I am having a lot of trouble getting the normal map to not look absolutely awful once I bring it back into my 3D package to render it (Look at final image below). Should I just split the mesh into individual elements and sculpt them separately? Or is it just that I need to sort out my edges on my mesh?
Post your UV's for your low poly. From looking at your image I'm guessing your UV's are sewed together. If you have a low poly model with 90 degree angles your normal map will not bake correct. There are a couple solutions to this problem, 1. you can bevel your edges and match them to the edges of the high poly or 2, you can make each side that has a 90 degree angle have its own UV island; separating it enough to give it some padding. Put you should post your normal amp and Uvs first, just to be sure.
@ CatalystFire. It looks a lot like you may need to "flip the green channel" of you created normal map. This happens sometimes when switch between certain programs. You can switch in Photoshop pretty easily using the channel tab, or using a colour balance node in your game engine and putting the green at -1 in your material editor.
Yay I go it to work. Okay so I think it may have been a combination of badly laid out UVs and my mesh. Originally I made the high res sculpt mesh as then I did a ReTopo on it inside of Mudbox to try an make a low res mesh from this. I am not sure if you are supposed to do this as it got rid of a lot of the hard edge detail.
So for this one I went back to my original mesh I made and re-UVed the whole thing then brought it back into Mudbox to bake out the Normal Map again. The only problem with this that I can see is that it is quite a high poly count.
Is their a better method to do this workflow? Anyways for the moment I am happy I can see it and it is starting to look kinda cool.
@CatalystFire your stuff is looking pretty good so far, you have got the camera angle well placed, something I am currently struggling with lol.
Just an idea to help with your topology is maybe to extract your windows and have them as separate pieces, then possibly combine them after. It would give you more freedom in creating the frames around the glass and keep the main building looking tidy without the edge loops going around the entire model.
However I like where you have got to so far! Keep it up !
Yeah I completely agree the poly count was ridiculous and I have managed to separate out the windows and reduce the poly count loads without affecting the UV much or the normal map. Yay!
I am now unwrapping all the elements which is about as much fun as pulling teeth and my eyes will start bleeding soon but you know 7 days to go let's see how much I can do.
Thought I'd post an update. Been getting the assets into UE4 and still texturing and playing with the materials. Is pretty low spec - Think I might have to bite the bullet and Re-UV some walls.
Any tips or advance appreciated. X3 2048px Material Sets.
To get a better texture resolution on those large assets you could use a detail texture for high frequency detail inside of the unreal material editor. You could add some bevels to your houses, currently these edges are very sharp.
Good start, but you got a lot of unnecessary edges on your walls. If you got problems with correct smoothing you could try to manipulate the normal direction by hand.
I didn´t worked on this since my last post, so today i just added my modular pipes to the scene. The lightmap UV´s are currently created by unity so there are a lot of lightmap seams I played around with some decal textures, currently these are only placeholders.
Because i´m only using the free version of unity i had to do a little workaround with the specular highlights of my metal pipes. I´m using a second light which only affects a special group of objects. Otherwise the whole scene would get brighter...
Hey guys, thought I should put an update, starting to get a bit concerned time wise as there isn't long left and a lot to do :P but I have just started testing out textures etc.
As you will see there is still a lot to do :P! This is only the Albedo map on it, not done the normals or spec etc... its late lol been fun working on this though
Ross
Does anyone know what is supposed to be under the second orange window?
Looks like a old sofa. I will treat it as a pile of boxes because if its a sofa, the scale would be odd. And those boxes could be used somewhere else in the scene too
Looks like a old sofa. I will treat it as a pile of boxes because if its a sofa, the scale would be odd. And those boxes could be used somewhere else in the scene too
thanks for the feedback. haha no it is not a sofa :P I have yet to texture it but I think from the concept art they are boxes.
@Kmactastic I thought I would see how Marmoset deals with environments as I usually just have it for singular objects but it has done a reasonably good job for an environment.
I am getting a late start on this challenge, but this is what I have so far. Planning on finishing the high poly tonight, then adjusting the game mesh. Still lots of wasted verts in that first pass.
Hey, got a bit of an update but still mainly testing out a lot of stuff. Texturing on somethings need improving, especially the resolution... slowly but surely getting there...I think.
Thanks for the critique conghal! Took me awhile to have time to do another pass but here it is.
On the second pass I added I darkened the dwarf ax and gave it a bit broader color range, threw in some hints of greens and yellows. The highlights look a tad sloppy so I'll be going back to refine that.
On the demon ax I just added shadows and highlights where I felt it would help push the texture a bit more. I'm thinking I may bring the demon ax into UDK and do some particle effects to the blade, get some smoke and embers float up off of the blade.
Looks like a old sofa. I will treat it as a pile of boxes because if its a sofa, the scale would be odd. And those boxes could be used somewhere else in the scene too
I thought it was a couch too but it really can't be because of scale. So.. yah boxes sounds good. Is it a crime to deviate from the concept a little? :P Ross,
Looks like you can bevel your edges a bit more on your buildings. The orange building in particular looks very sharp (I think it would be softer in real-life). This is unless you are going for very lo-poly of course. Otherwise I think that would help you a lot. Awesome that you are getting some textures going. I am behind!
I thought it was a couch too but it really can't be because of scale. So.. yah boxes sounds good. Is it a crime to deviate from the concept a little? :P
Creativity is never a crime. You can deviate from the concept if you want to, it´s written in the rules on page 1 .
@.Wiki - Your stuff is looking insane I really like it. I believe that I have done mine in completely the wrong way. I really should have tried to flesh out the basic scene in Unity or Unreal first then started adding in the assets. Do you know if you can pass cameras from a 3D package into Unity? Also how did you get all your assets to line up in Unity? Did you model a base mesh in Unity and then bring it into your 3D package to model the details/texture etc?
@ross185 - Hey man I am loving the textures in your scene I like how dirty and grimey eveything is. What is your workflow for texturing and how are you going to do your normal maps etc?
@Tom Machie- Hey, I like the colours in your scene, really vivid pallete going on at the moment. All I can say is that I think you should watch the scale of some of your assets as they are getting a bit over sized like the sheet metal walkway on the right and the top of the roof on the right building. Other than that it is looking good. Keep it up!
Here is my latest update. Even though I think I have done this in completely the wrong way around now I will continue in my 3D package for now and figure out how I am going to transfer it over to Unity or Unreal a bit later. I have spent most of my time getting the textures on most of the assets. I still have a long way to go to make them look any good, I am not great at this texturing milarky. Anyways, any crits are as always welcome. Cheers guys!
Do you know if you can pass cameras from a 3D package into Unity? Also how did you get all your assets to line up in Unity? Did you model a base mesh in Unity and then bring it into your 3D package to model the details/texture etc?
I tried to export my softimage camera direclty to unity but it didn´t worked. So i just placed a null at the position of the camera with the correct rotation parameters. I just put my Unity camera as a child object and reset its transforms, this way i got the same camera view in both applications.
I modeled all of the pieces straight in softimage. The pipes are modular and are made out of 3 straight, 2 curved and 2 end pieces.
Tomorrow i should have some time to work on this scene again and post some images. Today i only modeled the last pieces and UV´d them in uvlayout.
I'm a bit late to the party, but should hopefully manage to have something fairly complete by the end of the month. Not sure if I should sculpt in the details, or jump straight to texture painting and call it a day...
Still plugging away at this one. I'm way behind on this project since my PC had a fatal error so I had to re install the OS etc.. Luckily I had all my work docs backed up O_O
Current progress for today. I still need a tiling texture for the metal elements, like the windows, the pipes and the tank. Some colors are a bit off at the moment. Maybe i fix them on sunday or monday. A few meshes need some optimization. The roof of house 1 has a lot of not required edges. The decals are still placeholders, but i guess at least greentooth stays.
Currently the leaves are moving with a vertex shader. I want to add some particle systems for some dripping water and maybe a leaking pipe.
For the wires i´m planning to use the unity line renderer together with some slight wind to give it some movement Ahh and the duck... the duck moves already...
I guess on september 30 i will upload a web player version so you can see the animated scene.
Hurr, forever neglecting update posts. I've definitely been following along with all the stuff you guys have been posting, though, and it all looks great so thanks for keeping me motivated and inspired, everyone.
It has been a headache, but I'm starting to feel comfortable with 3ds max and I'm kind of happy with how this is turning out. There is still a lot of texture-work to do, I've barely touched the plants, I'd really like to replace that Unity standard skybox, there a bunch of other little things that I still want to add, etc.
I made a plaster texture and I'm just using that on all the buildings with 6 different coloured materials (yellow, orange-red, blue-ish, light, medium and dark neutral). Still need a metal texture, a wood texture, maybe some more/better decals, plant materials and something for the duck. I tried to think about how all the buildings would be laid out relative to each other in space, too, and I'm pretty happy with how that's worked out. I'd really like to get around to making some alleys and streets, and to giving the the buildings ground floors and entrances.
This is hilarious.
Deoce Excellent work. Are the ties made with cards?
Here is where I am at. Started throwing some textures on. Still don't have a good camera angle yet. >.> Also need to decide what engine I am going to use.
kmactastic
Thanks and if you mean the red cloth ties in middle of axe, yea, those are just one sided planes. I didn't noticed that wire got lost there, sorry. :poly122:
your duck sculpt looks really nice. Only eye texture looks a little bit blurry.
Here is a small update, tomorrow i want to add the background buildings. Then i need to rebake the lightmaps. I switched to the 30 day trial of unity pro to get those nice water reflections and a better GI calculation. Ahh and i need to create a new cubemap for my scene.
Tomorrow i will upload my final presentation as a unity webplayer scene. Because there is a bit of movement like wind in the leaves and the floating duck
Well I have managed to get my scene into Unity finally. I don't really know how to use it so for a first go it is alright. I will need to learn a lot more to work out how to make proper shaders etc. I have learn't a lot throughout this month and thanks for all the help guys. I definitely know that if I was going to do it again I would have worked from inside of Unity from a much earlier stage.
I also have a few more questions (they never stop) If I try to do lightmapping, where ever I have overlapping UVs in my meshes the poly just goes really dark. I can't seem to figure out how to stop that.
i think its really interesting to see the subtle differences in all your pieces
its like those pics where theres one correct and you have to figure out ten differences
I also have a few more questions (they never stop) If I try to do lightmapping, where ever I have overlapping UVs in my meshes the poly just goes really dark. I can't seem to figure out how to stop that.
If you want lightmaps and don´t have premade lightmap UVs you can enable the "Generate Lightmap UV" Checkbox in the import settings of the mesh.
Wondering if you will share a break down to show wire-frames and texture sheets? Very Nice.
I can upload some more images this evening when i´m at my home computer, but here is a quick texture mashup out of my dropbox folder. This image contains all of the used textures.
The small detail textures are mostly photosourced and tiled in photshop. The decals map looks a bit strange in this preview becaue of the padding.
I've been lurking in Polycount forums for some time, admiring beautiful works that people post. On Friday 26th I noticed this challenge and decided to register and go for it.
I'd like to learn PBR texturing workflow so I chose to do non-painted look of the dwarven axe. It's actually my first time I tried to "seriously" texture something using PBR techniques.
So here's what I got after fiddling around for some time.
Lowpoly: 790 tris
Cheers .Wiki I got the lightmap to work. It was actually the 'Scale In Lightmap' setting for my meshes was too big as it defaults to 1 and I had to put them down to 0.1 and it seemed to work. Unfortunately I have now lost my normal maps but I think that is because I am using the basic not the pro version on Unity.
I brought it into UDK to add the smoke effect. Also through a material effect made the lava move. I'm thinking I may go back for fun and add some sperts of fire and sparks. I really enjoyed this months challenge, I can't wait to see everyone's final pieces. The environments are all looking amazing!
So, here is my final scene for this month. Didn´t had enaugh time to finish it.
.wiki u won in my book, incredible job! I can see the few things u missed, the humans, detailing the bg buildings, & the default unity skybox, but holy shit you've gone far. if ur looking for crits: I'd suggest now focusing on the lighting effects, which seems to me the main focus the artist of this concept was practicing or experimenting with. I wanna try and learn my way around shaders, either in source engine 2013 or udk. I'm also planning on making the water a little clearer to experiment with water caustics, but yea if i were u i'd make the fog bluer & i'd add a blue reflection on the corrugated sheet but yea you pretty much nailed everything! Also thanks for showing how u organized ur assets. I wouldn't've thought to do the conduits like that, despite it's obvious simplicity.
@SomethingFishy: Nice job! It seems like there may be some geometry that doesn't contribute to the silhouette, but i like what you've done with the texture & effects!
@CatalystFire: I love ur plants! The floor numbers seem kinda bright red compared to the desaturated rusty colors of everything else. Good job on the bg buildings too, keep it up!
@kmactastic: wow it looks like ur having alot of fun with this, how'd u make the duck floaty?
@conghal: I like the creative layout, it really works! It seems like you came up with pretty much the same solution as me for the plaster, although the main difference is i called it stucco X3 Super ambitious plan for the streets, but if that's what you're eager to learn then go for it!
It's unfortunate i can't reply to everyone, it's so inspiring to see the amount of progress and learning/teaching going on within this thread; keep it up everyone! ^^
Cheers .Wiki I got the lightmap to work. It was actually the 'Scale In Lightmap' setting for my meshes was too big as it defaults to 1 and I had to put them down to 0.1 and it seemed to work. Unfortunately I have now lost my normal maps but I think that is because I am using the basic not the pro version on Unity.
You could use a simple trick. I used it too
Just create two directional lights. One is your shadowcaster and Lightmap Lightsource, the second one has no shadows and has no contribution to the lightmap (if you are using unity free, this would be the default anyway). Because the second light is dynamic you will still have highlights and your normalmaps.
The only negative point with this "trick" is that you have to balance these two lights. Otherwise you scene will be to bright. It took me some hours to get the right settings for my two lights.
Finally i only assigned the hightlight light to the metal objects. You can do this with a parameter group and add all your specular objects to this custom parameter group. Then you need to set the light to affect this group only .
Hey guys, this is my interpretation of one of the axe concepts for Septembers Noob Challenge. Apologies this post is a little late, I had just started the project before heading to London for Euro-gamer (last week of September) and didnt get back until a few days ago so wanted to work on it a little more in my free time before posting. I decided I would try a more stylized approach by making some of the colours more vibrant than the original concept. This is the first time Ive tackled a hand painted, diffuse only piece so any crit/ tips you could give me to improve my work would be much appreciated .
Replies
Post your UV's for your low poly. From looking at your image I'm guessing your UV's are sewed together. If you have a low poly model with 90 degree angles your normal map will not bake correct. There are a couple solutions to this problem, 1. you can bevel your edges and match them to the edges of the high poly or 2, you can make each side that has a 90 degree angle have its own UV island; separating it enough to give it some padding. Put you should post your normal amp and Uvs first, just to be sure.
So for this one I went back to my original mesh I made and re-UVed the whole thing then brought it back into Mudbox to bake out the Normal Map again. The only problem with this that I can see is that it is quite a high poly count.
Is their a better method to do this workflow? Anyways for the moment I am happy I can see it and it is starting to look kinda cool.
Thanks for the help guys!
Just an idea to help with your topology is maybe to extract your windows and have them as separate pieces, then possibly combine them after. It would give you more freedom in creating the frames around the glass and keep the main building looking tidy without the edge loops going around the entire model.
However I like where you have got to so far! Keep it up
Thanks,
Ross
I am now unwrapping all the elements which is about as much fun as pulling teeth and my eyes will start bleeding soon but you know 7 days to go let's see how much I can do.
Any tips or advance appreciated. X3 2048px Material Sets.
To get a better texture resolution on those large assets you could use a detail texture for high frequency detail inside of the unreal material editor. You could add some bevels to your houses, currently these edges are very sharp.
@CatalystFire
Good start, but you got a lot of unnecessary edges on your walls. If you got problems with correct smoothing you could try to manipulate the normal direction by hand.
I didn´t worked on this since my last post, so today i just added my modular pipes to the scene. The lightmap UV´s are currently created by unity so there are a lot of lightmap seams
Because i´m only using the free version of unity i had to do a little workaround with the specular highlights of my metal pipes. I´m using a second light which only affects a special group of objects. Otherwise the whole scene would get brighter...
As you will see there is still a lot to do :P! This is only the Albedo map on it, not done the normals or spec etc... its late lol been fun working on this though
Thanks, Ross
That looks awesome so far. Is that in game engine or in Maya?
Does anyone know what is supposed to be under the second orange window?
thanks for the feedback. haha no it is not a sofa :P I have yet to texture it but I think from the concept art they are boxes.
@Kmactastic I thought I would see how Marmoset deals with environments as I usually just have it for singular objects but it has done a reasonably good job for an environment.
Thanks,
Ross
I am getting a late start on this challenge, but this is what I have so far. Planning on finishing the high poly tonight, then adjusting the game mesh. Still lots of wasted verts in that first pass.
C&C welcome of course.
Thanks Ross.
On the second pass I added I darkened the dwarf ax and gave it a bit broader color range, threw in some hints of greens and yellows. The highlights look a tad sloppy so I'll be going back to refine that.
On the demon ax I just added shadows and highlights where I felt it would help push the texture a bit more. I'm thinking I may bring the demon ax into UDK and do some particle effects to the blade, get some smoke and embers float up off of the blade.
I thought it was a couch too but it really can't be because of scale. So.. yah boxes sounds good. Is it a crime to deviate from the concept a little? :P
Ross,
Looks like you can bevel your edges a bit more on your buildings. The orange building in particular looks very sharp (I think it would be softer in real-life). This is unless you are going for very lo-poly of course. Otherwise I think that would help you a lot. Awesome that you are getting some textures going. I am behind!
@ross185 - Hey man I am loving the textures in your scene I like how dirty and grimey eveything is. What is your workflow for texturing and how are you going to do your normal maps etc?
@Tom Machie- Hey, I like the colours in your scene, really vivid pallete going on at the moment. All I can say is that I think you should watch the scale of some of your assets as they are getting a bit over sized like the sheet metal walkway on the right and the top of the roof on the right building. Other than that it is looking good. Keep it up!
Here is my latest update. Even though I think I have done this in completely the wrong way around now I will continue in my 3D package for now and figure out how I am going to transfer it over to Unity or Unreal a bit later. I have spent most of my time getting the textures on most of the assets. I still have a long way to go to make them look any good, I am not great at this texturing milarky. Anyways, any crits are as always welcome. Cheers guys!
I modeled all of the pieces straight in softimage. The pipes are modular and are made out of 3 straight, 2 curved and 2 end pieces.
Tomorrow i should have some time to work on this scene again and post some images. Today i only modeled the last pieces and UV´d them in uvlayout.
Good work everyone!
You have me in anticipation! :shifty:
Current progress for today. I still need a tiling texture for the metal elements, like the windows, the pipes and the tank. Some colors are a bit off at the moment. Maybe i fix them on sunday or monday. A few meshes need some optimization. The roof of house 1 has a lot of not required edges. The decals are still placeholders, but i guess at least greentooth stays.
Currently the leaves are moving with a vertex shader. I want to add some particle systems for some dripping water and maybe a leaking pipe.
For the wires i´m planning to use the unity line renderer together with some slight wind to give it some movement
I guess on september 30 i will upload a web player version so you can see the animated scene.
@Catalyst Fire
your lightning looks a bit dull at the moment. Maybe it´s because your main light has no color. Try to shift it to some kind of orange
It has been a headache, but I'm starting to feel comfortable with 3ds max and I'm kind of happy with how this is turning out. There is still a lot of texture-work to do, I've barely touched the plants, I'd really like to replace that Unity standard skybox, there a bunch of other little things that I still want to add, etc.
I made a plaster texture and I'm just using that on all the buildings with 6 different coloured materials (yellow, orange-red, blue-ish, light, medium and dark neutral). Still need a metal texture, a wood texture, maybe some more/better decals, plant materials and something for the duck. I tried to think about how all the buildings would be laid out relative to each other in space, too, and I'm pretty happy with how that's worked out. I'd really like to get around to making some alleys and streets, and to giving the the buildings ground floors and entrances.
Here are a few more pics from different angles:
http://imgur.com/ibdo79j
http://imgur.com/MjnQtpn
http://imgur.com/E6trqzs
http://imgur.com/WDJqxxw
and that first one, with the wires:
http://imgur.com/0dQAo7d
also, I was kind of bored/braindead last night, so I did this:
LOL this is awesome.
So after coming back from THU festival i'm very pumped up to learn and work, so best way for me was joining the Noob Challenge.
Joined late so i only did this axe for this challenge but i hope you like it and comments and critiques are welcomed.
Modeling in Modo, textures in photoshop.
Tris: 526
This is hilarious.
Deoce
Excellent work. Are the ties made with cards?
Here is where I am at. Started throwing some textures on. Still don't have a good camera angle yet. >.> Also need to decide what engine I am going to use.
Thanks and if you mean the red cloth ties in middle of axe, yea, those are just one sided planes. I didn't noticed that wire got lost there, sorry. :poly122:
@conghal
I did the same like you in my scene. Everything just refers to some simple tiling textures and a detail overlay with different material colors.
@kmactastic
your duck sculpt looks really nice. Only eye texture looks a little bit blurry.
Here is a small update, tomorrow i want to add the background buildings. Then i need to rebake the lightmaps. I switched to the 30 day trial of unity pro to get those nice water reflections and a better GI calculation. Ahh and i need to create a new cubemap for my scene.
Tomorrow i will upload my final presentation as a unity webplayer scene. Because there is a bit of movement like wind in the leaves and the floating duck
Wondering if you will share a break down to show wire-frames and texture sheets? Very Nice.
I also have a few more questions (they never stop) If I try to do lightmapping, where ever I have overlapping UVs in my meshes the poly just goes really dark. I can't seem to figure out how to stop that.
its like those pics where theres one correct and you have to figure out ten differences
The small detail textures are mostly photosourced and tiled in photshop. The decals map looks a bit strange in this preview becaue of the padding.
I've been lurking in Polycount forums for some time, admiring beautiful works that people post. On Friday 26th I noticed this challenge and decided to register and go for it.
I'd like to learn PBR texturing workflow so I chose to do non-painted look of the dwarven axe. It's actually my first time I tried to "seriously" texture something using PBR techniques.
So here's what I got after fiddling around for some time.
Lowpoly: 790 tris
Anyways here is my scene with some lighting
Here is a web player link for dropbox, i hope it works September Challenge Web Player
Below is a small breakdown, i already posted my texture sheets. The second picture shows all of my small assets that i used to fill the scene.
Why not keep working at it? It took me 2 or 3 more weeks to get my June Challenge done. No ones going to stop you?
I brought it into UDK to add the smoke effect. Also through a material effect made the lava move. I'm thinking I may go back for fun and add some sperts of fire and sparks. I really enjoyed this months challenge, I can't wait to see everyone's final pieces. The environments are all looking amazing!
.wiki u won in my book, incredible job! I can see the few things u missed, the humans, detailing the bg buildings, & the default unity skybox, but holy shit you've gone far. if ur looking for crits: I'd suggest now focusing on the lighting effects, which seems to me the main focus the artist of this concept was practicing or experimenting with. I wanna try and learn my way around shaders, either in source engine 2013 or udk. I'm also planning on making the water a little clearer to experiment with water caustics, but yea if i were u i'd make the fog bluer & i'd add a blue reflection on the corrugated sheet but yea you pretty much nailed everything!
@SomethingFishy: Nice job! It seems like there may be some geometry that doesn't contribute to the silhouette, but i like what you've done with the texture & effects!
@CatalystFire: I love ur plants! The floor numbers seem kinda bright red compared to the desaturated rusty colors of everything else. Good job on the bg buildings too, keep it up!
@kmactastic: wow it looks like ur having alot of fun with this, how'd u make the duck floaty?
@conghal: I like the creative layout, it really works! It seems like you came up with pretty much the same solution as me for the plaster, although the main difference is i called it stucco X3 Super ambitious plan for the streets, but if that's what you're eager to learn then go for it!
It's unfortunate i can't reply to everyone, it's so inspiring to see the amount of progress and learning/teaching going on within this thread; keep it up everyone! ^^
Just create two directional lights. One is your shadowcaster and Lightmap Lightsource, the second one has no shadows and has no contribution to the lightmap (if you are using unity free, this would be the default anyway). Because the second light is dynamic you will still have highlights and your normalmaps.
The only negative point with this "trick" is that you have to balance these two lights. Otherwise you scene will be to bright. It took me some hours to get the right settings for my two lights.
Finally i only assigned the hightlight light to the metal objects. You can do this with a parameter group and add all your specular objects to this custom parameter group. Then you need to set the light to affect this group only
[sketchfab]92597b990be746de815864b987ad7543[/sketchfab]
Hand Painted Axe - Polycount Noob Challenge Sept by jdp092 on Sketchfab