Sketchbook: Rhyl Mayes
Hello polycount!
It's long overdue that I started getting my work out there, I've been wanting to join the polycount community for quite some time.
Time to sketchbook. Modeling. Some concepting. Maybe some animation.
Feedback encouraged :icon60:
Edit: Recent work
It's long overdue that I started getting my work out there, I've been wanting to join the polycount community for quite some time.
Time to sketchbook. Modeling. Some concepting. Maybe some animation.
Feedback encouraged :icon60:
Edit: Recent work
Replies
Le Concept
Sculpt progress
A crystal! (and colour variant) ~600tris + 512 diff/norm/spec. Texture could be less noisy, an attempt at compensating for lack of fancy material, seeing about spheremapping if the engine allows.
Wireframe
Highpoly
I attempted to add some geometry poking out of the wall face to break up the surface a bit, but I ran into some smoothing issues and waviness in my normals. I ended up doing away with the extra geometry and instead using a simple plane, but I would still be interested in finding how how to get around this.
Could somebody please suggest a way to go about solving this issue?
This tutorial seems to use a continuous mesh + single UV island + hardened faces. However, I was under the impression that hard edges with continuous UVs lead to shading breaks in normalmaps. If anyone could shed some light on this it would be appreciated!
The smoothing irregularities are transfered to the normal map, and while the final model looks fine with them on, it feels messy to have a texture containing the waviness for what is essentailly a planar surface.
There are a few reasons I want to have the normals cleaned up:
-The engine this will be going into has the option to disable shaders, to support old hardware (unnecessary imo), which means it will likely be viewed without a normal map, leaving me with waviness once again
-I thought it would be useful to have a clean texture that I might use to texture some additional smaller assets to accompany this one (recycle the textures), the waviness in the normal map would make this quite difficult
Maybe this isn't really an issue, but if there is a way to further clean up the model, it would be great to know how.
If you look at the normal map in that tutorial you referenced he has the same blue->pink gradients that you have which indicates that he is NOT baking an unsmoothed model. He just doesn't have those tight transitions.
The reason why your model is shading like shit is because gouraud vertex shading shades one vertex and then interpolates the result to the connecting vertices. Meaning you can fix some of the tight transitions simply by triangulating your model differently to eliminate the long thin triangles in your quads, but the only way to get a clean result is to add more support edges and/or hard smoothing splits with more uv islands.
In general in order to get clean shading (with the same smoothing group) around a 90º angle you need to have a minimum of 3 edges running along the side. You have two edges along most of your 90º angles which is why your model is essentially pillow shaded. You will also need to inset more edges around the protruding pieces of your wall.
This was definitely not a good approach if your goal was to reuse the texture, generally in a situation like this you would model your texture map flat in logical parts (tileable pieces and trims) and then apply them to your objects or you would divide up your model into reusable chunks that dont need to be retextured but can be easily placed to build new objects.
Good looking model though regardless!
This is an important thing to understand when you eventually move to modeling with non-unique textures because you will often need the additional support edges to ensure correct lighting.
This will also eliminate most of the gradients in your bake.
Example:
http://zoffty.free.fr/images/gallery/Average_Normals.gif
you can look where the normals are going bu adding a "edit normal modefyer"
this shit is complicated and I dont fully understand it but I understand that max trys to shade a flat surfice like it was a curved surface. how this is solved I have jet to discover
I have read the sticky thread about normals but. shits complicated
apart from that shit looks nice
Just apply an edit normal modifier to your stack, turn on select by face, and select your flat surfaces, then click the average selected button it will make the vertex normals all face the correct direction. You'll have to do this for every flat section and might need to do some tweaking of the individual normals to get it to look right (unless you can find a better way) but it will save you a lot of geo.
This will only work if your engine supports explicit vertex normals, most engines do but you may have to fiddle with the export options to get it to cooperate.
Not my SB but seriously thanks for posting that.
I'm not sure how this will bake but its worth testing
DrEnigma: Thanks for the help! I thought changing normals might be a solution, however I wasn't sure if it would have unforseen side effects, but that looks like it works quite well. I might do a test on a quick model and see how the baked normals turn out.
Ruins Wall, 710 tris, 1024 diff/norm/spec
I wasn't too sure how to go about the specular for the moss. At first I made it very dull, I figured grass-like vegetation should pretty diffuse. Then I thought the moss might be wet and hence more reflective so I bumped it up. Ended up dulling it again and leaving a few highlight specs.
The main block of wall works pretty well as a tilable wall or floor, and the 4 small blocks at the end of the model are all seperated and can be reused/scattered about. Should get some nice variation out of this once in-game. Time to work on some more props to accompany it!
Thanks for all your help, I appreciate the effort!
foredea: Thanks!
Goliafish Concept. These fellas are for a game a friend and I are working on in Unity3D, the project is temporarily on hold, but I thought I'd try and get some assets done still.
Goliafish Untextured. 510 tris
Goliafish progress
Goliafish still has a bunch of painting to go, I've got a rig setup and it has been skinned, hoping to get an idle animation ingame at some point soon.
Had a go sculpting a self-portrait in ZBrush
tedious work without a portable mirror or good reference photos. Might come back and do another one with proper reference, or try some famous people.
Doing a little house with hand painted textures, I don't do enough of it, great fun.
House Concept Sketch. It's not very exciting but I thought I'd start simple, and then try something more adventurous.
House progress. 325 tris
Anyway, keep up!
House progress. Started texturing.
Diffuse
Diffuse. 256x256
Wireframe
Started working on a little game with some colleagues. They saw me making this, "let's make a game with that", made a quick mockup of how the game might look (view angle/visualising some gameplay elements).
Obviously, more props need to be built. Enjoying this handpainted stuff though!
Fence A. 52 tris
Diffuse. 256x128
Fence A wire
Fence silhouettes. A few styles, and some broken versions for flavour.
Next up, modeling this guy
Wires
Diffuse. 256x256, and a 64x64 for the eye.
Onto rigging!
A Wolf!
My wolf/dog anatomy is rudimentary and I wasn't too sure which forms to accentuate. I would appreciate any feedback , especially if you notice anything glaringly incorrect.
The game levels are randomly generated, so I made a mockup in max to get an idea of what to aim for with the level generator.
Started on an industrial laundry bag, yet to start the sculpt of the actual bag, when that's done it will be on to making it a game-ready asset.
Wolf texturing progress
Started blocking in the main forms on the wolf, spent a bit more time on the face to make sure the features were in the right place. A lot ofwork still to go on this, I want to push more variation of colour into the texture.
Laundry bag sculpt progress
It needs zips and some short straps in a few places. First time sculpting cloth and it feels like I didn't pick the best shape to start on, there's an overwhelming amount to keep track of with the clips and bars adding tension points. Feels good to attempt new things and push myself though.
Laundry Trolley, finished with it. 8460 tris, 1024 diff/spec/norm
Back into the handpainted models for now, thar be a wolf to finish. Wanting to revisit the industrial laundry theme with some more assets soon.
Slapped together a quick scene using the assets I have so far for my Industrial Laundry environment. SuperWIP.
Some concrete! Been getting familiar with ndo2, such an awesome program.
Some windows! Ndo2, photoshop, mapped onto plane.
Some chains! More ndo2, created entirely in photoshop, mapped onto 2 perpendicular alpha'd planes. 3 variations of link-sections randomly sequenced along the chain.
Underwater Apartment constructed amongst ancient ruins. WIP,
The entrance to aforementioned Underwater Apartment. WIP.
Wolf progress, about 50% through the rig, texture could use a little more work later on.
Started working on a Go Kart. I've not touched vehicle design before, even something simple like a kart is taking me a long time to work out what looks good.
Concept WIP. Been iterating the design by modeling and then painting over, then back to modeling, seems to be going well in terms of advancing the design, but the model is getting a little messy with each iteration.
Kart paintover concept. I think the mouth needs to find itself a better location on the body.
Lair concept.
I had a rock asset already built that I'd used previously for smaller structures. However, I ran into trouble executing the Lair's large surface area and less natural (sculpted) forms using just the rock, coming up against huge polycounts and imprecise forms. I decided a tileable texture alongside my initial rock asset was the best way to go about building it.
Creating a tileable texture that matched the original assets diffuse/spec/normals was surprisingly straightforward (using max).
- Create a 512x512 (arbitrary size, just needed to be square) plane
- Scattered source object over the area of the plane several times until I had an interesting flow of objects (important to have objects sitting over the borders of the plane on all sides, it helps to reduce obvious tiling)
- Grouped the scattered source objects into a single cluster object, then duplicated/translated the cluster by 512 units in X/Y axis until I had a set of 3x3 tiles
- Made sure the plane was UV'd right to the borders
- Added a projection modifier to the plane and moved the cage up above the rocks
- Using Render to Texture, I added (2048^2) diffuse/specular/normal elements to the Output, rendered them out.
- Scaled the rendered textures down to 1024^2, sharpened them, done.
Quick and easy, had a tilable texture I could use alongside my rock asset, and didn't have to mess around in photoshop doing any extra texture work.
Finished up with the racing kart, overall pretty happy with how it turned out. Was a bit outside my comfort zone, going to try and push my vehicle work further in the future and try something with a more serious and thought out design.