A Guide to weapon modeling for FPP games
polycounter lvl 8
My huge article abut FPP gun modeling finaly avaliable in english!
I hope you like it!
Feel free to share and comment!
"The publication concerns creation of models in video games. It discusses issues connected with modelling weapons and props which are held by a character in FPP games. The Tutorial is aimed for pre-intermediate and intermediate graphics.
Each sub-sections comprises of a text comment describing a particular issue, followed by illustrations and examples taken from video games."
Replies
One thing caught my eye. In section 8.1 you shrink the mirrored UVs down to 1 pixel, for the bake mesh. This is a bad way to work. You should simply offset them 1 unit on the U axis, like you show in step 7.5. This will bake without errors, and the same model can be used for both bake and in-game use.
It would be helpful I think to provide more information about how modeling affects baking. For example
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_Map_Modeling#Low-Poly_Mesh
Yes, you're right. UV offset it's enough to get perfect bake. I will remove chapter 8.1.
The information and thought process on the practicalities of how the asset will read from the player's POV is particularly interesting.
@skyline5gtr
No, but you can always Print it to PDF
If I pack using UVLayout for example, my UVs get all mixed, but good use of space. You achieve booth. How ? By Hand (I hope not?) ???
I have a bad news for you... :C By hand only.
Really? Is not listed in the features list....
Thanks again guys!
@MediumSolid
Professionaly? 6+ years
From the very beggining of my aventure with modeling. It's quite handy and i like Blender hotkey-workflow. It allows you to quickly get the result.
I work also with textures, materials, lighting... mainly with stuff connected with environment.
You can use boxes in the packing options of UV layout to keep elements together in an auto-pack.
What I missed is camera layers, the weapons and hands use a seperate camera, this camera could even use forward rendering as deferred warrants no usage, and a note about typical FOVs for FPS cameras should be included. 35 - 50° is about the range that looks acceptable, while 45° seems to be the most popular.
The images about Texel density are hard to see any difference on, a gradient would show the principle much better id say
Additionally/optionally, faces could be deleted which are never visible from first person or in any of the animations.
A small notion about aliasing elements would be good tho, such as often seen on pistol slide handles.
Edges should also be softer relating to the distance to the camera. Further elements such as the weapon front should have softer edges, while closer ones sharper edges.
Also it would probably be safe to assume that a sole first person weapon should have no mip maps, this saves texture space and looks better. There could also be some issues with a weapon taking a mip map instead of the original one in an animation or something if mip maps are enabled.
Anisotropic filtering would also play a role as weapons usually are in low angles towards the camera
Thanks again! I will update this part soon!