Obi-Wan Lightsaber

HashBrownHamish

*LATEST* (more later in thread)




I've modelled this real time lightsaber based off of Obi wan's third lightsaber. I've been playing a lot of Swtor with friends and that is where the motivation came from ^^


My texturing isn't finale, i'm looking for critique and such. Also i have no idea how to handle the actual blade part.


(The waviness in the normals needs to go i think)





EDIT: Ah! I've realised i've had my screens saturation etc.. messed with (flux for eyes) so these renders are a bit colder than i thought..

DanielR17

Hey,
It seems close enough to the "actual" Obiwan third light saber.
Any new thought about how you're gonna make the light sword?

Regarding the texturing, maybe you can do a very light dirt pass?

TophT

There is a little bit of scalloping in the normal map that is apparent in the crystal lens assembly. (the little bulge before the tip.) If your UVs are straight you can simply stretch out the portion that looks good over the entire length and fix it easily.
I also agree that it needs a dirt pass and some wear and tear. Feels too new right now.

HashBrownHamish

Yep dirt pass is coming this is just all the materials set up etc.. I don't know how to handle the light sword yet, an emissive is going to be in there somewhere but i have never done anything with fancy lighting in marmoset.

I don't quite see what you mean about the normal map scalloping

james01

HashBrownHamish wrote: »

My texturing isn't finale, i'm looking for critique and such. Also i have no idea how to handle the actual blade part.

For FPS weapon of this size you could go higher and your bake will appear better (the waviness that you speak of will be reduced).
Especially on the top cylinder at the end of the weapon since that is what you would mainly see from an FPS view.
Even things like the belt clip can be a lot higher (if you've noticed most FPS grenades these days have circular pins that are very smooth, not chiseled).
A rebuild shouldn't take much time to do,(a simple cylindrical extrusion) and you have the materials sorted out already.

TophT

Here is a better explanation and fix for you to sort out the normal map.
Hope it makes sense.

almighty_gir

Or... you could learn why it's there in the first place and rethink your workflow to correct it before it happens?

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154

Tobbo

Yeah I would avoid trying to manually cleanup normal map errors in Photoshop. It's a hack fix and a bad habit.

It would be much better that you learn why it's being caused in the first place.

The lightsaber looks nice though. You may want to make the top flat part a little thicker.

skyline5gtr

Reference is off in a few placed particular the gold in middle

TophT

Nothing wrong with manipulating normal maps as long as you understand them. Hell, I have normal maps that are completely hand painted. No high poly needed. Bad habit you say? If my method is faster than yours and yields the same result, that doesn't make it a hack. It' makes me better than you. Of course it's better to understand how to not make mistakes in the first place. That's a ridiculous comment. "Do it better" isn't a valid critic. Knowing that the cage was misaligned or that your object is just too low poly to support that type of baking helps. Posting a link to a 10 page thread that may or may not even reference low poly cylinder normal maps isn't helpful. There is too much information outside of the problem there and too much opinion in the guise of knowledge.

EarthQuake

TophT wrote: »

Posting a link to a 10 page thread that may or may not even reference low poly cylinder normal maps isn't helpful.

Wat? The OP in that thread addresses cylinder normal maps in great detail. Did you not bother to even read it?

TophT

Actually I gave up looking for relevance 5 pages in.

EarthQuake

So you didn't see the first post? It's linked in my previous reply.

TophT

Nope, My forum is set to show the last post first. so I end up at last page and the have to clicky clicky may way through. See the link you (EarthQuake) posted was helpful. Directly to relevant information. Why don't people just do that?

EarthQuake

Well, to be fair, the link Gir posted goes to the first post for me. So it's less that he didn't post a helpful link, and more that your settings show you information in a different way than most people. I would think it would be common sense to check the first post (the origin of the discussion) if you don't understand the relevance of what is being discussed on the last page of a long thread.

Tobbo

If you're in an actual team environment where assets are being passed between several artists, it's actually faster if you get the asset baking correctly naturally without having to manually go in and paint out errors every time you need to bake it out again because your boss wants you to make a small tweak.

It's a bad habit and a hack because of actually trying to solve and understand the bake errors you're just covering it up, or worse, you're passing it off to other artists to deal with problems that you could care less to understand and get right.

Most (not all) baking errors occur because of human error.

EarthQuake

Right, when it comes to revisions in a production environment it can be slower to paint out errors in PhotoShop. Lets say your AD asks you to give more resolution to the sights on a gun, now you have to rescale and pack the entire uv set to accomplish that, rebake the maps, and repaint any normal map errors. If anyone else has to make revisions to your asset, rather than simply baking the file they have to reverse engineer whatever you did to make it look right.

It's also not a universal solution, and becomes much harder to do the more complex the asset gets, so it's good to understand how to tackle the problem in different ways. Additionally, a normal map is a complex data set of math which is not only represents details but shading compensation. The more you paint over bits, the higher likelihood you will introduce smoothing errors or other undesirable artifacts.

TophT

Oh, there was no lack of understanding. Just maybe people don't realize that not everyone has the website configured in the same manner, myself included.
Funny thing about this whole thing is that one of the classes I teach actually has a lecture where I drill into the students that painting over a normal map is a bad thing. That lecture revolves around symmetrical UV seams. I find though with mechanical models like this, where the UVs are straight, manipulating them isn't so bad.
You're right about iterative approvals, though. Pain in the arse if you need to go over the model time and again. but sometimes pipelines don't allow for time enough to make a high poly.
I once had a contract that required 6 characters to be sculpted, painted, render meshes created, textures bakes, rigged and skinned and finally posed and rendered all in the span of one week.
The deadline was firm as it was for a convention and they couldn't alter that. All that and I signed the deal without having a computer on which to work. When that happens you take any and all shortcuts you can. Sometimes the results aren't pretty, and I would never recommend it for a proper pipeline. But that work needed to get done and in a hurry. A few hand painted normal maps there save me hours and hours of time.

TophT

Any way, we hijacked poor Hamish's thread while he was looking for advice.
Hamish, clean up those normal maps and dirty that sucker up.

HashBrownHamish

I've done some more work and i'm close to happy with it. I'm having trouble using the transparency for materials in marmoset. At the moment the blade is a separate obj and the material uses a mix of transparency and emissive with also cull back faces turned off.

If i try and use transparency all on one obj however, the hilt becomes see through. I have modified the albedo's alpha so i'm confused on this one x)

And also the glow on the lightsaber is thanks to bloom.

PS: I suck at taking good renders







C&C is more than welcome, i failed to point out i'm a student btw ^^