Monado Sword High-Poly WIP - Advice needed! (warning: lots of images)

Barnaby

Hi everyone - I wanted to improve my high poly modelling skills so I started working on a sword from the game Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii as I felt it has a good mix of sharp edges and curved surfaces (reference below).





Progress images:





















As you can see, I feel I've pretty much finished with it's construction... but this is where I run into problems. I used edge-extrusion modeling techniques for most of this, which may have been a mistake, but during construction I found it a lot easier to make it this way, as with box-modeling methods I found it hard to get the mesh to transition nicely from rectangular shapes to cylindrical shapes.

However, now when I try to triple-edge loop it for smoothing, the loops are going in lots of random directions I don't want, and causing lots of smoothing/seam errors. I've tried to fix it, but every time I do I just end up creating a lot more tris (there are already several in the model that cause issues with looping as well). I would like to know if there was a better way of constructing this model, and if there's anything I can do to fix it - I'd like to use this to bake normals onto a low-poly version so I want it to be as crisp and smooth as possible.

Sorry for the long wall of text and lots of images.

Decoyz

You desperately need to find your material splits/break it up into several pieces at this point and do a lot of simplifying before you do any triple edgeloops. Your life will be easier and the model wil look better in the end. Your mesh is too unecessarily heavy and has a bunch of topological problems if you want to do hard surface modelling. Making proper edge flow, especially at the tip end area of the blade, and breaking it up the sword into separate meshes will simplify your workflow and cut down your unecessary loops by like maybe 80%.

Edit:
If it was me, I'd block out a new one by retopo-ing over what youve done so far. There are so many edgeloops there, many of which lack edge flow, that it would take alot longer to go in there and fix it.

Barnaby

Thanks for the advice! Blocking out a new one by retopo-ing over the current model might be a good idea. It's a process I've not really touched upon much though, so I'll have to find a tutorial for it - if you have any good ones, feel free to post 'em in here. I agree there are too many uncessary loops. I'd originally constructed it like that to keep an even mesh density for smoothing, but seems that it was a bad idea!

I should mention that the model is split up into different sections, I should have made that clear in my original post. Here's an exploded version just to illustrate the seperate pieces.

Joost

Your model looks nice but there's 2 big issues:

-Your unsmoothed mesh has way too much detail. You can easily make round curves with a lot less geometry. Turbosmooth/meshsmooth will take care of that. Try to be a bit more minimalistic, it makes editing easier.

-Your edges are also way too tight, this won't bake well.

Barnaby

Thanks for the replies guys! I've started trying to refine and fix all the sections on my sword following your advice. I've removed any unnecessary loops and geometry and refined some shapes (like the circular hole at the bottom of the sword's hilt). I'm starting to add chamfer's to some edges, like the blade's edge, to try and help make a better bake as in the Racer445 example. Here's the progress so far, just wanted to know if it's more of a step in the right direction? The old version I posted previously is on the left, the new version is on the right:

Joost

It's definitely an improvement. However, I wouldn't spend too much time on cleaning up the geo IF the high poly looks good. I'd just keep it in mind for your next model. Focus on softening up the edges. An option that you could try is just retopologizing over your current model.

Barnaby

Alright! The idea is just to soften anything that's a harsh, 90 degree edge, right? What tools would be best to use? I've been trying it with the Chamfer tool but it looks kinda messy in places (ends up adding more tris to the model, rather than quads), and since some edges are so thin, like where the insetted lines touch the edge of the sword, I can only do a really small chamfer.

Joost

Well usually people just use a turbosmooth modifier and place edge loops to control the smoothing.
This might be useful http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/next-gen-weapon-creation-part-1-the-high-poly-model--cg-782

Barnaby

Ah, I thought I had been trying to make the curves more pronounced as preparation before placing edge loops and using turbosmooth. Since the chamfering wasn't working well anyway, I scrapped them (just reloaded an interation before I started chamfering) and got on with doing the triple edge looping. It took a few days on and off to get the smoothing looking good without any noticeable errors, so here's the result at the moment:



I still think many of the edges might be a bit too sharp, but rather than muck around with it when I'm not really sure, I've gone ahead with creating a lowpoly version I can bake onto, that way, I can fix anything that looks bad on the bake as it happens. Lowpoly is below:



Lowpoly & Highpoly side-by-side:



The lowpoly is currently sitting at 3914 tris. I'm not sure if this is still too high, but I would prefer to keep the edges crisp and smooth if possible, rather than risk it looking like a PS2-era model. If anyone has any suggestions for the model, please feel free to give some advice - I won't be able to work on this for a couple of days now, but when I can work on it again I'll get started on unwrapping it.

luge

Feeling like that high-poly may still be too sharp on the edges. on the 90 degree angle of the blade, you can reduce some edges there. actually, if there are any edges where there is no deformation and the uvs wont look skewed to hell even when smoothed and placed... reduce in those spots as best you can. also you can still reduce on the curvature, just be thoughtful about it. look at how close edges are to eachother and see if they really change the smoothness of the curve.

Barnaby

Yeah it is pretty sharp, like I said, I want to get the lowpoly done so then I can bake and see how my changes effect the normal map. I've always been a bit clumsy when it comes to normal bakes so I would like to do it this way as I can then learn how my changes affect the bake! As for the lowpoly, I will try to refine the mesh a little more before the unwrap. I did get rid of some of the loops on curves where they really had little to no effect, but all the ones that are left do slightly change the outline of the shape - I was worried even these little changes could affect the normal map when it bakes - am I mistaken in thinking this?

luge

it depends. there can be some weirdness when you bake in areas that don't curve the exact same, but thats only if the low poly is covering more area than the high poly. for example, if in your low poly, the circular openings, if they were more inward than your hi poly (closer to the center) then it could cause some errors in the bake. so you want your edges to be as close as they can, but some areas can still be reduced in order to cover an area, still be lower, but bake well anyways. as long as you don't remove any edges that cause more major changes in silhouette, you should be fine.

Barnaby

Hi everyone, it's been a while since I last posted but I've just gotten back to working on this and I have some progress. I tidied up my lowpoly just a little bit more and unwrapped it. I have now started trying to get a good normal map bake, and this is where I'm stumped. In UDK it keeps coming out really pixelly, and there are several weird issues around the normal map, some of which even appear on flat surfaces. I'm away from my PC at the moment so I'm attempting to take screenshots in UDK - I apologise for the lack of 3ds Max shots at the moment, but my laptop just can't run it very well, especially with the highpoly model in the scene.



This image is probably the best one that demonstrates the issues I'm having. Some parts have baked perfectly (such as the patterns on the inside section of the blade, near the top of this screenshot) but other parts, such as around the cicular part in the middle of the sword are incredibly pixelly. Also, there are these weird black blotches on parts of the mesh, I've circled them below:



And finally, here is my normal map (baked out at 2048x2048 ):



The weird multi-coloured sections of the normal map can be ignored as it's being caused by overlapping geometry and you can never seen under those sections anyway. However, it shows the weird "holes" in the blade parts of the mesh and the pixellated bake on the circular part of the sword and some other areas.

I have a few ideas of what *might* be causing it - either something is wrong with my settings, or like you guys have suggested, it's because the corners are too sharp. I'm guessing it's the latter but I'm interested to know so I can avoid it on future projects. Also I'm not sure what's causing the holes so I'd like some answers there. I'm away from my PC for a few days, so I'll resume work as soon as I can and post more images if I can, including images from Max of the exploded models and the cage.

Also: I'd love some crit on my unwrap as it's always been one of my weakest areas.

Kimon

The sharp corners will make your highlights smaller and disappear at short distance, it won't really cause that kind of problems.
"Holes" in the normal map usually occur when the high poly is sticking out outside of your cage when baking.

For the pixelating in UDK, which compression settings are you using? UDK is pretty harsh on the compressing and if I don't remember wrong there is one setting that's prety much "normal map uncompressed" which (ofc) greatly increases the quality.

Bek

It appears you have over 50% of your uv map as wasted space. You should straighten out those long, thin pieces (To save space and avoid aliasing); you should mirror some of those awkward pieces if possible, and figure out what you can pack this more efficiently. You might find a 2:1 texture ratio works better with this piece.

There was some UV packing discussion just recently in this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2046874#post2046874

And remember to account for edge padding.

Barnaby

Thanks for the tips - since the normal map was so terrible and I was having trouble overlapping pieces to mirror them (symmetrical pieces were flattening out slightly differently which I found odd), I decided to re-do the unwrap from scratch. I deleted half of the mesh so I could maximise the use of space in my UV Map and so then I could just bake one side and have the normal map appear on both sides (as well as saving time when I get to texturing the diffuse). It's come out a lot better, except for some issues I've been trying to fix for the last few hours.

Firstly, here's the new normal map:



Here's how it appears in UDK:



Here's the main issue I'm getting: along the symmetry line I'm getting a massive seam along the symmetry line on the normal map. I've tried several ways of getting rid of the seam, from rebaking with different settings, reimporting the normal map with the correct compression settings (thanks to Kimon for reminding me about that, it was on default compression, I've switched it to NormalMap compression now) and reimporting the mesh as a skeletal mesh. So far, nothing's worked. I've tried deleting the symmetry line on the mesh to reduce it's tricount as well (currently sitting at 4,294 tris) but when I remove that line is messes up large chunks of the unwrap, causing even MORE issues.

Image of the symmetry line:



I'm also getting this happening on the inside of the circle. It was originally causing an error that made every tri have different shading, but when I changed the smoothing groups on the mesh, the error changed to all these little lines instead:




Finally, different sections of the model seem to be shaded differently which is.... just weird. Never seen it before. You can probably see it in the screenshots I've posted but here's a higher contrast example:




There's also some distortion in the normal map on the handle so I'll try and fix that now.

Anyone got any ideas? I'm so absolutely stumped and I'm so close to the end of this project I can taste it!

stevston89

That normal map looks really off. It shouldn't have any washed out white areas.... Heres what is should look like. ( ignore the wireframe overlay).

Barnaby

Yeah I thought it looked a little... odd as well. It's a hell of a lot lighter than my first attempt. I'm baking it in 3ds Max, so if you have any tips please let me know. I tried using xNormal but my highpoly has some ngons in somewhere and the software refuses to accept any models with ngons. Might try to find them and remove them if xNormal has a chance of fixing my errors.

joeriv

Some possible ways to avoid it:
-Don't use mental ray, but scanline
-Max sometimes likes to bake funky colours when there's a more "fancy" material on it, or a material with opacity, so apply a standard material to your high&low
-If that doesn't solve it, export your low/high as .obj and reimport.

For your xnormal error, apply a "Turn to poly" modifier to your lowpoly, set the max edges to 3 (wich you should do anyway, cages/projection modifier tends to work more nicely with triangles).
and on the .fbx/.obj export make sure it's getting triangulated (to be double safe).

Also, up the padding setting in max to 32 instead of the standard 2 wich you seem to have(or whatever is the highest again), or use something like the xnormal dilation filter before exporting to a game engine.

Barnaby

@joeriv, you hit the nail on the head! I still had my "fancy" material from my presentation shots earlier in this thread applied, so I got rid of that and it made the normal map much better. Using "Turn to poly" got rid of some issue spots in the bake I previously had to paint out as well. It's looking much better now!





The seam is greatly reduced too, I don't think I'll be able to get rid of it entirely but at least it's way less noticeable now and only shows up under really harsh lighting angles.



Thanks for the help! I'll move onto texturing now.

stevston89

I would fix up your high poly and rebake. Your edges on your highpoly are way too sharp. They need to be beveled and rounded to give more information for the bake to pick up. Here is an image to explain:

Shrike

the circle in the middle looks like you baked everything in one piece.
Move the parts away fro meach other, then bake and if its fine, then move them back together so you do not get problems with overlapping stuff

Also did you use a cage, and was it big enough ? the black spots look like a too small cage that cut off things.

Barnaby

Hi guys. Sorry I've left this post for quite a while now. Not had much time to really work on this a lot and stuff and I just wanted to get it finished.

With the normal map edits, I was kind of stupid and collapsed the turbosmooth layers... really wasn't thinking that day haha. I could've gone back to an earlier iteration but would've had to re-construct some stuff but this project was taking way too long. I will most definitely keep the feedback I've got from here in relation to normal maps in mind on future projects, and I am very grateful for all your help! I definitely agree that some of the areas (mainly the sections the light flows through) are really harsh on the bake, so I'll try to exaggerate anything like this that comes up in future projects.

Shrike, I didn't bake everything in one piece and I did use a projection cage, don't worry . Here's a pic of my baking file:



So anyway, I went ahead and textured it and put it into UDK. I'd love some more crit on things I could improve before I consider it fully "finished", but if you have crit for stuff I should keep in mind for my next project, fire away!

The following images are all rendered in UDK:








I'm not sure if the emissive is too blown out, but it was the only way I could figure out how to get that glow/bloom effect.

lukas.chrapek

Hi

Yuo have still shading problem on blade and handle, try to fix smooth groups or hard/soft edges, depends on SW you use or fix FXB export setting when you export it to UDK. Normal map in your post number 20, is still bad.