Feedback for my work

A l e x

Hi,

I've been learning 3DSMax for about a year, and thought i would start posting things up to see if if anyone would have any tips on how to improve my work, i'm at uni atm and will be posting up mostly stuff for that i am doing for assignments

So firstly i'd like some feedback on this low poly MP7 modelling texturing and presentation, thanks.

AirmanEpic

If I were you I'd look into my renderer. The version you currently have definitely doesn't show off all that your gun has to offer. Also it's not reflective and you can barely see the spectacularity. I'd look into those things if I were you.

A l e x

Ok thanks, I probably should have mentioned, for the assignment it has to be rendered in mentalray or scanline, and we are being marked on diffuse only

CarlK3D

What would be the Intended use for this piece? Mobile? I ask because the texture looks rather low detail to be rendered this close and is pixelated in some parts. Is there a restriction on your map size?

A l e x

The assignment is for a Mobile environment, i believe 2048 is the restriction on map size, but will have to reason why sizes were given for each asset, i have used a 2048 on this as it is a pick up able weapon for and would be inspectable in a menu, i have included a block out and then my actual scene still unfinished, in a render below.

Also i struggled to find reference for the texturing and mostly used photos and masked them over, i'm not a particularly good painter, i'm always happy with my models and then ruin them texturing.

Ervin

How big is the texutre? That's very important with very low poly objects like this one. Also your UVs are very inefficiently packed, and I'm surprised your instructor hasn't pointed that out already. There are huge gaps inbetween every piece and that's a big problem. Over all it looks nice, however efficiency is crucial when it comes to low poly items. If you ever work on a game project, your skills at making the most of your UV space will be just as important as the quality of your diffuse.

I'm also really surprised that your instructor is having you put all of this effort into unwrapping UVWs and not having you learn normal and spec maps at the same time.

Nice work otherwise.

Edit: I posted after seeing your latest post.

Mobile games do need to be extremely efficient, so learning to pack your UVs well is important. I also feel that 2048 is excessive as well, much like the polycount, texture sizes need to be limited for decent performance.

A l e x

I think we are doing spec and normals after xmas, i agree about my uvs

(notice the horribly squished rail on the bottom left)

I do find unwrapping a struggle, i laid them out in that way mostly so i could make sense of them when i was painting, the only feedback that i have had so far is that the wear on it needs work and doesn't make sense but didn't elaborate too well.



Unrelated, I managed to figure out how to get it in UE4. I really don't like the handle but i can't find any good reference. and i think my seems are in bad places.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Reference for photo copy pastaing or reference as in to paint from?

Shrike

The presentation on the first image is really cool

The model is good for a start but theres a lot to improve
Try using more polys in general and make the shapes as close to the original as you can, which will give you a far better model overall. Baking normal maps is something you learn later on, which will drastically improve your model again

About the textures, first you use 1280x1280 which is no usual format, engines want power of two, which is 256 / 512 / 1024 / 2048 / 4096 etc - you can also make 1024x2048 rectangular textures, which can be very smart at certain cases. I would also advise to always work in 4x the resolution (1024 is 4x 512) as you usually would, as you can always save out smaller ones. Dont work in low res if you are not doing pixel art, there is no benefit, only drawbacks.



Your texture resolution is not worth anything, if the things you put on your texture sheet are not high rez enough. All these things you put on it are far lower in res than the sheet allows. Just look at the grip i cropped in, it is about the same size, even smaller, but is far sharper.

A pretty usual workflow is to define your areas with flat colors, and then put some small scale textures on it depending on the material to give small details (play with blending and not make them too strong)
Then you start painting the large scale details, the wear, edge definition, larger scratches and worn off places, dirt and so on with brushes. For stuff like that grip, it would be best to retrace the photograph with crisp photoshop linework and start your texture from that point for that part

A l e x

Ok that helps alot i hadn't really thought of it in a GIGO sense, and the tracing is another great tip thanks.

yes shamefully i had been copy and pasting photo reference over for the texture, I really want to learn how to be a better painter, i bought an intuos pro but don't really know how to use it effectively.

Thanks for all the input so far everyone.

(Is there a way to stop poly count from logging me out if i've been idle on a page for too long, it seems to be less than 5 mins atm and I keep having to log back in due to spending too long on typing a post)

Oh and also my texture should be 2048 but i think the img host has resized it.

Yogensya

I'd show the diffuse instead of the wire in that presentation (first pic in the thread). Wires can be overlayed on the diffuse in necessary.

For a diffuse only assignment it looks pretty cool to me, a bit blocky but judging from the wire, your mesh is well optimized so that blockiness would depend on your triangle budget. As others mentioned if you can spare more tris try to get the main shapes closer, so that the silhouette looks as good as possible. This will be very important when you use normal maps.

As for the texture itself, i'd say it looks too blurry in some areas (up-scaled from photos i'm assuming :P). In this case half resolution and a subtle sharpen would probably give you the same results, except for loosing some of the finer detail you added to it. The red and orange logos stand out a bit too much for my taste.

Nice work nevertheless, keep at it!

A l e x

Thanks, The tri limit for all my assets is 1500, i hit 1654 with the strap hooks on the sides but when i delete them off it's 1486, else i'd do much more too it

It's all low poly this semester but after xmas i will be starting high poly and normals,

Yeah i think i overdid the saturation and exposure on my renders and it made the colours stand out too much in the actual texture they are a little duller.

I was thinking about down scaling the res but i'm scared of mip mapping (i think that's the term) as my padding was only 2 pixels

oh yeah my teacher did say that i should put the actual texture instead of the wired on the pres sheet, i just haven't gotten round to it yet.

Yogensya

Mipmapping is done by the game engine, it doesn't matter what the original resolution is, the game will gracefully switch to lower mipmaps depending on distance in the game and view angle to avoid the texture to cause unnecessary aliasing. I'm not sure if other would recomend this, but i usually go all the way with the padding. A low padding can indeed give problems as you were saying, although in with weapon it would be hardly noticeable because of the dark color in your diffuse.

You can always re-bake with a bit more padding, or even in this case just take the void area of your texture and make it dark grey to make any possible seams less noticeable.

A l e x

good idea, i'll try that then, thanks for the help.

JohnDraisey

I'm surprised your teacher only wants a diffuse map since most of the texture detail on a gun comes from the Normal and Spec maps.

A l e x

I think they're trying to get the concepts across as it's the 1st semester of the 1st year and then after xmas we will get more advanced as most people have never used max before this, also most people aren't actually making guns our assignment was to make a mobile platform environment with about 10-20 assets in it. But i really wanted to model an MP7 so i made it fit the assignment, further up i've got a render of my scene so far, next to its block out, soon i'll be posting up some more assets from it, i was just excited to finish the MP7 but all the others assets are only modeled atm not unwrapped