Hi! My very first item (or 3d model) lol

soulhacker

So I've been playing dota since forever and recently stumbled on a dota 2 item tutorial on youtube. Although I didn't understand anything that the guy was doing, it looked fun as hell and I decided to give it a shot! So after 10 days of watching tutorials and what not I have somehow managed to complete something which is beginning to remotely resemble a dota 2 item. lol.

Here is the link :
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=207730113

Feel free to critique/make suggestions or just bash away. I'm still learning a lot everyday and I know I've probably made a million mistakes.

[IMG][/img]

MagnoHusein

Well at first glance I'd say this is the most HUGE bow I ever seen. Seriously, scale down to the size of her standard bow.

soulhacker

MagnoHusein wrote: »

Well at first glance I'd say this is the most HUGE bow I ever seen. Seriously, scale down to the size of her standard bow.

It is rather big now that I think about it lol. I will scale it down a bit. Thanks for the input!

polkunus

You can probably play with maps a little bit to make each leaf feel independent when light shines on it.

soulhacker

polkunus wrote: »

You can probably play with maps a little bit to make each leaf feel independent when light shines on it.

Hmm I noticed something. When I use a blank template for normal maps (128 128 255) ... I don't see any changes in my model in the portrait view. The model looks exactly the same as before lol. And you gave me another idea. Perhaps I can make each leaf stick out a little at different elevations in the high poly model? And hopefully create some normals that actually show it lol. I haven't even started on mask1 and mask2 which is where I'm guessing the light factor will come into play. Thanks for the idea!

heboltz3

soulhacker wrote: »

Hmm I noticed something. When I use a blank template for normal maps (128 128 255) ... I don't see any changes in my model in the portrait view.

Well if your normal are acting funky, the best way for us to help is to post them up here. A blank normal sheet wont really do you any good unless you are just trying to pop your wep in engine. Which program did you use to bake the normals?

It's generally a good practice to fix all problems before shipping, or atleast understand why they are broke.

soulhacker

heboltz3 wrote: »

Well if your normal are acting funky, the best way for us to help is to post them up here. A blank normal sheet wont really do you any good unless you are just trying to pop your wep in engine. Which program did you use to bake the normals?

It's generally a good practice to fix all problems before shipping, or atleast understand why they are broke.

Lol ... I guess I was overexcited to hit that publish button :poly142:. I've been reading a little bit on normals and found out about tangent space and object space. I don't know which one Dota 2 uses or even which ones I have but I think the problem is that I put too little detail in the high poly version of my model.

I used xNormal to create the maps since that's what the guy whose tutorial I was following did too. Here is a screenshot. I created 2 versions of the maps. One was sized 256x128 and the second one at 1024x512. I used the first one for the item directly in game since I thought it'll be better to directly use a low resolution map than to have valve shrink the high resolution map.

Sukotto

It's doesn't look like your normal map is doing anything at all. Why didn't you sculpt the leaves on the high poly? And it looks like you're getting some artifacting because you didn't make a proper cage.

soulhacker

Sukotto wrote: »

It's doesn't look like your normal map is doing anything at all. Why didn't you sculpt the leaves on the high poly? And it looks like you're getting some artifacting because you didn't make a proper cage.

You're right. The normal map is barely doing anything. Going to reshape the model and then sculpt it again. Hopefully better this time. By cage do you mean the UV's? This is my first time for everything hence the mistakes. Thanks for helping!

heboltz3

Your normal map doesn't look like its doing anything because from your normal it looks like you aren't really pushing it to do anything substantial. Tangent space will be the thing that plays the nicest. I would recommend doing some hard research into baking, and try just baking simple objects like cubes to have beveled edges until you find out what works best. There are tons of entries like that in the polycount wiki.

Sukotto

Nope by cage I meant the projection distance between your high poly and low poly isn't big enough so the baking process isn't reading the entire mesh. When you go to redo the sculpt we will be happy to help

soulhacker

So I redid the top wing normal maps with the leaves extruding and got the following normal maps. Since my UV's are overlapping 4 times total for the wings (I did mirror geometry twice while making the model), I created two normal maps. Firstly using all of the model and then only using 1/4 of the model to see if there was any difference. Here they are. I am adding the UV's on top so you guys can see better.





When I import either of these normals into dota 2, I don't see any difference at all. I think it's because the number of polygons used in the wing is too low. I mean you can see each polygon on the wing. If that is not the case please let me know so I can fix it. Thanks!