Essen AE-0006+ Assualt Rifle
polycounter lvl 11
Hey guys, I've started work on a new gun, designed by daisukekazama on deviantart. Here's the concept:
And here's my progress so far on the high poly. I've mostly finished the lower reciever.
The bolt slide area is probably the worst part... I'll need to work on it.
Thanks for reading!
----
edited to reduce image size.
And here's my progress so far on the high poly. I've mostly finished the lower reciever.
The bolt slide area is probably the worst part... I'll need to work on it.
Thanks for reading!
----
edited to reduce image size.
Replies
On a side note, as a newbie who has yet to dabble in the world of hard surfaces--would you mind telling me what tool you used to create this mesh?
I think he uses Blender and the built in OpenGL render, correct me if i'm wrong.
Yep, modeled in Blender.
Been a while, eh? Well I think I finished off the high poly unless someone notices a problem.
I'm sure there are plenty of areas that are too sharp, especially on the picatinny rails.
Here's the start of the low poly:
I'm aiming for about 10,000 tris, but unfortunately right now it's at about 18,000 so I have quite a bit of work to do to get it where I want it.
Any suggestions? Critiques?
It's looking pretty good right now, but there's still a lot of loops on flat surfaces that you should collapse.
(rendered in UE4!)
There's some problem errors but it looks pretty good to me so far.
Here the bake, it's got some weird inverted areas on the picatinny rails, any ideas about that?
I also have to experiment with the workflow for exporting a cage for baking from blender (currently I'm not using one).
There is definitely room for improvement in the mesh and uv area.
For starters..
1) I would mirror the uvs for the whole gun. If you don't want to mirror in the mirror, you could map top, left side and bottom. and just mirror the left side to the other side, this way you won't have the obvious mirroring in the middle when texturing.
2) increase texel size for the things closer to the fpview, I guess in this case you could scale the iron sight and whatnot.
3) the rails are really wastefull and don't really need to be uniquely mapped.
something like this would decrease the polycount radically.
4) with all of this in place you could even make this into a 2*1 texture size. maybe a 2048*1024 texture.
Another thing you should do is see which edges you can collapse and delete now that you have a bake going. Basically see what areas aren't really contributing to the silhouette and whatnot.
Should be good!
Looking forward to new updates
Regarding mirrored UVs, the reason that I had unique UVs for each side of the main body is because I'll be adding text in the texture and I don't want it to be reversed on the opposite side. Is there a better solution to that problem? Other than the main body, most of the UVs are mirrored.
That way of doing rails looks much better than what I have now, should be very useful.
Basically you create a texture with all the text bits you want to add and then add small planes above the surface with just that texture applied to it.
and since its a separate texture it makes the gun look higher res because the text is much sharper than you would get if it was on the actual texture
Not necessarily. If you just want to write something on the side of the gun, the text can be its own alpha map. Actually the whole thing could fit in a single channel and be colorized by vertex color. Or it could fit in some corner of your diffuse -- like if you are taking it into UE4, you could use the cropping material expression and then some basic selection/masking done in the shader would spit out a perfect alpha.
UE4 also has a neat text generator actor/blueprint that utilizes the Signed Distance Fields technology from UE3's Lightmaps, you have access to the shader too, so you could hack it apart and make your own text/label generator.
There are a lot of other cool UE4 features you could use for this gun, like layered materials with tiling sub-materials for some super high resolution texturing.
Edit: alright, there's the text render actor, which is nifty, but is there any way to use the distance field stuff on normal textures/actors/materials?
Go into any of the example's you downloaded for UE4, find any of the text that they got floating behind the examples and click on it.
These blocks of text are actually generated in blueprints. One of the exposed variables in the text actor is a string, you can type any text into the box and it will be passed to the text actor's shader/material. if you open the material you can see how they got it set up. They have a material expression for rendering fonts as an alpha:
If the fonts that UE4 supports/provides out of the box are good enough for your purposes, you can literally just select the font and style you want, type in what you want the text and your done. Just box it up with the gun in a prefab/blueprint and your done. (you can even have it do cool things like dynamically change, like a different serial number for each gun or info on attachments and things like that!) It will have negligible memory usage and its pretty efficient. Also, since the font material expression renders using signed distance fields, the text will stay incredible sharp despite being really low resolution.
However, If you want to create your own unique graphic for the text (because UE4's choice of fonts and what not might not fit your needs or you might want drawings/logos/graphics rather than text), I found a free signed distance field generator which you can feed your high resolution text or designs and you can plug the resulting image into the font shader to get the same result.
So yea, shaders in UE4 are cool.
So, once you have the font material expression generating the single channel output (as you can see with the red channel in the image) you can do anything with it.
You've got the text there, you can color it (for example with vertex color), use it as the alpha channel for your decal, generate a normal using the heightmap-to-normal material expresion (or whatever it's called in UE4) and pretty much anything else you can thing of.
Here's the normal map bake. Still needs some work on the cage but I'm happy with the initial results (after spending a while trying to get it to work).
funnily enough, the front part of the rail is still inverted '-_-
I'll have to redo the highpoly in that area
I wish i had the knowledge of your bakingskills.
My baking is still bad
Cool looking Weapon!
Nice!
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154
Everything I know about baking I learned from there or experimentation.
@komaokc: thanks!
I still have a few small issues to fix up in some areas of the bake, but I'll be moving on to texturing soon I think.
Speaking of which, more shots of the top and FPV!!!
Nice model, but Dude your text is wrong. Correct to "Перед использованием читайте инструкцию" )
Texture flats:
Any critique?
But for now it`s looks like whole piece made from metal, you should try to separate your material on metal and plastic for example
Your Texturing still needs more work.
Gazu