Need help with topology and UE4 integration
polycounter lvl 7
I really need some help with the topology of a rifle I modeled based on the Brown Bess, as well as the modeling workflow for UE4.
I'm a 2D/texture artist, and so far I have been modeling mostly as a hobby.
At the moment I am living in a town with very few job options and in a country with a language I do not speak, so I decided that instead of rotting away as an unemployed bum I would learn 3D modeling for games on a more serious level.
I started modeling for a very small team of amateur game developpers, so the rifle will actually be included in a game, made with Unreal Engine 4. I do not have experience with Unreal Engine yet.
Here is the problem I'm having:
I would really appreciate opinions and advice from people who have more experience than me.
I have been modeling this weapon for ages, I've never been particularly fast unless I'm really confortable with what I'm doing, and there is now some pressure to include the rifle in the game as soon as possible.
Learning to use the engine and testing the model properly would take some time, and I already have spent the last few days fighting crashing software while dealing with bakes, so I thought that maybe by asking around I could know in which direction to focus my efforts.
Here are my main questions:
Are hard and soft edges (smoothing groups, is that correct?) displayed as such in Unreal 4?
It seems that many people are having trouble with it when I do some research on the matter.
Is it a good idea to model based on the assumption that I'll be using smoothing groups, or is it more common to average the normals of a model when importing it into the engine?
If it is indeed a good idea to use smoothing groups, one of the problems might have been the fact that I used the setting "average normals" to bake the normal map in Xnormal instead of "use exported normals" for the low poly (I used the model with smoothing groups for the bakes).
To test this I rebaked one of the pieces with "use exported normals" the pinching seems to be gone in most places, but the normal appears much more flat:
Regardless of the previous questions, do you think that including so many triangles was a bad idea and it's best to have more geometry with a better edge flow, even if the polycount will increase considerably?
Are triangles in game models really ok or not? Because right now they seem like the Devil to me.
Should I just retopologize the whole thing again and make an effort to make it all quads?
I'm not excited at the prospect of redoing the topology + UVs + Bakes while there are people waiting for the rifle to be finished, but I really would like to make it right, and not settle for "good enough".
I'm really sorry if this is all confusing, I am a bit lost myself and have so many versions of the same thing I don't really know what to use with what any more.
I would really appreciate any help you can give :poly122:
I'm a 2D/texture artist, and so far I have been modeling mostly as a hobby.
At the moment I am living in a town with very few job options and in a country with a language I do not speak, so I decided that instead of rotting away as an unemployed bum I would learn 3D modeling for games on a more serious level.
I started modeling for a very small team of amateur game developpers, so the rifle will actually be included in a game, made with Unreal Engine 4. I do not have experience with Unreal Engine yet.
Here is the problem I'm having:
I would really appreciate opinions and advice from people who have more experience than me.
I have been modeling this weapon for ages, I've never been particularly fast unless I'm really confortable with what I'm doing, and there is now some pressure to include the rifle in the game as soon as possible.
Learning to use the engine and testing the model properly would take some time, and I already have spent the last few days fighting crashing software while dealing with bakes, so I thought that maybe by asking around I could know in which direction to focus my efforts.
Here are my main questions:
Are hard and soft edges (smoothing groups, is that correct?) displayed as such in Unreal 4?
It seems that many people are having trouble with it when I do some research on the matter.
Is it a good idea to model based on the assumption that I'll be using smoothing groups, or is it more common to average the normals of a model when importing it into the engine?
If it is indeed a good idea to use smoothing groups, one of the problems might have been the fact that I used the setting "average normals" to bake the normal map in Xnormal instead of "use exported normals" for the low poly (I used the model with smoothing groups for the bakes).
To test this I rebaked one of the pieces with "use exported normals" the pinching seems to be gone in most places, but the normal appears much more flat:
Regardless of the previous questions, do you think that including so many triangles was a bad idea and it's best to have more geometry with a better edge flow, even if the polycount will increase considerably?
Are triangles in game models really ok or not? Because right now they seem like the Devil to me.
Should I just retopologize the whole thing again and make an effort to make it all quads?
I'm not excited at the prospect of redoing the topology + UVs + Bakes while there are people waiting for the rifle to be finished, but I really would like to make it right, and not settle for "good enough".
I'm really sorry if this is all confusing, I am a bit lost myself and have so many versions of the same thing I don't really know what to use with what any more.
I would really appreciate any help you can give :poly122:
Replies
Wow, that's a lot of great information, thanks!