SAI Suppressor

cookedpeanut

Hi there,

I kinda feel like a noob posting this, especially in comparison to some of the awesome work on here...
Anyhow, here is a SAI Suppressor that I made earlier on - I intend to attach it to an AK74-U (When I get round to making it).

Was very difficult to get any images/refs for the cavity between the can and nozzle attachment, so I sort of just went off what my eye could see...
Render and composition all done inside the Blender node editor.

cookedpeanut

Low poly: 2284 Tris + 2048 Normal map - Came out pretty nicely, only have a little issue with wavy edges on the metal plate (In red box). Any advice how I can remove em in Photoshop?

Crits?

No comments

theSixtyEight

Comparing to hipoly, normals came out pretty bad, but thats problem of blender, ..it bakes terible normal maps....about polycount...for classicall game art I would go for 100-150 tris at max....best would be around 60 tris
Alsour edges are way too tight for game art

marks

2048 texture for a silencer is insanely big.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

Well for one if you baked with hard edged you wouldn't have that gradient in your normal map, it's not a huge issue really. You need to texture it or do something with it, like make a gun for it.

theSixtyEight

alex, problem is, blender cant rly bake with cage, so if u use hard edges, u will get nasty seams on them....blender is useless while baking maps

cookedpeanut

Hmmm... I rendered the normal map in Xnormal. Didn't realise it was a bad bake though, that's probably down to me being new to the game workflow.
Anyway, I duplicated the low-poly mesh and tweaked it into a cage. I exported both the low-poly and cage as triangulated meshes and assigned the settings respectively in Xnormal.
The model is intended to be imported into Arma II as a mod, so ideally I want to pack in as much detail as I can. 150 Tris would be too low I think...?

So if I loosen up the edges, tighten up the cage and reduce the normal map to 1024x1024* I should be on a roll?

Thx for the crits, time to get down to work!

joeriv

Well, you could also reduce the tri-count by a lot, 2248 seems really excessive. you could probably bring it down to like 500 with barely noticing a difference, (keeping in mind it will be in a game, not a super zoomed in screenshot of the silencer alone).

cookedpeanut

Ok, I tweaked the cage a little bit and found a few intersecting faces so cleaned them up.
Loosened up most (If not all) edges on the high-poly model and reduced the normal map size. I added in some AA to smoothen out the norm map too...
A few wavy bits in the map which can easily be cleaned up, but overall I would def say this is an improvement over the last bake? What do you guys think?

I'll see what I can do with reducing the tri count, however I guess the moral of the story here is 'Keep a tight cage and loose edges'... :P

Time for some texturing!

Bek

Looks like a much better bake, post a wireframe perhaps (or a p3d link) if you want us to tell you where you can remove polygons from. Probably wouldn't hurt to post the normal map / uvs either if you want feedback on them, someone might notice something that's better to change now, before you go and finish it.

cookedpeanut

Ok, thanks
Wire side:

Wire front:

Wire back:


Uv:

Normal:

The waviness on the two islands at the bottom I'll try to fix in Photoshop.

erik!

I would argue that wavy edges on cylinders can be fixed with cage adjustments (assuming you're using a cage). check it:
Or you could fix it in PShop, but THAT'S CHEATING.

from Poop's tutorial Normal Map Workflow

Bek

You could probably remove those four insets on the main part of the silencer, unless the camera will get really close to the silencer (when reloading maybe?). The normal map should take care of it from any reasonable distance. But if you've got the budget might as well make it look nice I suppose. Might be able to get away with a 512x512 map size, that's super easy to check though.

Handplane can fix waviness can't it? You could always give that a go.

cookedpeanut

That's a helpful image, thankyou for the share.
Hmmm, I forgot about Handplane, I'll have to give that a shot...

cookedpeanut

Ok, I've baked the AO and cavity maps. Also popped in some text, serials and a logo onto the normal map. Working on diffusion and spec at the moment.
I re-baked the normal map again to try and fix some issues - some fixed, others not...

theSixtyEight

I think you could just use classicall cylinder with 16 sides and another one with 5 sides as that bump at the front and thats all, it rly dont need any extra geometry,ingame the difference will be rly minimal and u will get maybe 100triangle count and u can use 512 maps