Mateba Unica 6

Toasty Fresh

Hey guys, first real post here on Polycount. Just finished this hipoly to a point that I feel like I can post it. I chose to model this mostly because there's already a couple of these posted on the site and I could get good reference from those threads as well as pics on the net.

Also while I've tried to go into detail with this I'm not really fussy over actual inaccuracies, I just really want to improve my 3D skills.





Let me know if I need to include additional pics like wires or whatever, I didn't think they'd really be helpful for HPs.

Thanks.

Toasty Fresh

I think I've finished with the lowpoly. Please let me know if there are any areas that definitely need more optimisation, I really want to get on to UV mapping and texturing.



Also can anyone give me a better way to post wireframe pics? I'd prefer a way to render them rather than just screencapping, to avoid the jaggies.

Amatobahn

Are those edge loops in the middle of the gun's trigger/finger-area (don't know the technical name) necessary? I feel like there is a lot of cleaning up that can be done and capping those cylinders by connecting the verts.

Toasty Fresh

Amatobahn wrote: »

Are those edge loops in the middle of the gun's trigger/finger-area (don't know the technical name) necessary? I feel like there is a lot of cleaning up that can be done and capping those cylinders by connecting the verts.

Yes, good point. I missed that.

Toasty Fresh

Running into big problems with normal map baking. It looks nice in some areas but it's really got problems in other areas, such as this:



Is this because my model is too low-poly?

cptSwing

Try hardening the borders of your uv shells, and baking with a cage

OtrickP

Are you using the super sampler? I find sometimes with those round surface normals the super sampler can make some strange artifacts, try taking off the super sampler and render it at 2-4 times your target resolution. As always, a nice cage will help too.

OtrickP

cptSwing wrote: »

Try hardening the borders of your uv shells, and baking with a cage

Interested in what you mean by Hardening the borders of your UV shells.

Toasty Fresh

OtrickP wrote: »

Are you using the super sampler? I find sometimes with those round surface normals the super sampler can make some strange artifacts, try taking off the super sampler and render it at 2-4 times your target resolution. As always, a nice cage will help too.

I'm using a cage, but I will definitely try rendering at a higher resolution.

Try hardening the borders of your uv shells

What do you mean by this?

cptSwing

Basically set your uv shells to separate smoothing groups (max) / set the edges of your uv shells to 'hard' on the mesh (Maya).. There's a wealth of information on the wiki and in the technical subforum

You could also try breaking some of the hard angles into different uv shells.

Toasty Fresh

cptSwing wrote: »

Basically set your uv shells to separate smoothing groups (max) / set the edges of your uv shells to 'hard' on the mesh (Maya).. There's a wealth of information on the wiki and in the technical subforum

You could also try breaking some of the hard angles into different uv shells.

Thanks. But the reason I asked is that I don't know the term "UV shell" :P

TrevorJ

Hey a Mateba! I did one of these, EQ did one as well. It's looking pretty good as far as accuracy. PM me if you need more reference, i think i still got a lot of pics, but you said your not worried about 100 percent accuracy so i wont comment on the high poly. I think what others have said, giving any UV shells/islands hard edges all the way around(different smoothing groups) will help in a lot of cases.

However i think adding some more geometry to your lowpoly will definetly help. You need to think about the use case of this model, if it's going to be a first person model(im assuming) you can probably put a lot more polys into this. Especially areas facing and close to the "camera".

My Mateba model was where I really cut my teeth on normal baking, it was a lot of trial and error, keep at it, and read over all the normal mapping stuff in the Wiki, especially any threads from EarthQuake or the guys at 3point, they know their shit.
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryTexturing%5Cb%29#Baking

Toasty Fresh

Oh! I'm assuming UV islands/shells are just large chunks of connected UV mapping?

TrevorJ wrote: »

Hey a Mateba! I did one of these, EQ did one as well. It's looking pretty good as far as accuracy. PM me if you need more reference, i think i still got a lot of pics, but you said your not worried about 100 percent accuracy so i wont comment on the high poly. I think what others have said, giving any UV shells/islands hard edges all the way around(different smoothing groups) will help in a lot of cases.

However i think adding some more geometry to your lowpoly will definetly help. You need to think about the use case of this model, if it's going to be a first person model(im assuming) you can probably put a lot more polys into this. Especially areas facing and close to the "camera".

My Mateba model was where I really cut my teeth on normal baking, it was a lot of trial and error, keep at it, and read over all the normal mapping stuff in the Wiki, especially any threads from EarthQuake or the guys at 3point, they know their shit.
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryTexturing%5Cb%29#Baking

Yeah I used your and EQ's work for reference a lot, which helped for reference for some areas I really could not find pics for, such as the hammer area etc.

Toasty Fresh

I solved the wierd baking problem by redoing the whole cylinder area and that looks okay now but I'm having problems with baking again.



I've been looking this problem up quite a bit and from what I gather it's fairly common and the solution is to make sure that the culprit pieces of UV are seperated but I've already done that. Unless by that what is meant is seperate them completely from the rest of that chunk of UV, but how is that practical? It wouldn't be practical, to me anyway, to have large pieces of my UV that should be all in one neat group all over the place.

Why is my normal bake taking any consideration from the smoothing groups at all? It's incredibly annoying and when I render a world-space normal it looks absolutely fine on the map itself, whereas a tangent-space map has those seams on it.

alexdubbeat

...or inverted green channel.

Toasty Fresh

Been playing with smoothing groups, have fixed the problem, on the cylinders at least. However I'm having trouble applying them in other areas. How can I apply the same smoothing group to one whole piece of the gun without it looking really strange in some areas? I apologise for not thoroughly googling the problem but it's just really confusing for me.

Millenia

Hey dude, TexTools has a one-button function that will automatically assign smoothing groups by UV islands for you. I personally always use that.

Don't worry if the smoothing is a little blobby, the normal maps will probably fix it as long as you don't have 90 degree angles stitched together (and even then it might work if your baker and target engine are synchronized)

Toasty Fresh

Yeah I must have missed that bit in your tutorial



This is what I get when I use that. The normal map looks much the same when I bake it.

Pedro Amorim

that doesn't seem to even have a normal map

Toasty Fresh

Yes, it doesn't. I was just showing how the smoothing groups don't seem to be applying correctly with the tool that Millenia was talking about.

I'm sure I'm missing something here. Does it need to be triangulated? Do I need to go back and fiddle with the UVs? I'm at a loss.

cptSwing

^ without knowing how the smoothing in the picture relates to your UV layout, that's hard to confirm or deny ;-)

Also, the tool in TexTools only works on single objects, so you'll have to apply it to each separate object that makes up your gun.

Furthermore, after having set the UV shell edges to hard, I slap an Edit Mesh modifier on top of my lowpoly (for traingulation), then the projection (cage) modifier, adjust as needed, and export to xnormal's SBM file format, using the 'low poly' settings (tangents exported, cage included etc.)
Once in xnormal, be sure to have the 'use cage' option checked in the low poly tab.