German stick grenade

Youngy798

Hey everyone, I decided to try a simple asset to get some practice with high poly baking. I decided to do this German stick grenade, it seemed like a fairly simple asset to make.

High poly compared to reference:



Low poly:



Now that I look at it, it seems the end section of the handle is too long.

I didn't add the little circle bumps on the metal, I am going to do this in the normal map.

Any criticisms?

My low poly is around 700 tris, should I try and decreased this amount or is it fine for an object like a grenade?

Youngy798

I found two basic materials I will be using.

A metal changed to be dark: (might need darkening some more)



A piece of wood with some slight colour changes:



The materials aren't exactly the same, however I think they will fit nicely.

Youngy798

Decided to make a different wood texture, I think this one is better

Oniram

i think your current wood texture is a bit too bright and saturated. what you had before was nice but maybe could use a bit less contrast. lets see how it looks applied to the object

Youngy798

Yeah, it probably is. I need to unwrap and bake it first.

Youngy798

Do you think I should just bake with the current high poly, or should I do a mudbox sculpt and make some interesting metal detail?

Oniram

mudbox or any sculpt for that matter would not be necessary for an object like this.

i would also suggest you go back and more closely examine the shape of the overall grenade. it seems like you've done yours by eye which isnt necessarily a bad thing, but it looks like youve simplified some of the shapes. most notably the bottom piece.

Youngy798

I used the reference in orthographic view, but the actual reference isn't perfectly side on. I did end up changing the end piece a little, it was one of the things I noticed was wrong after posting it.

Here is a side view against my reference:



I might just completely remake the end part, I messed it up a bit

Youngy798

I found a better reference for the end part, it seems I messed it up quite badly





I probably should have looked at more references when doing that end piece.

Youngy798

Do you think this looks any better? It will obviously look smoother in the high poly. Also seeing as that part will not be visible when being held, I don't think it should have too many loops.

Youngy798

Anyone have any idea how I would go about UV mapping this? UV mapping is one of my weak points ATM

Sculptaur

It's really just cylinders, so use a cylindrical map projection and unfold/peel/relax as necessary, then planar map project for the top and bottom/caps.

Youngy798

Ok, Ill have a go at that then, I was trying to use textools but it wasn't going too well

Youngy798

Have you got any good tutorials for this? It didn't go very well on the little section I tried.

ZacD

This is literally one of the easiest things you could UV, cylindrical projection + planner projections on the very top and bottom. Post some screen shots of issues you are having.

Youngy798

I ended up with this:



Does that look right?

ZacD

Yup, that's right. You can straighten or relax the UVs if you want, but you do not need to.

Youngy798

This is how the final unwrap ended up:



Is everything looking ok?

I need to spend some time getting as much texture space used up as possible

ZacD

If you want to make sure it's a good unwrap apply a checkerboard texture and look at the model with the texture in the view port. Make sure the squares are square, not too stretched, and pretty evenly spaced and sized.

Youngy798

Ok thanks will do

Joost

I'd straighten that uv island on the top left.

Youngy798

First attempt, not good:

ZacD

So the UVs for the handle are stretched, scale them vertically or horizontally until it's square.

The UV's on the top metal part are mirrored/overlapping itself.

The size of the UVs could be more uniform.

You probably need to relax the UVs, I'm seeing a few areas that would be fixed by that.

Youngy798

Ok thanks, I will try that

Youngy798

I tried to flatten some of it but it ended up going all crumpled up. I couldn't figure out how to scale in only one direction, only scaling larger.

DWalker

Break it into several pieces with roughly the same radius - 5 will probably work well for this model - the main grenade cylinder, the wider part at its base, the metal connector, the wooden handle, and finally the base.

Remembering your basic math, the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*radius, or pi*diameter. So, for each cylinder, when you UVW map it, the U-coordinate can start as 3.14 times the length & width, and the V-coordinate as the height. Change to Edit UVs, move the map off to a convenient side, then repeat with the others. The can top, the bottom, and any other planes are just planar maps with their UVs as the appropriate dimensions. Then, just combine all the pieces, move them around to a squarish-shape, and shrink (or grow) to fill the 0-1 area.

Youngy798

Could you explain that with an image? I don't really understand what you are explaining, sorry

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

Youngy798 wrote: »

I couldn't figure out how to scale in only one direction, only scaling larger.

looks like you're in Max - you can hold shift while scaling UVs to go in just one axis

Mattvaughn12

I did this same thing over the summer to study PBR texturing and to learn the quixel suite.

http://imgur.com/23tt0Cm

Youngy798

Very nice

Youngy798

I tried scaling, however I ended up with a problem where the 2 thicker parts of the handle seemed good, but the middle section was stretched

Youngy798

Right, I tried doing it with textools and rewatching Millenia's UV unwrapping tutorial, it is looking a lot better now.

I had to separate the end grenade piece into a couple of bits, otherwise it was going horribly stretched, not to bad though.

I think I still need to mess around with the stretching on the handle and get it a bit more uniform.

fab-camp

I think you cant avoid the stretching on the handle completly. try to get your checker unstretched on the thicker parts. thats all you can do if you want to keep that handle with one uv-isle.
just try to get your checkers unstreched. and in the next step try to get them the same size by scaling the uv´s uniformely
maybe you could post your uv-layout ?

Youngy798

I managed to finish it and get it to have minimal stretching



It looked quite good with UV checker as well.

UV layout: