Creating detailed metal panels for walls and floors

ElleKitty

Hello! I've been jealous of MGS1 and MGS2 for a while now for being able to present such an interesting metal panelwork in their levels. I have tried to emulate this however it's not been working out very well for me. I dont know how to approach the issue. I am talking about places such as these.






I use 3ds Max for modelling and UVs, tho I can use 3D Coat for painting in viewport if that ends up preferable. Texture resolution is not an issue, and should be rather high as I do not mean to create game assets but beauty renders. Doing it in high-def and then baking to low-poly would be nice.

The objects seem to be made out of dirt-simple parts, but however I approach the issue, I end up with things like broken chamfers, booleans, sharp edges that wont be grabbed into nmaps by the baking engine, and in case of some concave objects, topology gone to heck. Moreso if I want to sub-d model and put Turbosmooth on top. This discourages me almost every time that I re-attempt it. I get a feeling that another person, with a slightly different ay of thinking than mine, would find this same task effortless. What do I do?

cryrid

Since the end result is more of a planar texture, it would probably be faster just to use a tool like NDO to paint this kind of detail into the normal map. The beta should be free for a few months, so you might want to give it a shot.

Otherwise, for modeling I'd probably use floating geometry to create the panels and indents, and bake that off into planar maps to use for the textures. Then you don't have to worry so much about the topology

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/#Floating_Geometry

passerby

personally i wouldn't even bother baking any of this from geo.

This is the kinda of stuff that ndo2 amazing for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwj0mQTMrK8