Halo 3/4 Assault Rifle [WIP]

JorisArt

Here are the final renders:





model
I hope you like it!
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I started working on the assault rifle from Halo a while ago. I want it to be a remastered version of the Halo 3 rifle, with the amount of detail the Halo 4 version has. I don't like the sci-fi look on the Halo 4 ar, so I tried to keep certain shapes more smooth like in the Halo 3 version.
I want this to be a portfolio piece, so critiques are very much appreciated.

JorisArt

Low poly is coming along, also did a quick test bake:

CybranM

clean bake but I feel like you could optimize the lowpoly a bit more
I think its going to look great when its done

JorisArt

Thanks a lot. I optimized it some more, but somehow the smoothing groups are causing a lot of issues that are very subtle in Marmoset but really visible in Substance Painter. I don't know how to solve this because in some areas where I would expect problems to occur it looks great, while other areas cause huge artifacs. I don't want to split my smoothing groups to prevent hard edges, so my only option would be to add a support loop? If that's the case I would need these loops almost everywhere if I wanted a perfect bake. I already read this thread multiple times but it still confuses me.

JorisArt

After doing a lot of research and testing I have some decent results and I think I'm ready to continue modeling the rest of the low poly.
All I changed to improve the bake was this:
1. Bake in 3ds Max instead of XNormal.
2. Use .obj instead of .fbx for previewing in Substance Painter.
3. Triangulate the mesh when exporting. (I don't know if 3ds Max uses a triangulated version when baking?)
The topology, smoothing groups and uv's haven't changed since the last post. Also I went from ~2500 to 1180 tris after optimizing more so it was definitely worth it.



Next update will probably be the complete low poly, unless I run into some interesting problems that I feel like sharing. Should be fun!

CybranM

JorisArt said:

I don't want to split my smoothing groups to prevent hard edges

What do you mean by preventing hard edges?
If you use a normal map hard edges arent any problem, just make sure that the hard edges are cut on the UV.

In regards to your question about if 3ds max uses triangulated mesh for rendering: yes.
All meshes are tris all the time but some of the edges are marked as "hidden" to make selections easier.
The problem is when you export a mesh without clearly marking what direction the "hidden" edge is it might get flipped in the new program.

JorisArt

CybranM said:

What do you mean by preventing hard edges?

I could have worded that better, instead of preventing hard edges I meant preventing the seams caused by them (and also the uv split). I am using hard edges on the 90 degree edges without issues, I just don't want them in places like this:

CybranM said:

The problem is when you export a mesh without clearly marking what direction the "hidden" edge is it might get flipped in the new program.

I think you just explained the whole issue here. When I export the .obj as quads I get lots of errors, but when triangulated on export there are no issues. However when I triangulate the .fbx on export, the errors still persist. Which leads me to believe that somehow the fbx is not triangulating correctly. Exporting the triangulated .obj, importing it back into Max and then exporting it as a .fbx works fine though.

Maxilator

The smoothing errors you got were because you didn't triangulate, you said something about max using a triangulated version when baking, the thing is, your mesh is always triangulated under the hood, even if you use quads, they are just not set and can change the Triangle direction (since a quad can be split in two different directions to become a triangle).
That's the gist of the problem you had, when baking the baker might cut the quads one way and your viewer might cut the quads the other way, resulting in both uv's stretching in a weird way and normal being off if you try and bake with a quad mesh.

JorisArt

Finished the low poly, set up uv's and smoothing groups and baked some maps. I had no problems at all with baking after figuring out the triangulation thing, which is awesome. 

Here are some images:


Baked ambient occlusion and normals, curvature from Photoshop:


Substance Painter:


UE4:


It's 11.891 polys.

Textures next!

JorisArt

~

Sage

Nice work

Polygoblin

That's a good looking bake. The general width looks very thin. It's going to be a pain fixing that kind of issue at this stage but that top and FPV shot is telling. The rifle is not much wider than the barrel itself...