Teutonian Tinkermeister Gregory - A Stout, Wrench-wielding Engineer
high dynamic range
PROJECT THREAD
Hey Polycount!
Going to be modeling the Teutonian Tinkermeister Gregory, a Knight of Teutonia skilled with Wrench and military tactics. This is all tied up with a game I'm working on at USC called The Maestros, a UDK RTS game, so most of the construction of this unit is framed in that "Does this work for an RTS" mindset. Requesting critiques, if you have any.
Objective: Model and Texture a current-gen RTS Commander unit for the game "The Maestros"
Planned Workflow
Concept > High Poly Sculpt (Maya, ZBrush) > Retopologize > UV (ZBrush UVMaster, dDo, nDo2, Maya) > Texture
Specific Rules I need to hit:
LATEST UPDATE:
Final renders in Marmoset:
Hey Polycount!
Going to be modeling the Teutonian Tinkermeister Gregory, a Knight of Teutonia skilled with Wrench and military tactics. This is all tied up with a game I'm working on at USC called The Maestros, a UDK RTS game, so most of the construction of this unit is framed in that "Does this work for an RTS" mindset. Requesting critiques, if you have any.
Objective: Model and Texture a current-gen RTS Commander unit for the game "The Maestros"
Planned Workflow
Concept > High Poly Sculpt (Maya, ZBrush) > Retopologize > UV (ZBrush UVMaster, dDo, nDo2, Maya) > Texture
Specific Rules I need to hit:
- Work with the team while working on this to find a specific art direction we should be going with out game.
- Learn better high-poly modeling techniques. Hard surface high poly mdoeling and Sub D modeling still eludes me. People say to use 3DSmax over my more familiar Maya, but it's really hard to find a good Maya tutorial series on completing a fairly complex hard surface model. Kinda tempted to actually give 3Dmotive money at this point. There's a LOT of free tuts on 3DSmax high poly modeling, though. Perhaps I should just take the time to learn the software.
- Learn how to texture skin, cloth, and leather better.
- Work towards a "Cartoon Network" vibe with the shapes and forms made.
LATEST UPDATE:
Final renders in Marmoset:
Replies
Just have the leather bags to sculpt/block in. Trying to figure out a way to purely block this out in Maya without having to do Dynamesh retopo in ZBrush.
Spent most of the time working the hair, doing folds on the pants, and make silhouette adjustments.
Not sure if I want to dynamesh the shirt and the sleeve flairs together now so I can sculpt them with my Selwys CLoth brush together, or deal with them seperately. Or do I even need the flairs at all?
Nice job so far!
And yes, witha little bit of 10. Have yet to make a final concept, but this model needs to get done first.
Bags totally redone, copying Gav Goulden's technique for the Heavy Soldiers in Bioshock Infinite. Lots of detailing, with some basic learning and start of a personal Insert Mesh archive, involving thread placement, nicks, and dings. Hopefully the material is communicating with the sculpt (not so much the material shader of course).
My reasoning for the exorbitantly large details, like the weaves, is because the eventualy final asset will be for an RTS, so I'm working towards that scale. Big elements, big shapes, etc, so it'll actually show up in game.
Anyone have any feedback or critiques?
Detail/Noise pass on a lot of the big elements. Apron, bags, additional folds and dynameshed the shirt and sleeves. Created the folds and threading on the boots. Collapsed the bag on the sides of the backpack out of laziness and polygon count. This guy is pushing 15 million points, and my rig is crying. Maya as well, with these renders. Dings on the metals, adjustments on the turbine casing. Think I'm getting close to calling this done and starting retopo.
Anyone have any critiques?
Is there another way of dealing with deformation topology on cloth (especially volumnious cloth) at deformation points that is not necessarily adding more compacted edgeloop density, or is it just that?
EDIT: BLEh. I shouldn't post late at night. I messed up. I was thinking about the wrong cloth. Sorry. It depends on a number of things including how close you're gonna be to this model, how long are we gonna see those limbs bent at any given time - things like that. I don't think it would hurt to throw an extra loop into the elbow portion. But, generally, I think it's a good idea to focus on accurately reflecting the silhouette. From the looks of this guy, his limbs would bend just below the part in question on the arms, and just above where the pants meet his boots. Theoretically, you should be home free.
But that's just my opinion.
You're doing good work here.
Does that change anything?
Just keep going. Sometimes, obsessing over minutiae is just another way of procrastinating.
You're doing good, just keep it up.
EDIT: And for the love of flan, grow some confidence in what you do.
Starting bakes! Cavity is looking janky for some reason, but Thank God the normal and AO maps came out pretty clean from xNormal
Baking errors with certain objects.
Does anyone have a solution to these pinches in the normal map I'm getting from xNormal bakes?
It's also happening as well with other objects in the scene.
if so, you have to also split your UV's there.
(just did that to make sure there is no confusion, don't use maya, so not 100% sure what the split operation exactly does).
but assuming the red lines are your hard edges, every different colour should be a seperate uv shell (with padding in between the different parts).
If you want to keep your uv's in one shell (texturing/optimization in terms of vertices) there are solutions to that, but for that you probably want to have a look at these topics:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=116899
Imperfect AO bakes, but we're getting something here. Wrench is still pinching at the edges of the normal bakes, which is making me sad. I even separated each face out as its own UV island. Will investigate further.
goign to follow this
Laying in the colors.
Can anyone help me?
The latest Normal map bake of the Spanner
-Don't have black as the background but the standard 128,128,255
-You need to have padding in there (just set that to like 64 or whatever is the highest in your baker)
I hope that finally solves it
-> just a minor thing, but keeping in mind padding, make sure to have a good even spacing between the parts on your uv, on some parts there are like 1-2 spacing of pixels.
Separating UV shells on where vertex normals are split, like others have mentioned, is half of how to resolve this issue. What they haven't mentioned is you will need an averaged projection mesh to override your game mesh's normals (which are split, thus creating gap) when baking the normal map. This is the "envelope mesh" in Maya, or "cage" in xNormal.
That should give you good results. Keep in mind though, it can never get rid of the gap artifact, only minimize it; however, the error will not be visible as long as you don't zoom in 10x closer than anyone will ever see it at.
As joeriv already mentioned, I highly suggested at least reading through this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196
Fixed the normal errors by baking in Maya. FOr some reason that worked, but it might be because of the cages you guys earlier mentioned.
Did a dDo base texture pass. This is going to get murky for me since I'm too used to painting purely handpainted textures, so my handle on material definition isn't too good. Definitely requesting critique at this stage regarding material definition, etc, before I start a final push to finalizing textures.
Diffuse (dDo rough)
Specular (dDo rough)
Gloss (dDo rough)
Normal
some good reading here about specular and gloss: http://www.manufato.com/?p=902
Just setup an "averaged" cage :poly136:
For the backpack and apron. I'm guessing its leather? The spec might be too much in my opinion. Feels sorta like a plastic toy. Kinda wet
Definitely going to fix where the edgewear is on the wrench.
Watch this video! Explains things very well.
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Work done to the Specular and Gloss map, as well as minor adjustments to the Diffuse.
How are my materials looking? Anything I need to change to make these more accurate?
Specular
Gloss
I know its supposed to be from a top down view and it might not be as noticeable then, but the seam on the right hand side of the backpack at the back is catching my eye, might be worth trying to get that stitching to go over properly so its not as obvious. Also the metal on the top, is it supposed to be copper? or gold? if gold the gloss needs to be whiter, if copper the spec needs to be a bit more orange if non of the above and its painted metal, maybe chip it?