Sketchbook: Zarakun
polycounter lvl 7
Hi to all the Polycount community!
I juste created a forum account, but I've been hanging around for few month now. Unlink most of people here, I'm not an artist and I'm not actually working in 3D/video-game industry. I'm pretty far from this field to be honest since I'm trying to finish my PhD in biology. However, I'm really interested in 3D modeling as a hobby for now and I wish I will be able to improve my skills thru hard work.
I saw many of the improvement done by a lot of members in few month here and this is really impressive. As I learn on my own aside from my real work I don't have that much time left for training, so the thing I really need to learn efficiently are constructive critics from confirmed artists and I know you are a lot out there!
Unfortunately, the only critics I can get from self learning are friends ones and self-critics, and I know I wont progress that way! Since I'm hard on myself, don't hesitate to tell the truth and to point the problems in what I'll post here.
I've already done some stuff in Blender long ago but I recently got my student version of Maya. I know this software is used along with 3dsmax and zbrush in video-game industry so I decided to focus myself on 3D modeling with this software.
Here are some screens from the first exercise I tried with maya, I had to use boxmodeling to create an airplane or a spaceship. Since I found some kind of blueprints for the Normandy SR2 from mass effect, I decided to give it a try!
However since all this mesh is made of one piece, I think there is a lot of useless geometry that come from edge loop used basically for tiny details. But I don't really know how to remove or stop these useless edges while keeping everything made of quads... Based on some tutorials I saw online, I tried to remove some of them by creating poles:
I don't know if this is absolutely necessary or if I can create some tris somewhere else on the mesh without causing problems. The first rule that seems to rise from every tutorial/books is to avoid tris and to keep every polys as quad, but when I watch some really impressive professional models, I always find tris...so is there is a precise rule about tris versus quads ?
After subdivision and smoothing, some smoothing artifact seam to appear especially on the wings...
I think it comes from stretched quads but I'm not sure.
So here it is, this is my first piece of work on maya. At that point I know a little about what has been wrong during the modeling process and what I would do differently now but critics and feedback would be greatly appreciated to improve and evolve from beginner to maybe one day a better modeler.
Thank you very much, now back to work, I hope one day I will improve myself as much as peoples do on this board.
Oh and I'm really sorry about my english (this is not my birth language
) But maybe this forum will also improve my english skills too? Thank you Polycount! :poly121:
I juste created a forum account, but I've been hanging around for few month now. Unlink most of people here, I'm not an artist and I'm not actually working in 3D/video-game industry. I'm pretty far from this field to be honest since I'm trying to finish my PhD in biology. However, I'm really interested in 3D modeling as a hobby for now and I wish I will be able to improve my skills thru hard work.
I saw many of the improvement done by a lot of members in few month here and this is really impressive. As I learn on my own aside from my real work I don't have that much time left for training, so the thing I really need to learn efficiently are constructive critics from confirmed artists and I know you are a lot out there!
Unfortunately, the only critics I can get from self learning are friends ones and self-critics, and I know I wont progress that way! Since I'm hard on myself, don't hesitate to tell the truth and to point the problems in what I'll post here.I've already done some stuff in Blender long ago but I recently got my student version of Maya. I know this software is used along with 3dsmax and zbrush in video-game industry so I decided to focus myself on 3D modeling with this software.
Here are some screens from the first exercise I tried with maya, I had to use boxmodeling to create an airplane or a spaceship. Since I found some kind of blueprints for the Normandy SR2 from mass effect, I decided to give it a try!
However since all this mesh is made of one piece, I think there is a lot of useless geometry that come from edge loop used basically for tiny details. But I don't really know how to remove or stop these useless edges while keeping everything made of quads... Based on some tutorials I saw online, I tried to remove some of them by creating poles:
I don't know if this is absolutely necessary or if I can create some tris somewhere else on the mesh without causing problems. The first rule that seems to rise from every tutorial/books is to avoid tris and to keep every polys as quad, but when I watch some really impressive professional models, I always find tris...so is there is a precise rule about tris versus quads ?
After subdivision and smoothing, some smoothing artifact seam to appear especially on the wings...
I think it comes from stretched quads but I'm not sure.
So here it is, this is my first piece of work on maya. At that point I know a little about what has been wrong during the modeling process and what I would do differently now but critics and feedback would be greatly appreciated to improve and evolve from beginner to maybe one day a better modeler.
Thank you very much, now back to work, I hope one day I will improve myself as much as peoples do on this board.
Oh and I'm really sorry about my english (this is not my birth language
) But maybe this forum will also improve my english skills too? Thank you Polycount! :poly121:
Replies
For my first experience with UVs I did this small exercise of texturing a box shaped guy, I tried to make a "box batman"
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But things are a lot harder with complex UVs as I experienced with my next exercise of texturing a plane. So this is my low poly model of a "Rafale":
I have problems unfolding UVs and I'm sure I could optimize them much more but I hope all these habits will come with practice.
Here is the base of the texture on the complete model
This is a closer look of the wing before the detail on the texture
And the other wing after a little more time spent on details like paint scratch on stressed spots of the wing...
I will then continue with dust, oil spots and some signs all over the plane.
Since I work with layer masks to selectively remove the paint of the plane, I think I'll try to use these same masks to create adapted reflection and specular maps...I don't know if this is the correct method to bring reflect and highlight on "naked" polish parts of the model but I'll try...
If you have some comments and advices for me it would be really useful!
I don't want to do something too complicated for now, that's why I did not sculpt the details under zbrush or mudbox and just realize simple bump map under photoshop...anyway I'm really noob at sculpting so I think I'll try to master basics first! But I realize that quality always increase with time so I ll spend as much time as needed on this task.
Critics and advices on texture would be great!
Prussian Musket: 7524 tris
Far to be finished, I'm actually working on the diffuse map
Thank you for the feedback