[CE] Metroid Prime Gunship WIP

FelixL

Hi,

This is meant to become a next-gen version of Samus' Gunship from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. I own the statue from first4figures, so I thought this would be a good exercise. Now that I'm familiar with the model, I can say that whoever did the physical model got a bit lazy with subD modeling :P



My version is a personal project that has been going on for a few months. I only get to work on it for a few hours every week, so this has been dragging on far too long already! Anyways, pics:

Renders of the highpoly:





Wires (I am using turbosmooth pro/openSubDiv for this, to explain the lack of control edges)



UVs inside MARI (I've set the symmetrical pieces up with identical UVs offset one patch to the right, so I can use patch linking - basically symmetrized painting with the option to turn symmetry on and off per layer)



I am at 4x4 patches with a 4096x4096 resolution or 16384x16384:



AO inside MARI:



I've wanted to test a few things with this project:

- Modeling a complex model with opensubdiv and see how it holds up in this scenario regarding edge creases, UVs and whatnot
- UVing the highpoly to test opensubdiv, also so I can do some sweet closeup vray renders in the end
- Texturing something big and complex in MARI, also something symmetrical to test UV linking

The plan is to build an in-game version and render it in cryengine, and possibly in UE4 and marmoset for comparison's sake.

Next up: finishing the UVs, then base material setup! Can't wait to start texturing!

FelixL

C&C welcome, of course.

jeremiah_bigley

Not much to crit man. Looks nice! A mild grunge (general use) pass would do wonders to bringing this thing to life. And it might be just me but 4 4k's seem a bit excessive. Just hope you make use of it by giving it some good detail.

artquest

Ohh nice! How are you liking mari so far? p.s Unless you are planning on doing something special with uv linking. I've found that using overlapping uvs is a bit easier (less glitchy) Unless they fixed it. In which case do let me know! Because I'd like to try that out too on my next project.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

nice

FelixL

I actually went up to 32k
But it's for the highpoly only. For the in-game, I'm thinking a single 2k or 4k. Better have the resolution and not need it, than need it and not have it. And MARI doesn't really care what resolution you throw at it.

@artquest: I have only briefly tried Uv linking. It seems that you need to specifically activate it for each new layer you create, and it's off by default. This could get pretty annoying, but I guess I can make a script to do it in one click.
Overlapping UVs work as well, but they are a final thing. With linking, I can paint wear and dirt and mirror it, the turn it off and break the symmetry.

Geno527

This is really cool. As Jeremy_Bigley said, you should use your rez to add more detail (not too much, because you're going to kill te cartoonish aspect) like some miscoloration or little scratch.

Awesome work I definitely need a new Metroid ^^

garriola83

I think the lighting and the speckling on the material is making it look like a miniature, unless that is waht you are going for. Other than that, yeah just add variations on the roughness, not all of the parts of the ship should have the same roughness, and it should be good to go.

FelixL

@garriola: Yes, you're right. The metal flakes need to be way smaller. But these are just test renders with no real texture, I just started with the texturing.
I'm actually not sure how much I should push the realistic aspect here. If I want to make it super realistic, I have to add tons of tiny details (both texture and geo) to make the scale read, as the ship would be quite big in real life. But that would probably clash with the cartoonish/gamey shape and proportions of the ship... the original design is based on manga-style drawings.

I'll probably go for a car paint -ish look on the yellow bits with some chunky, readable wear and tear that reveals the bare metal underneath in a few places.

FelixL

I've had some time and built an initial material stack in MARI. These are viewport grabs from MARI's ortho viewport (perspective gives me shader artifacts for some reason):






Also set up the metal reveal and spent a few minutes painting it. Hopefully there will be more progress later this week!

FelixL

Had some time to work on this again. Feedback welcome!

garriola83

The spec on the last shots are too wide now. I like the ones on the first high poly shots. I would revisit the material parameters for that and add some variance to the roughness. I also liked that the high poly had more of an orange tint rather than a paler yellow tint. Keep going man!

FelixL

Thanks for your feedback!
Actually, I think the glossiness was too high before. What I have now looks more like metallic car paint, minus the clearcoat layer. I'm going to leave it as it is and then render it with a proper car paint shader. It should look more like in the first pics. If that doesn't work, I can tweak the gloss as you mentioned.
You might be right about the color. I am using three paint materials now, deep orange for cavities, yellow for flat areas and pale yellow for edges. I'll try tweaking them for a more reddish orange.

Shrike

Try coloring the AO red or purple or so, (it should be too stronly applied anyways), + yellow and black hate each other and give this ugly dirty look (this has something to do with screen gamut, as yellow has a shorter range on digital media I think)

Also try presenting on a nicer background, a dark purple space background would do very well with the yellow and green. Aside it looks nice

FelixL

Sometimes I use curves. As in, select an edgeloop, extract as shape, then simplify the shape so it's very clean. Then align the vertices on the curve with snap to spline.
Then, it helps to start with a very rough shape without lots of edgeloops and then later on add them only as needed. If you add too many at once it becomes a pain to keep the geometry clean and the curves tidy. Adding edgeloops with Max's swiftloop (with shift pressed) is a good way to do it.
Other than that, mostly a lot of manual tweaking. Something like this helps with small tweaks while keeping curvature intact: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104718

FelixL

I've painted all the major damage now. I'm getting to a point where I need to look at it in a proper renderer to proceed. Colors and materials will be adjusted as per the feedback in this thread. I hope to get some new shaders next week that will push it to the next level ,)

Until then, here's a bit of progress: https://vimeo.com/114397279
edit: eh, vimeo insists in playing it back in full RGB range, crushing the blacks if you care enough, you can download a high-quality version here: https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B425Li3OSebQZUgta3dFUDQ2amM&export=download

FelixL

Some progress on the underside:








I'm not sure about the exaggerated curvature roughness. Up close, it looks cartoonish, but at normal distance, I think it's quite nice, and theres a lot of shimmering/business without it.

Some 4k close-ups:

FelixL

Some progress on the top part. Looks a bit more like metallic paint with a clearcoat now, what do you think?
I've also tried adding some major scratches since the existing ones didn't read at a distance. They still need to be de-symmetrized and cleaned up.

As always, c&c welcome! All pics captured from within MARI. There are some white artifacts due to dodgy UVs :S

Gannon

O_O sick work. I'm looking forward to the texture crunch when you kick it into an engine as well as the material work.

picfad

Nice work,

nickcomeau

Wicked cool design on this. As for the textures and the damage you've got going so far, the only thing I would say would be to try and think about scale. You've got a some small and medium scratches along the sides, but to me I feel like if you're getting that many micro scratches you're bound to have one or two larger ones scratches across a couple of different plates of metal. Love how the metal color/spec highlights look though!

joskiller

where can we download it ?