[Unity] Sports Gear in 2 weeks

Jerry_Royals

Complete: May 11, 2015



Original Post:

Hey all!

I'd like to learn new things and quicken the pace. I am modeling an Avex water bottle and a small/medium-ish sports bag. If I have time I'll try more but that's the core of it.

Deadline: April 25, 2015

Tools:
-3ds Max
-Photoshop
-Zbrush
-Marmoset (for testing only)
-Unity

New Stuff:
-NURBS modeling? (how often are NURBS really used?)
-Z Brush
-Importing and rendering in Unity (first time doing this)

Results:
-A modeled, textured, lit, rendered water bottle and sports bag.
-Emotional Confidence!!! Affirming and improving my understanding of modeling and texturing due to the 2 week limit, while learning new skills.

References:
-Bottle: http://i.imgur.com/xfQzvI3.jpg
-Bag: http://i.imgur.com/LhaepDw.jpg

For the cap I started with a cylinder and continued with edge modeling. For the base I used the lathe tool. I'm thinking of using turbo smooth and use 3ds max's retopo tools for the low poly.

lloydj14

Not much to comment on. But i would suggest using a turbosmooth modifier with supporting edge loops rather than adding in all those edges if your looking for efficiency.

Jerry_Royals

lloydj14 wrote: »

Not much to comment on. But i would suggest using a turbosmooth modifier with supporting edge loops rather than adding in all those edges if your looking for efficiency.

Hey, thanks. Yeah turbo smooth. I've backtracked a bit. I'm having trouble with a few things. Two questions:

1. Getting dots in this rendered normal map from 3ds max. I'm guessing there's a render setting in the Default Scanline Renderer to get rid of these? The base of this bottle doesn't seem to need a normal map but just for my own knowledge how can I get rid of the dots?



2. I'm getting smoothing errors. Is there a better way to model the cap where the red circles are? Adding control loops adds hard edges in unwanted places.

Jerry_Royals

Took longer than I expected. Next is low poly using 3ds max's retopo.

Jerry_Royals

Can someone tell me or post a link as to why xnormal is giving me all these artifacts? It doesn't show up in the xnormal 3d viewer but it does in marmoset and unity.

nickcomeau

The model is looking good. Look into handplane 3D, I think that could fix your problem. Basically normals are calculated different in most programs and it can lead to what you're seeing right now.

.Wiki

Jerry_Royals wrote: »

Can someone tell me or post a link as to why xnormal is giving me all these artifacts? It doesn't show up in the xnormal 3d viewer but it does in marmoset and unity.

It helps to render out normalmaps in 32bit. You can convert them afterwards to 8 bit to introduce some dithering, because of this the banding will become less visible.

huffer

The xnormal artifacts are from rendering in 32-bit, and the dots in normal map from 3dsmax are because 3dsmax uses dithering to convert the 32-bit internal render to 16-bit output file. If you bake in xnormal at 32-bit then convert in Photoshop to 16-bit you'd get the same dots as in 3dsmax. The only solution is to fill that part of the normal map with constant default normal blue value (since you might not need a normal map anyway on that part).

Jerry_Royals

Thanks, those answers help a ton. I found a link, by the infamous earthquake, a polycount link describing it further if anyone stumbles this way.

Here is the low poly and high poly. Looks like I'm not going to reach my deadline. I'm glad I started this project though. I need to do more small projects like this so I can isolate both the problems and questions I have. I'll finish up this bottle before the month of May.

AlecMoody

Your high poly looks nice but the low poly has waay too many edge loops/triangles. When you bake normals from a high poly model the job of the lowpoly is just to be a silhouette that can hold the normals from the high poly model. Right now you have a lot of repeated edge loops and internal edges that do little to nothing for the silhouette.

This is just a starting point:

Jerry_Royals

AlecMoody wrote: »

Your high poly looks nice but the low poly has waay too many edge loops/triangles. When you bake normals from a high poly model the job of the lowpoly is just to be a silhouette that can hold the normals from the high poly model. Right now you have a lot of repeated edge loops and internal edges that do little to nothing for the silhouette.

Thanks Alec, I took your advice. Hoping this works. Gonna see if the normal map looks decent from this. As you can see I'm attempting to make one low poly piece from 4 high poly pieces: the base, cap, lid, and small bump on the back of the cap.

Does the low poly need to have correct smoothing groups in any way?

Jerry_Royals

Hey! good stuff. 3ds max is dithering it out. I need to fix that. But cool! Not a bad start.

Jerry_Royals

AlecMoody

What are your bake settings and what are you using to preview your model?

Here is an xnormal baking tutorial for you:
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l59_R7RENxE[/ame]

Jerry_Royals

I'm using marmoset. Yeah, that last image of the bottle is strange. I figured out my hi poly model had some weird shading going on from looking at 3ds max's view port. I'm not sure what made it do that but I imported a new hi poly and that fixed it.

I've been using 3ds max for making the normal map. No settings that are out of the ordinary I think. 2k res, as a tiff file then converted it to 8 bit in photoshop.



This is what I'm wrestling with now. The corners of the holes are messy. I don't know how to get it right. There are two smoothing groups right now.

Jerry_Royals

Alright, fixed a bunch of things. Still problems.

Jerry_Royals

normals and base colors

Anyone know how to create worn plastic?

Assassinaded

Jerry_Royals wrote: »

Alright, fixed a bunch of things. Still problems.

Try selecting the polygons that are not the supporting edge and use the planar button. Just flop between X Y Z and undo 2/3 that won't work. Because right now the area looks a lil wonky.

Jerry_Royals

Assassinaded wrote: »

Try selecting the polygons that are not the supporting edge and use the planar button. Just flop between X Y Z and undo 2/3 that won't work. Because right now the area looks a lil wonky.

Thanks, I figured it out. I didn't triangulate the model before exporting. The normals were getting screwed up.


Here it is. My GPU died so I finally replaced it. Here is the final result. Any feedback is good. Thanks for all the help. I should do more small projects like this...as long as my computer parts don't die.


Albedo, AO, Spec, Gloss, Normal

nickcomeau

the materials are looks pretty good at the moment. Only thing I'm not a fan of right now is the damage to Perry on the blue bottle. Just not really a fan of the damage on the beak.

Jerry_Royals

Here's a fix for the transparent bottles.

ahmed mohamed wrote: »

cool , what about maps

Here's a link to the textures. It's at the bottom.

nickcomeau wrote: »

the materials are looks pretty good at the moment. Only thing I'm not a fan of right now is the damage to Perry on the blue bottle. Just not really a fan of the damage on the beak.

Thanks. Are you able to be more specific on the beak? I dug in some damage on one side of it. Maybe I need to have damage uniformly across the entire beak? If I can jump back into this project I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the crit.

nickcomeau

I guess right now it's focused pretty evenly across the left side of the beak. So maybe spread it out a bit more and make it less evenly spread? It just doesn't look natural at the moment.