Throwing Knife

MooseCommander

Hey polypeoples!

I've been trying to master the dDo workflow considering it is such an awesome tool. Here are the final shots from Marmoset.

All based on this concept by tipagraphic.

MooseCommander

Sorry to bump my own topic, but I'd love some feedback from the community on how to improve this piece. I think it is maybe 90% of the way there, but I want to know what you think I can do to push it further.

Thanks guys.

[Deleted User]

It looks good to me. Tiny crit-- I think you might have made unnecessary polys for the handle though. In your wireframe, you modeled the 4 tiny screws for the handle--I think if it's not changing the silhouette you can most likely just use normals, but I'm sure you know this, because you applied it on the blade itself and some parts of the knife butt(deeper holes/contours), which turned out alright. That way, if you're arguing a mega closeup like shot number 3, you won't see the boxiness of your screws and you use less polys.

Oniram

i'll go ahead and toss out the usual "your edges are too hard" crit. you can see even in your high res render there that your edges are already aliasing, and from any distance further the detail is lost. id say itd be best for you (if you want to go back and rebake later, or just for your next thing), to go in and pull your control edges further apart, so that way your bake can get a lot of information for the normals. take a look at the same example done by a friend of mine.

http://benbolton.com/work/knife/bake_001.jpg

thats his normal map bake, and you can see all of the details very clearly.

MooseCommander

paololazatin - Excellent crit. I appreciate it. I should have either pushed the polycount higher or just normal mapped it like the other bits. It definitely calls attention to itself.

Oniram - That is something I've always struggled a bit with. I hadn't seen the other Ben's version before, thanks for pointing it out. Definitely see some areas where I could have improved my version based on that. I may go back later on. I've been slowly switching to nDo out of convenience, which has probably negatively affected my actual proxy modeling skills. For example, I redid a lot of the normal detail in Photoshop & nDO because it didn't come out clear enough or because there were baking errors due to cage issues.

Either way, it gives me something to think about for the next project, as you said. I want to call this one done just because I need to move onto my next project, but its good to know what could be improved if I came back to it in the future.

If anyone else has anything, keep it coming!