First "finished" game asset: greek pillar
Hi everyone,
Some of you may have seen my thread over at tech talk asking about this pillar I've been trying to make. After hours and hours of reading, watching tuts, blood, sweat, tears (lots of tears), trial and error I'm finally at this point of my model. I've taken as many screenshots as I could and my normal texture and uv layout in hopes that this can be looked at by some of the greats of the forum so that I can be steered in the right direction, and fix any bad habits I may have developed during the course of making this simple yet annoying asset. Before going on, I have to confess something. as I mentioned in my other thread I'm totally new to this game development field, and from what I understand there's no standard workflow. For all of the texturing, all I did was bake out a normal map and AO map, and let nDo2 do a lot of the converting for me (another AO map and cavity map).. is this frowned upon in the industry? should I not make this a habit?
All of the polys are placed in smoothing group 1 for both models, by the way. If there's anything I'm forgetting to mention please let me know. Ah, let's just get to the pics already
The first photo shows the polys/tris/verts of the HP model, and the second shows the same stats of the LP model. The third is the same two simply side by side. I don't know what's up with that weird black line going down my LP model, but if i spin around it, it just moves all around with the model. I'm guessing it's just the 3ds max lighting?
Some of you may have seen my thread over at tech talk asking about this pillar I've been trying to make. After hours and hours of reading, watching tuts, blood, sweat, tears (lots of tears), trial and error I'm finally at this point of my model. I've taken as many screenshots as I could and my normal texture and uv layout in hopes that this can be looked at by some of the greats of the forum so that I can be steered in the right direction, and fix any bad habits I may have developed during the course of making this simple yet annoying asset. Before going on, I have to confess something. as I mentioned in my other thread I'm totally new to this game development field, and from what I understand there's no standard workflow. For all of the texturing, all I did was bake out a normal map and AO map, and let nDo2 do a lot of the converting for me (another AO map and cavity map).. is this frowned upon in the industry? should I not make this a habit?
All of the polys are placed in smoothing group 1 for both models, by the way. If there's anything I'm forgetting to mention please let me know. Ah, let's just get to the pics alreadyThe first photo shows the polys/tris/verts of the HP model, and the second shows the same stats of the LP model. The third is the same two simply side by side. I don't know what's up with that weird black line going down my LP model, but if i spin around it, it just moves all around with the model. I'm guessing it's just the 3ds max lighting?
Replies
Go to create UV's, Set vertex normal, Unlock Normals (or something like that) and the shading went back to normal. Try to find the Max equivalent and see if that works.
Post up some photos of your UV map and make sure that when you bake the normal map that no UV's are overlapping
Also post the low poly with the normal map applied.
Remember when you are baking a normal map, you need to split the smoothing group wherever there is an angle that is 90 degrees or sharper. Otherwise there could be a black line in your normal map, or some other weird errors. Also make sure no overlapping or inverted UV's.
That weird viewport shadow you're getting on your model might be max's lighting if you are using one of the newer versions? Go to the little + in the top left corner and configure your viewport to have 1 light instead of 2. Maybe that's it haha.
here's my normal and uv template
ben: I'll try to find what you're talking about. Also, in max when I tried to select "inverted faces" or "overlapped uvs" it didn't select anything, I also looked around and everything seemed fine so I think I'm ok there? not totally sure
I'm also pretty sure there's some things that can be fixed in my normal, but to be honest I haven't gotten into the photoshop aspect of all this yet so I don't really know the whole editing/fixing process
er..really suck at this image thing. Trying to embed them
I did multiple renders since I wasn't sure how to go about it. hopefully i did it right. here's the high poly ones
Here's the lowpoly model with normal applied. I'm not sure how you wanted it applied, to the diffuse to see it "painted" on or in the normal bump. When I put it on the normal bump it seems like it's not doing anything, unless i'm not applying it correctly. renders of the low poly too
normal applied to bump:
normal on diffuse:
rendered, for whatever reason it may help
Alberto: I was only working off of this one reference image. what exactly am i researching? The start of this project was just to try to get comfortable with the max tools, but i ended up trying to take it all the way. thanks though:poly142:
In this case, that reference is really bad, as it's some sort of minature sculpture or something that is heavily stylized. Having said that, you ought to take another look at it, as you've missed a lot of the proportional and spacing cues, for example, check the top short cylinder's radius as compared to the column's radius in your image and the reference.
Yes, you are supposed to apply your normal map in the Bump slot, but you are doing it incorrectly. First bump the strength up from 30 to 100, then click the 'none' slot, select 'normal bump' from the window that appears, and then you can add your texture selecting bitmap. Hope that's clear.
After deleting every material I could find, and restarting it from scratch and following your steps I still can't get my normal bump to show up.. Not quite sure what I'm doing wrong, it may be a problem with 3ds max 2013, from what I've read on google. When I import my mesh into Marmoset Toolbag and add the textures they're applied to my mesh but I can't get the normal to show up in max, ugh.. I'm going crazy over this
To be honest I don't even know if anything is wrong with my bakes/textures. If they came out fine, then the point of this thread is kind of meaningless as I can consider this mesh "done" and move onto my next one... with a lot more pre-planning this time. But if there's something majorly wrong I'd still like to fix it before moving on
found this first google page.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Schema_Saeulenordnungen.jpg
awesome thanks. Please, now can I have the uv's/smoothing/textures/bakes looked at this is my main concern at the moment? I'm not at all trying to be rude or shunning your advice, I just know that my mesh isn't matching the photo reference, or proportion of a true pillar either. As I mentioned earlier I went into this project with very little pre-planning, just to try to familiar myself with max's interface, tools, and to try to formulate a workflow that works for me while following various tutorials and reading up on here and other forums.. Now that I'm almost comfortable, I'd like to start my next project with a lot more pre-planning this time to make sure I get scale/proportion down correctly but I can't do that if I have a major problem here that I'm not seeing or getting, since it'll just reoccur in my asset