Astartes Bolter WIP

stahl

hi,
ive recently started to model a bolter and im running into similar problems like with my leman russ model.

Cglewis

what issues are you running into?

stahl

the topology i have right here gives lighting errors, too many thin polies in one place.

the problem is the ejection port is hindering me from ditributing them evenly so the front of the model has barely any polies, while this part has a bug group of them thightly together, so when rendered you get artifacts from the light hitting that part.

Bartalon

The topology shouldntt be an issue unless there are ngons, stacked vertices, flipped face normals, or improperly configured vertex normals. Not sure which software you're using in that shot, but you should check all three.

stahl

im using blender, and so far there are only 2 triangles on the model, no ngons or stacked vertices or flipped faces. it was like that with my lasgun and in maroset it also had faulty lighting due to that, especially if i have smooth rendering on.

Behemoth

Hi! could you post some pics of the problem or the .blend file?

stahl

yes ofc !






you can see the artifacts around the rounded pieces of the cover and main part of the gun as well as the muzzle where i used boolean to punch holes.

GrungyStudios

Very nice

stahl

a little update:

stahl

Snader

Is this your highpoly, lowpoly? It doesn't seem particularly suited for either.

jacksterooney

I think you need to turn off 'smooth shading' on the left hand toolbar in blender. To then get smoothness on the round parts (barrel etc) use the edge split modifier.

stahl

i willl do that ofc, i took the pics just after i finished modelling the lowpoly. 3.8k polies for this view model, it will be less after i clean it up but i still need to do the highpoly one.

stahl

update:

final highpoly wip, without subsurf:

Brian "Panda" Choi

Rendering still looks weird for a highpoly.

Are you turbosmoothing at all?

It should hopefully looks something like this if you're making a high poly

Nosslak

Why did you choose to show your highpoly without subsurf/turbosmooth? Turning that off should only make the the model look worse and if it doesn't look good with it I wouldn't consider the model final. It doesn't seem to have any support loops so look into those if you don't already know about them.

Either way I think you could push the detail level a bit more with proper indentations for the screws and some kind of detailing on the grip.

stahl

turbosmooth is subsurf i suppose ?

because the subsurf isnt done yet, maybe ill get it done today. yeah im really running out of ideas to make this thing look more realistic. GW doesnt give you much to work with even so, i feel like its a bit bland anyway.

Gmanx

I'd concentrate on the sub-surf first and then do another detailing pass. I use Blender and the raw base vertex shading algorithm is hideous. Adding a sub-surf with some edge-defining loops will make your bolter look 100% better straight away.

stahl

yeah im working on it as we speak, it looks crisp as chips now.

and yes the algoritm gives eyecancer straight away...

stahl

finally the final highpoly ( i couldnt take shots from different angles because of the extremely low fps it caused on my laptop.) :

stahl

a small headsup:



i kinda feel ive used too much wear on the rear, probably needs some thinning out, what do you think?

Tobbo

I think the edge wear is way too uniform.

stahl

yeah i feel it kinda lacks randomness somehow especially when you compare the rear with the casing of the gun

stahl

finished the scratches:



looks good so far.

Brandon.LaFrance

The edge wear still looks too uniform. Try to think about the most likely places that would come in contact with another object during normal wear and tear. For example, the scratches on the concave edges would be highly unlikely. As would those near the top of the grip and trigger guard, as those areas would be protected by the overhang.

stahl

very much in the final stage, struggling with xnormal atm:





here are the errors im gettin, im new to normal maps so tips on it would be appreciated:

the errors are mostly on the edge of the program window, resulting in lighting artifacts, also the big screwlike weapon part on the rear of the weapon is kinda bleached out, could be sharper...

stahl

figured a way to improve the dirt on the grips, so heres the final result. its not perfect mainly because i kinda need to learn how to use normal cages properly for better baking, but the raytrace method will do for now.

Tea Monster

One method I've heard of is to use the solidify modifier. Make sure you don't choose 'fill rim'. Apply a negative value so that the 'interior' mesh is proud of the main mesh. Apply and then delete the main mesh and you should have a good cage with minmal fuss.

stahl

ive checked up on this looks like its something like scaling, but its evenly distributed. that might just work, ill check it, thanks for the tip i appreciate it.

stahl

i know it has to have the same topology as the base mesh, but what if parts intersect after using the modifier ? how much does the cage have to be the similar
?

Tea Monster

hopefully it's only going to be a few percentage points, nothing major.

What does your UV map look like? How have you split your islands?

What I did initially was to pretty much pelt map everything and it turned out with all these errors around where major sides bent round. I had to do the effect of cube-mapping it. Not in actuallity, but so it looked like that, breaking the sides up to their own islands.

Here is the map for a pistol I did. Everything has basically been 'flattened'.

stahl

here are my normals, i used soeme edge padding:

Der Hollander

You need to set up your normal smooth angles on your low-poly model, that's a major part of why you're getting errors in your bake. EarthQuake's article goes into a lot of good depth about it, but I'll summarize real fast based on my experience with Hard-Surface game models.

1) You need to set up your face/edge normals in your low-poly so that they approximate the high poly's "smoothness", so planar faces need to look like a flat piece, rounded areas should look rounded, and any hard edges need to look hard-edged in your low-poly. Doing this much will vastly improve the bake by eliminating unwanted/needed gradients. These gradients are going to eff up your lighting, always.

2) In order to completely eliminate wacky normals and ensure a proper bake, any and every hard edge on your low poly needs to be a separate UV island. This way the renderer isn't trying to compensate for the turned edge and you'll get a seamless bake out of it.

Lastly, I would recommend baking your normals as Object Space normals for the initial bake and then using either Handplane or the Object Space to Tangent Space converter in the Tools tab of XNormal. The advantage of doing this is an Object-Space normal map is UV direction independent and will bake 100% accurate X,Y,Z every time. By converting an Object Space map to Tangent Space, you're telling the renderer where X,Y,Z actually is instead of it just lighting the map top-bottom, left-right like normal (pun not intended).

It's a huge pain in the ass at first, and it makes Hard Surface objects very time consuming to do a proper Hi-Lo bake on and extremely aggravating to texture without automation or 3D painting, but it is what it is.

Hope this helps, and good luck with the project!

stahl

thanks a lot for your info it is very helpful. that sound really like a pain, i always thought you have to chop your model uvs as less as possible, but for the normals thats like the total oposite... i guess youre using raytrace instead of cage ? or is this viable for both ? since im using subsurf for my highpoly, wouldnt that mean im it actually dismisses the smoothness of the parts which i marked as sharp ?