i can't wrap my head around how you guys are doing it..

It's incredibly simple, just follow those steps

Make your lowpoly object as usual
If you feel like it, don't bother with proper unwrap and use simple texture mapping with tiled textures (hell, if you have no serious performance considerations, drop any and all UV mapping work altogether and just use a triplanar shader with a tiled texture for the underlying surface)
Create a decal texture (do a simple mesh with various detail and bake it out)
Slap some quads on top of your surface, map those quads with a separate decal texture with all the detail you can imagine (seams, rivets, panels, vents, anything). Don't stop at just quads, create looped quad strips mapped to seam textures to create panel outlines, or even make seam decals going through multiple surfaces at once.
Export surface and decal as separate meshes
Use a shader with depth offset if you don't want to model your decals with offset from a surface and don't want Z-fighting
Use deferred rendering and a shader with per-channel GBuffer mixing if your want your decals to e.g. only influence normals of the underlying surface (that's the hard part, see examples of UE4 and Unity solutions in the thread)
Spend the remaining 80% of the time you somehow still have until your deadline dancing like a maniac and staring lovingly at in-engine results
Optional: Use that freed up time you don't have to spend on baking and proper unwrapping to make your surface mesh really, really, really sweet (chamfers with face weighted normals are a popular thing lately, and you'll get to boast about following Star Citizen and Alien Isolation practices if you'll use them)

bac9-flcl

4 ·