help with low poly mechanical modeling & texturing
polycounter lvl 19
I recently worked on a fairly complex low poly hard surface model and it was really difficult finishing it in a timely manner. Does anyone have any tips & techniques for "old school" low poly hard surface stuff, like robots & guns?
I'm looking into some xnormal map types (thanks Jason Young) to try and speed up the texturing process, a lot of the texturing time is eaten up with highlighting edges which can be a pain on a really greebley asset.
It should be mentioned that these are 1500 tris and less with no normal maps or high poly sculpts.
Here's one shortcut I discovered
I typically always bake my AO in 3DCoat, I found that a large number of lights with a fairly low blur bakes out a good AO for low poly mech stuff. I recently did 128 lights with 8 blur steps and it gives a bit of a subtle bevel look on hard, unbeveled corners
I'm looking into some xnormal map types (thanks Jason Young) to try and speed up the texturing process, a lot of the texturing time is eaten up with highlighting edges which can be a pain on a really greebley asset.
It should be mentioned that these are 1500 tris and less with no normal maps or high poly sculpts.
Here's one shortcut I discovered
I typically always bake my AO in 3DCoat, I found that a large number of lights with a fairly low blur bakes out a good AO for low poly mech stuff. I recently did 128 lights with 8 blur steps and it gives a bit of a subtle bevel look on hard, unbeveled corners
Replies
Also is nice if you've got something like a belt and you want to texture just the polys extruded out for the belt with a nice crisp edge.
A super (sl)easy way I make worn edges in PS is using the hard round brush just quick and dirty paint the edges then run the "Splatter" filter on it. Ruffs up the strokes.
Not sure if that is what you are looking for but maybe it helps.
A different way would be to properly make the high using sub-Ds, and the just remove most hard edge loops to drastically reduce tri count. As far as time saving goes, it depends on the model. It's sometimes easier to just build the low poly mesh from scratch. Hope it helps.
edit: If speed is a concern, I'd suggest Substance Designer anyway, even if only to bake and process (blurring, contrast, overlaying some grime to break it up...) the curvature maps. Just get your Substance set up and you can just throw it onto every new mesh you make.
katana: As far as how I break down the forms, I model it out with primitives and then optimize things down. Cylinders may have to be dropped down to 3 sided or alpha cards and plenty of details will have to be painted in rather than modeled. I try to avoid too much intersecting geo because I have limited texture space, it can be a balancing act between what saves on triangles and what saves on UV space.
I've done a few batch of ships/assets that required the illusion of metal highlights, all started from a simple AO bake in max. I then used a greeble panel texture, that i manually detailed once in photoshop, adding highlights to get a metal effect. Once the greeble sheet was done it was simply overlayed on top of the bake, that took care of small details. Getting an interesting design was just a matter of rotating the greeble sheet around for each part of the ship.
I also did a quick pass to "punch" the baked edges, just by holding down shift and tracing on top of the AO and blurring to fade highlights where needed. Last step was to create broad highlights for stuff like cylinders, oval shapes etc.
That worked so well that i spent more time finding new silhouette designs than texturing the assets. That being said, it all depends on the style you're working with, if you need details that have to make sense up close, you'll need more time obviously.
Can you show an example?
I don't have an example I can show, I might work something up to test at home I just have to overcome the PTSD these last few assets caused! Luckily I'm doing a bunch of human clothing for the next few weeks so I don't have to worry about stressing out about it right now.