Pokemon Gold Time Capsule Prop

uberphoenix

Here's something I've been working on for the past 2 hours or so:

The concept:



I'm not gonna follow the concept exactly, as I want to be able to change the concept to my liking, since you can't see the rear or the part the player is covering anyways.

What I have so far:



Most of this is turbosmoothed with some supporting edges, this'll be my first ever completed high poly. Hopefully I'll be able to bake it down onto a low poly and texture it.

Learning loads from doing this!

Crits welcome! Thanks in advanced

uberphoenix

Shameless self Bump

Adding some more images of the highpoly(with the wires) and the base model I used to make the high which i'll use as the low poly if it looks correct.



Is this the correct way to make a high poly?



Here's the low poly that i turbo smoothed to make the high poly what it is atm.

Crits very welcome! as I want to learn something from this piece at least!.

Clos323

good start! however these edges don't give enough detail to normal map as they are too sharp..you would want to make them softer for a better normal bake.

uberphoenix

Thanks Clos323!

Would I do that by making the support edges not as close to the edge?

Clos323

yes and yes..

uberphoenix

I've noticed with my high poly that its shrunk somewhat when the turbosmooth is applied to it, I did a quick unwrap of the top piece to do a test bake and at first the normal look as if it was inverted instead of raising, it was going in like a groove.

Here's some images of the bakes i have done



This one looks like it didnt even use the high poly :L, and for some reason I cannot replicate it. I was using the "bake a flawless normal map" on cgtuts but then read on here that its got alot of incorrect information so I stopped following it.



Here's the lowpoly and high on top of each other, I'm not sure if this is wrong or not...



This is all I'm getting now, and can't seem to stop it from doing this :S

Tips and help very welcome

DannSw

The highpoly "shrinking" is fine. This happens because the distance between the right angled edge and the control loop is being interpolated when you smooth it. (Though ideally you should set up a cage - see below)

From your bake, it looks like you're getting ray misses - to get round this you should set up a cage for baking your normal map. A Cage is basically a duplicate of your low poly that envelopes the high poly so to ensure that everything is baked correctly. I actually think there is a setting in max that will create a cage for you when baking down.

I'm afraid I'm not a max user, but If you want to read about normal maps and cages in detail, then check out http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/Normal_Map_Tutorial.html

Also, If you haven't already, check out xNormal for baking your maps! I hope this helps.

uberphoenix

@DannSw, thanks for your reply! I am actually using the projection modifier for the cage, but those are the results its giving me which I can't seem to fix :l thank you for the link, and i'll check out xNormal!

DannSw

No worries. For more normal map basics, you should check out the "You're making me hard" thread here on polycount. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196