Handplane - X1

X-One

Hey, I'm going to be trying my hand at this:

http://www.jimbodetools.com/Majestic-Fancy-Scottish-Infill-Smooth-Plane-with-Double-Perforated-Brass-Lever-Cap-p48329.html



I'm not all that familiar with handplanes, so I'm not all that sure how they're completely put together. This guy doesn't appear to be assembled in the same way as a Stanely tool, so I'm probably going to have to make up a little, based on references I can find for similar tools.

Final:
Handplane bakes


Sketchfab screengrabs

Wires/Triangle Count

Presentation Shots

model

X-One

Progress:


I need to finish refining the basemesh, and get it into zbrush to rough it up. I'm planning on using floaters for the screws rather than modeling them in or sculpting them. I'm more interested in testing/learning Handplane. I've done some other tests already, and the one thing I don't quite understand is how to bake out MatIDs. Is it possible to bake a multiple ID High-poly mesh down to a single material low-poly mesh? 

X-One

Okay, so I finally found some time to work on this again. 

First off, my experience with using Handplane Baker: Overall, I found it fast, and fairly easy to use. There were some issues, but I did not need to do very much cleanup with any maps once I got everything set up. I appreciate the save feature quite a bit, as it allowed me to make changes in an iterative manner. 

Like many others, I found that the scale of my object seemed to produce banding/faceting in my curvature map. In the end, I wasn't able to fully resolve it, but it didn't seem to cause me any major distress.

One of my biggest gripes was with the ID map. I wasn't able to figure out any way to get Handplane to recognize my material IDs from 3DS Max. I also tried assigning vertex colours for the sake of experimentation, and that may have worked, but it was crashing Max for me, so I wasn't able to fully test that functionality. In the end, I ended up separating my HP mesh by material, and creating and assigning materials in Handplane manually. It wasn't horrible, but it was not very smooth either.

Generally, I had no problem with my normal bakes, but I did find I had some issues on objects with tight concave corners. It wasn't unexpected, as I usually expect issues in those spots. I tried messing with ray distances, but didn't really know what type of values to use, so I ended up using a custom cage which worked quite well.

Overall, I like it quite a bit, and I definately enjoy the speed. For me, I'd just love to see some more comrehensive documentation, especially regarding object scale, and which values to adjust based on scale. Something as simple as an example of vaues for a 1mx1m object vs values for a 10mx10m object.
Updated top post. Going to see if I can get it into UE4 for some final shots.

X-One

Updated top post with some UE4 images (and fixed up my presentation a bit).