FlashLight and Survival Knife

ZennLDN

Hi guys,

So a couple of months ago I started learning modelling and texturing so I could make some assets for an UE4 project me and a friend have started. I just wanted to show what I've got so far and get some feedback from some people that actually know about this stuff as it's all new to me and there's so much to take in. After a lot of research my workflow is currently..

Model mesh and create UVs in Maya 2018

Bake Normals in Substance Painter/Designer (I know the general consensus is Xnormals but I've tried all sorts of settings and substance always comes out on top)

Mesh Details i.e. sculpting / height details in Zbrush or Substance Painter/Designer

Material/Texturing in Substance Painter/Designer

I've made a bunch of items which i've ended up deleting as I've learnt new techniques/have thought of better ways to do things or have just looked back on them and thought they've looked terrible - so I really haven't got much to show for all of the hours I've spent tryna get my head round this stuff.

As it stands, I've just finished two items which I'd say I'm happy with and wanted to get some other peoples thoughts.

I've made a Knife and a Flashlight, both with the workflow listed above. The assets will be used for a first peron game aimed at Nex Gen consoles, I'm trying to get things looking pretty realistic and follow a PBR workflow (and I think succeeding?).

Anyway, my questions are...

My low polys are about 5k-7k tri's, is that too high?

I've tried to keep them as low as possible while retaining detail, this was quite hard with the flashlight as I needed to keep the polys quite high to make the cylinder look decent as I wasn't able to get a great bake otherwise

My workflow - is there something I'm missing or could be doing better?
Does anyone else find that Substance bakes better normals than Xnormals? I don't know how outdated a lot of the information I read is, you find yourself googling a problem and after you read the answer it's like, "oh, that solution was posted in 2014" - I imagine it can be hard to keep on top of the best practice with the rate the technology moves forward

and..
What do you guys think of the assets?

FlashLight




Thanks for reading !

ZennLDN

Spwee

Hey! a little critique from my observations. 

First. 

The Handle part seems really flat, I think if you model those impressions in, it would look quite a bit better. And could also give it more personality.

Secondly, the blade texture to me seems a little weak. Look at the image below, notice how the parts of the blade still have a bit of shine to them. I would play around with yours and give it a shine on the non-rusted parts.  Also, the rough embossed noise texture imo seems a bit repetitive imo.

ZennLDN

Spwee said:

Hey! a little critique from my observations. 

First. 

The Handle part seems really flat, I think if you model those impressions in, it would look quite a bit better. And could also give it more personality.

Secondly, the blade texture to me seems a little weak. Look at the image below, notice how the parts of the blade still have a bit of shine to them. I would play around with yours and give it a shine on the non-rusted parts.  Also, the rough embossed noise texture imo seems a bit repetitive imo.







Hi,

Thanks for the feedback Spwee. I agree the handle does look quite flat, I actually changed design half way through from a flat-ish handle to this one - if I actually model the indents I was just concerned about the poly count getting too high. I also agree the rough/noise texture is a bit repetitive that's why I put quite a bit of dirt over it. Any other ideas to mix it up?

I think the lighting in Substance is quite dark when I've taken the screenshots - I'll import them to a scene in UE4 and post some updates

FYI - This was my reference image