Best practice question.

l.croxton

Hey guys,

I am currently building up a portfolio piece and I am just starting my high poly model. I have so far some floating geometry which I understand to be acceptable when used correctly, however I have a question to do with using the boolean subtraction tool.

I am including an exhaust piece like this in the image,



I was wondering is acceptable for me to just simply cut these circles out or do I thow in a butt load more edge loops etc and just move the verts where best or are there other ways I can approach this?

From what I understand if I do use the boolean tool it will be a huge problem to take it into mudbox or zbrush if I can get another free trial

Thanks for any replies .

Angry Beaver

Your best off using an alpha'd texture. The number of polys you'd be including would be astronomical and maintaining quads (why importing it into mud-box etc. could be bad) means it'll be tricky.

If your trying for a portfolio you've got to balance looks with proving you know how to spend polys. The metal is too thin for that edge to matter unless your going super close up on that part.

l.croxton

Ah right, so even for hi-poly stuff there is a "limit" ?

What I am creating now is purely for a hi-poly model, then when I am happy with it I'll make an attempt at creating a real high quality low poly game model . I was thinking for the exhaust part to either have that has a alpha map as you suggested or just a plain diffuse and to do some little tricks in photoshop to give the illusion + be more optimised?.

Thanks for you by the way, always appreciate the help round here .

Benton

Alpha all the way.

passerby

i think there talking about the lowpoly, since yould would these in the high poly to bake the alpa.

the approach i would take is adding a ton of loops, so you can get a vert where you want each hole, than doing the vertex chamfer trick to makes holes where the vertices's are.

cant show your right no, but this image i found kinda illustrates how

than you can extude the face down and delete.

WarrenM

Well, he COULD just map a blank area of the UV map to it and use something like nDO to lay in the holes on the normal map. Might be easier, depending...

l.croxton

Firstly, thanks for all the replies everyone .

I will then go for the alpha map way. I do not have much experince with using alpha maps so knowing myself, its going to be painful haha.

@passerby that is just genius :O. I will see if I can fit that into my model. I have already got a cut version which is basically a cylinder that is cutting a hole in the middle of the square, so its kinda neat, but obviously not ideal since its all triangles . I'll give that way a go .

@WarrenMarshall, I have not got nDO, is it something I have to buy or "aquire" as I don't like "aquiring" software anymore, I'll check their website to see if they do anything for students or a free trial. Could I use the photoshop nvidia plugin? Unless nDO does it another way. I was going to put some black circles down and do some simple beveling etc to get the appereance of the holes and then just run it through the pluggin. Would that not be ok?

passerby

what 3d package are you using?, i could try it out to show you.

since that method is a little tedious if you start from a cylender, what i would do is make 1 hole flat, instanced it a ton of times weld all the instances togeahter so you got a strip of holes, than copy the strip, and offset it and move it down, and keep repeating that, and once you got enough weld it all together, and use a modifier to bend it in a circle.

in the case of max you can do somehting like this


first one is me just making the hole shape, than duplicating it over and welding till i got a strip the size i want.

than in step to i drop a bend modifier on it, and bend it into a cylinder, than in step 3 i put edit poly, so i can weld things togeaher, where the 2 sides of the strip meet after the bend, than finally o drop a turbo-smooth on.

l.croxton

@passerby; Ah thanks for your reply, super helpful. I was thinking about doing just that although possibly not the turbosmooth since it would be an octogon hole so possibly doing that would leave a huge poly footprint, to which my sweet old machine might not enjoy to much, specially if I decide to duplicate the exhaust elsewhere :P.

Oh I am using 3ds Max 2012. Which at a guess is what you are using, however I have noticed some buttons saying FFD4x4x4 etc, what do those do? are they subdividing?

Again thanks alot for your replies, its been massively helpful.

passerby

ya that is max 2012 for that exemple.

FFD buttons are just shortcuts to different versions of the ffd modifier, which is essential a lattice with a set amount of control points, pretty useful for doing simple deformations of a object.

those buttons above the modifier stack can be user set, so i have the common ones i use there, like ffd, sperirfy, bend, uv mapping etc also spherify is what i used to make the resutls of my chamfered vertex round.

ya for a low poly, i would just use a cylinder no holes, or extra loops, but for the highpoly you prolly would want to keep the turbosmooth, so you can get nice baked edges for your normalmap, and get a more round hole in your alpha.

but ya agree it would get expensive fast, since i think that was 30k tris, on subdivision level 3, and that is olny 16x2 holes.

for the whole thing it would be more like 16 holes by maybe 24 rows, so a lot of polys.