A beginners object modeling. CC requested!
polycounter lvl 3
I have been studying various objects and trying to capture them in 3D for about 2 weeks now and thought I would make a thread to try to get some critique. I went to college for 3D and 2D animation, but admittedly got burnt out by the time I graduated and took such a long break that I pretty much have to relearn everything I know about 3D. I am aiming to build a scene in Unreal engine once I have finished all the odds and ends, so learning how to model for a game engine is really important to me.
tldr: haven't done 3D in a while, please help.
Just a simple box with some rubbish in it. I beveled the edges to try to get it to look softer.
The one on the left is the low poly. The one on the right is the one I made befor I worried about how many tris I was making.
This flower came out way nicer than I expected, but Im going to turn the pedals into a double sided plain instead since there are way to many verts for how simple the model is.
and this is my last one to date, A SINK! I love how the sink itself came out, but the faucet is going to need more verts so it doesn't look so boxy.
tldr: haven't done 3D in a while, please help.
Just a simple box with some rubbish in it. I beveled the edges to try to get it to look softer.
The one on the left is the low poly. The one on the right is the one I made befor I worried about how many tris I was making.
This flower came out way nicer than I expected, but Im going to turn the pedals into a double sided plain instead since there are way to many verts for how simple the model is.
and this is my last one to date, A SINK! I love how the sink itself came out, but the faucet is going to need more verts so it doesn't look so boxy.
Replies
Yeah I upscaled some stuff and tried to blend it out, I will avoid doing that from here on out. I worked in 1024x1024 for all of these.
On the flower texture sheet you could overlap all of the UV's of the small petals to save texture space meaning a smaller texture could be used while maintaining the same detail or scaling up the UV's to get better detail for the same texture size.
About usage of polygons: it does depend on what you are making the model for. For example if you are building the models for mobile then you would need to be very restrictive. However if you were producing this for PC or next gen consoles then you would have a much more flexible budget remembering that polygons are mostly not a limiting factor in the performance of games anymore. That being said make sure that you are not being wasteful by having polygons on flat surfaces where no difference is being made to the shape without good reason.
Personally I think it would be better to keep making props and improving and making better props while learning rather than trying to make a scene in a game engine.
Make sure to read up on normal maps and the highpoly -> lowpoly workflow too.
you also should work on your geometry - e.g. deleting/welding edge loops, such as
stuff like the low-poly lamp looks way too low poly for current-gen, too. like, it looks like you made the pipes hollow, which wasn't necessary, and it looks like you have the bulb too polygonally dense. the cage looks really bad now. the box, also, is ridiculously low poly. the trash should have some displacement to it and modelled-in bits of trash
please also work on your UVs - make better use of your space, unwrap things in a way that would be easier to texture, fix seams where seams shouldn't be, etc.
This is some solid advice here, Thank you for taking the time to work this out for me. I will look back into each of my models and try my best to apply better UVs and spend more time on my texture painting!
Thank you both so much for your time and help! I will use this information as best I can and report back once I'm satisfied with the results.
There are two ways you could get around this, both using alpha/opacity maps. When it comes to vegetation in games, modeling out individual leaves and details is obviously going to create a ridiculously dense model. Instead, it's much easier to create leaves from a single simple plane, and then texture them intelligently.
What you want to do is create and model a simple plane to a rough shape that will follow the curve of your object. Unwrap it, create your texture in photoshop. Then you take that texture and make an opacity map - everything you want to appear solid, recolour in white. Everything invisible, recolour in black.
When the diffuse and opacity textures are applied, if you have ONLY coloured the petal white, anything black applied to the plane will be invisible. By checking the 'two sided' option in the Max material window you won't have to bother trying to model an underside of your object. You can use this to model complex shapes like foliage while using the minimal amount of polys.
I tried 2 methods. The left one has each pedal as its own plane, the Right has one large plane that is using an alpha map to make the blank space transparent between pedals. The right model is significantly a smaller poly count (obviously) and I believe it looks just about the same.