Old Violin

Hoju

Okay everyone, this is my first time posting any of my work on Polycount, so please be gentle. :poly124:

I'm currently a student and this is a piece I did for class last year that I've finally gotten around to finishing. I also used it as an opportunity to start getting my hands dirty with PBR. Modeled in Maya with a little bit of ZBrush detailing. Used Photoshop, nDo, and Substance Painter for texturing. All critiques and feedback are welcome.





6906 Tris (Is that far too high for something like this?)


I did not include the metalness map in my flats as nothing on the model is metallic and the map is just solid black.

Analdin

Looking good! I noticed two things though; I'd make the "s"- shaped holes pitch black without any reflection, and I feel like the whole corpus is a little too shiny for old polished wood.

ZacTheAwesome

This looks very good! The texturing work is very good, the color is just perfect. The modeling work is also very good, nice job Hoju!

SergeiMirminski

Great work. But to nitpick, the 3 loops on the top curl of the Violin could be removed without any noticeable change to the silhouette.

almighty_gir

i think you really need to look into how violins are made to get a more accurate wood texture going.

generally speaking you should look up "quarter sawed maple top", and read how it affects the visual look of the wood grain (and also how it affects the sound, it's interesting stuff).

as a hint:

Carabiner

As a string player, I agree about the wood texture -- usually the grain is much more prominent, and the grain is often further emphasized when varnishing. The back of an instrument is usually made up of one or two pieces of wood, and that's the place where luthiers would use a really nice piece of wood to show off (see image below.)

Also, I think the violin looks too dirty overall. It wouldn't have aged so evenly across the whole surface.



The back of the "neck" should also be a lot lighter, again from wear and tear:

Hoju

Thanks so much for the input guys! When I was looking for textures to use I had no idea what to look for to get that proper maple instrument wood look. I will be taking care of that. I'll post back with progress.

As for the dirt, I'm including my refs that I used. I was trying to achieve the really dirty, beat up look of this violin recovered from the ocean after the Titanic sunk. I suppose that part of the look of it would be attributed to swelling from sea water. Any thoughts on that?

DWalker

I think you've mis-spent your polygon budget. Most of the polygons appear to be in the neck & the knobs, leaving the body with a blocky shape. I'm also not certain that you needed to model the 'rim' around the body; it doesn't contribute much to the silhouette, and a decent normal map (or bake) should be enough. At any rate, you could reasonably double the number of segments in the body itself.

So... how many segments do you need? The only way to answer this is to look at the model as it will be used - whether in-game, or in a pre-rendered shot. If you can see straight segments where it should be a smooth curve, and you are within your poly budget, then you need to add segments. If the wireframe appears to be a solid mass, then you've probably gone overboard.

Nosslak

It's probably too late to change by this point but it looks like you could've saved a lot of space on the UV map if you were to just straighten out some of the thin, curved islands. Doing this would result in a bit of extra distortion but in most cases it won't be big enough to notice and you can get more details from the same resolution.

Other than that I have to also agree that the polygon budget could've been distributed better and that the wear and dirt doesn't look too realistic.

Hoju

Okay, finally had some time to tweak it a bit more. Completely redid my base wood textures, added some lighter "wear" areas, increased roughness of the F-holes to solid white to kill any reflectivity, and adjusted the opacity on the dirt layer a bit. Still not completely satisfied with the results but will work on it more as I have time.



As for the poly budget, yeah, I guess I kind of missed the mark on this one but I am too far in to go back and fix that now. I added the rim of the body to the retopo mesh only because I was getting horrible looking bakes without it.

Thanks for the UV tip. I'm still learning to utilize my UV spaces more effectively. My texture sheets usually look like a mess but I'm getting better at it.

Hoju

Here is my reworked model. Went back and fixed the lo poly model, rebaked, and retextured.

marcobar

It looks WAY better now - awesome work. I love the long, thin cracks running along the bottom to the F-holes. My only critique is that the tailpiece doesn't seem to be as worn as the rest of the instrument.

GrungyStudios

oh yeah this is nice

Shrike

Occlusion/cavity is way too strong
I think if you removed a bunch of the dirt it would look better aswell
Then a nicer background would help sell the piece agein

fatihG_

I came in here to say that your poly distribution could be better, like suggested before.

I was pleasantly surprised to so an updated model.
I totally did not expect you to go back and redo basically everything.
So imaginary internet points for you. =]

There are still allot more stuff you could optimize imo. But than again I skimmed over this topic and do not know what your target render is, so it might just be fine.

Deathstick

definitely an improvement over the older one,

nice!

Envart

looks loads better now, nice job!