Batarang Redesign Project

Poseidon8734

Its been a while since I have modeled but I am trying to get back into it. This is a new project I am starting based on a new concept I came up with. Hopefully I will be able to put this into my portfolio for college once it is completely done. I am having some issues with the low poly model and I am not 100% sure how to fix it in Maya. If anyone could check my poly's as well that would be greatly appreciated! Also, in the smoothed version I noticed those two little slits and I am not sure why they are there. Thanks again everyone!  
Here is the concept I made that I am working off of!
Inspired by Tyler Ryan's Batman Redesign: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/wvOJw

Poseidon8734

Fixed that previous issue along with a bunch of others I was completely unaware of. Here is my progress so far. Comments and critiques very welcome! 

Brian "Panda" Choi

It's looking like it's coming along.  Is this object meant to fold into itself in any way, or does it come as is?

Most of the pop of this asset is gonna come from how you textures this in what I'm assuming will be Physically Based Rendering.  What are you planning to do to texture this?

Poseidon8734

Brian "Panda" Choi said:

It's looking like it's coming along.  Is this object meant to fold into itself in any way, or does it come as is?

Most of the pop of this asset is gonna come from how you textures this in what I'm assuming will be Physically Based Rendering.  What are you planning to do to texture this?

I really didn't intend for it to fold in but that also, for some reason, didn't cross my mind.

I am planning to do some kind of brushed metal textures for the main body. As far as the large cutouts with the red rings I had planned to do some kind of red, emissive texture. The logo in the middle will probably be a mix of both but I am still thinking internally about about what other textures I can include to try to make it more diverse.

Poseidon8734

Did some more work on the batarang today. Re-checked all of the objects to make sure there were no obvious, model-breaking issues. I also managed to UV all of the batarang as best as I could. I am pretty sure this is the first time I did it in a decent manner to be honest. I am wondering about the logo in the middle. I want it to be accurate and look nice but I am not quite sure how someone would go about making that logo with less poly's and keeping the nice accuracy. Next is making the high poly model and baking the alphas. I will probably do that in maya as well. Comments and critiques are welcomed 

Brian "Panda" Choi

Don't worry about polycounts or nGons for your high poly.  Just make it look clean and high poly.

Poseidon8734

Brian "Panda" Choi said:

Don't worry about polycounts or nGons for your high poly.  Just make it look clean and high poly.

Well what I have right now is low-poly. I don't plan to worry about polycounts when doing high-polys because if I understand correctly I will only be using that for the map anyway right?

Poseidon8734

So I've been very busy with multiple things in this project at once. This is the first project I am ever going to get around to texturing so I thought I should learn Substance Painter(which I did). I did a test render tonight knowing I have a lot of changes to make. I think the low-poly is actually too low-poly in some places, which I will fix. Another thing is when I am baking the high-poly onto the low-poly I am getting some weird issues. I have tried it through Maya and Substance painter and I am getting issues with both for some reason. I will probably end up remaking the high-poly from what I can tell. I also noticed that I may want to add some more details in the low and high-poly just to make it a more interesting prop in general. Here is the test render I did in Iray through Substance Painter. You can tell from the holes in the mesh that it may be slightly too low-poly. That and the center portion with the logo.

SamStark

cool stuff. Remember you can always use bevel tool to smooth things out, try not to rely on smooth poly too much especially when doing hard surface. 

I dont know if this bit here is intentional or not, but you can soften the edge normal to make it look not so edgy.

I don't know where the second image came from, but it probably because your front/ back verts pushed too much backward/ forward. Or the normals juz gone weird.

Hi-Poly is usually meant for normal mapping yes, but it's more like adding a small detail, like a bump or a nail. If you want your model to look good you will still need to add more division (maybe with bevel tool).

Poseidon8734

SamStark said:

cool stuff. Remember you can always use bevel tool to smooth things out, try not to rely on smooth poly too much especially when doing hard surface. 

I dont know if this bit here is intentional or not, but you can soften the edge normal to make it look not so edgy.

I don't know where the second image came from, but it probably because your front/ back verts pushed too much backward/ forward. Or the normals juz gone weird.

Hi-Poly is usually meant for normal mapping yes, but it's more like adding a small detail, like a bump or a nail. If you want your model to look good you will still need to add more division (maybe with bevel tool).

For some reason when I was doing the high-poly a couple of days ago a lot of the best tools to use somehow slipped my mind. Thanks for the reminder and ideas . I really appreciate it! I think I will still play around with the low-poly a lot and try to increase the divisions in some places. As for the high-poly, I will completely redo it after I redo the low-poly. Thanks for the help man! I am honestly so bad at working the pipeline so that is what this is for

Poseidon8734

I am not sure why but when I keep baking my high-poly in Substance Painter I keep getting these completely black maps. I have tried a couple times to remake the high-poly but for some reason it keeps happening. If anyone knows a fix or might know what I am doing wrong when I am backing that would be very helpful

Brian "Panda" Choi

@Poseidon8734
Ok, this is an understandable issue.  Happened to me when I began doing this early in Substance Painter.

Feel free to private message me and we can set up a Google hangout call to go through this because this troubleshooting takes a little longer than text.

Poseidon8734

JoshuaG said:

Do you have a naming convention set up? Also did you permanently smooth the high poly when exported?

I did permanently smooth it and what is a naming convention?