The Big Knife
polycounter lvl 12
Hello. I finished another piece of artwork. In addition to displaying the work, I would like to list how long it took me to do each step. I don't know if I'm slow compared to a professional or not. I've never worked alongside professionals in a full pipeline before so I'd like to reach out to the community and compare stats. If any of this is taking too long then I can begin to analyze why. I normally provide my source files but they are effectively useless now due to an error I'm hoping to fix. (link at the bottom). I will update this thread with your critiques but unfortunately I won't be able to edit the mesh in any way for the time being. I will also have a link to a Marmoset viewer file below as well.
Original Art (5th sword from the left):
High: 8 hours
Low Poly: 5 hours
Unwrapping and Baking: 2 days
Texturing (all maps): 10 hours (ran into a few issues so it may take longer)
Final:
Texture Size: 2048
Tri Count: 11291
Marmoset Veiwer on Art Station: https://daniellooartist.artstation.com/portfolio/big-sword
Error: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2310234#post2310234
Original Art (5th sword from the left):
High: 8 hours
Low Poly: 5 hours
Unwrapping and Baking: 2 days
Texturing (all maps): 10 hours (ran into a few issues so it may take longer)
Final:
Texture Size: 2048
Tri Count: 11291
Marmoset Veiwer on Art Station: https://daniellooartist.artstation.com/portfolio/big-sword
Error: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2310234#post2310234
Replies
Acts like an overlapping plane or duplicated geo.
You seem to have lit it with a lone white point light and some uncolored ambient light. For metals, reflection is key, so you probably want a proper cube map to show that.
The textures are waaay to grungy and noisy. Too much noise makes your shapes hard to read. Have less wear, tear and grunge, and use it to emphasize edges and crevices where you do use it. Make it tell a story.
On the material side, that's not what PBR metals look like. Metals should be black in the albedo, and bright and flatly colored in the reflection/specular/substance texture (whatever you want to call it). There are proper physically correct values to use for the different metals, but I'm not sure where to find them. Most of the texture work on the metals should be done in the gloss. You won't be able to see if your metals look good until you get some proper reflections going.
If you fix these issues, this piece could end up looking pretty good
Edit: I had a look at some of the previous work you've posted, and it seems that the feedback I'm giving you here is the exact same feedback you've been getting previously.
Any other suggestions?
You can find images of "used knives" on google. They will very often contain natural reproductions of wear and tear on metal.
If you need more tips on how to texture in PBR, you can refer to this tutorial
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Artstation Link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/big-sword
Start off your textures clean and build up details after the base material values are set. Think of it like the real world. That sword was made and it was clean. Then it got used, and worn. Your wear and tear should tell a story to reflect that. The current texture is far better than the first attempt but I think you can make this "great" instead of "good".
Artstation (With just the base material): https://www.artstation.com/artwork/big-sword
Why is the leather on the grip so glossy and low res?
It seems the edge of the blade looks faceted for some reason.
The hilt has some odd geo as well, very tight tris.
Also This is what I was previously talking about:
I like the suggestion for starting with base materials. So I have a quick question about that. Is there any chart for metalness maps? The one above only works for microsurface and it looks weird when i use it for metalness. I like the metalness workflow because it reflects the environment.
Source (132MB): https://www.dropbox.com/s/ohjpm4eq2opqjau/Knife.zip?dl=0
Artstation Link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/big-sword