Final Fantasy XV - X Potion

Andreicus

Hi all, so i decided to do some props to improve my modeling and retopology skills and also to have more stuff for my portfolio and since i'm a big fan of the Final Fantasy franchise and the Windows Edition of FF XV is going to be released soon ( eheh can't wait ) i wanted to do a "tribute" to the game so i decided to do the iconic X Potion from the series.

Now, i took the concept from the "Art & Design - Final Fantasy XV" Artbook available here: https://www.candb.com/en/artwork/2364/the-art-and-design-of-final-fantasy-xv-square-enix.html and it should be a unique concept that isn't in the game.
As always any feedback or critique is appreciated.

This is the concept ( i took a photo from the book ):



**Final rendering updated 11/03/2018 everything below this image are old WIP stuff



Software used:

Modeling: Maya
Texturing: Substance Painter
Rendering: Marmoset Toolbag

**OLD WIP stuff**

For the moment i made the high poly version and i assigned the materials for the future ID Masks.
Here are some screenshots:

High Poly:



High Poly with wireframe:



High Poly Close up screenshots:





High Poly with materials ( the ornaments have their owns material it's just maya that for some...reason it doesn't fully visualize the entire yellow material...):





I will use 2 differents texture sets, 1 for the whole bottle and another one for the emissive liquid inside.
For the retopology stage i want to try the quad draw tool of maya, if it doesn't work out i'll delete the edges manually.

Andreicus

Almost finished the low poly version, here are some screenshots, the only parts left are the main bottle case and the iron bars around the glass.

Cap:





Emissive liquid:





Iron top bars:





Pyramid, the "high" version was already low poly so i didn't change anything but i'll probably add more subdivsions to the high poly before baking just to be sure:



Top Bottle, i made 3 versions of the low poly, one with 3k tris, one with 6k tris and another with 8k tris, i had some problems with baking in the past so i made 3 different versions so i can go back and forth with the details.
This is the lowest one:





I tried out the Quad Draw tool of Maya but i didn't like it so i deleted the edges manually to avoid any artifacts or geometry errors and with the more simple meshes i used a combination of Maya Reduce tool ( decimation )+manual clean up.

Andreicus

i finished the low poly, here are the latest 2 parts:

Bottle main body:





Bottle Bars, there are a total of 30 bars and a single bar go from 400 to 500 tris, i deleted the top faces and some edges loops along the body but unfortunately due to the large number of bars the tris count is still quite high:





Full low poly mesh, from 500k to 30k:

Andreicus

Ok so i was looking for a way to reduce the tris count a little more but before doing that i did a test bake to check if everything was ok and unfortunately it is not because i'm getting some weird white and black spots on the mesh after baking the normal maps.
I'm using Substance Painter to bake all the maps and i exported the mesh in .fbx format from Maya.

Settings that i use normally for fbx export: smoothing groups checked, smooth mesh checked, referenced asset content checked, everything else disabled.
I also tried exporting with different settings but it didn't change anything.

Settings that i normally use for Substance baking: compute tangent space per fragment checked ( when importing the mesh ), UE4 preset, match by mesh name ( because i have multiple parts ), antialiasing usually at 4x4, frontal and rear distance at 0,01.

I read a lot of stuff here on the forum and on the net about "how to deal with baking errors" like the low and high mesh should match closely, triangulate before exporting and other stuff but at this point i tried everything and i don't know what to do, so if someone could help me understand the problem i will be glad.

Now here we go with the images:

Baked with the default settings that i normally use without anti aliasing:













Baked with the same settings but with anti aliasing at 4x4:









Baked with no antiliasing but with Max Frontal Distance set to 0.005 and Rear to 0.01, i noticed that if i increase both the settings ( ex. 0.03 ) it only get worse but if i lower only the frontal distance it gets better but some artifacts are still there:









Normal map view:







Difference between Low and High geometry ( as you can see they match closely ), the High is the colored one and the Low is the one that i have selected:

ZacD

Your approach for the low poly is not ideal. You could easily get the polycount down to 3k tris with some basic optimization. The lowpoly is also not designed in a way that will bake well. 

The bars could probably be flat and simply baked on for the lowpoly, OR you could model the bars onto the glass body, but still have it be one piece of geometry. 

Large clean forms in the low poly bake better and tend to get lit better and look cleaner once the model is in a game engine. The bars wont handle lighting or aliasing well. 

Andreicus

ZacD said:

Your approach for the low poly is not ideal. You could easily get the polycount down to 3k tris with some basic optimization. The lowpoly is also not designed in a way that will bake well. 

The bars could probably be flat and simply baked on for the lowpoly, OR you could model the bars onto the glass body, but still have it be one piece of geometry. 

Large clean forms in the low poly bake better and tend to get lit better and look cleaner once the model is in a game engine. The bars wont handle lighting or aliasing well. 

Hi and thanks for your time, could you explain in more detail why the low poly is not designed well? Do You mean that the bars are not designed well ( as you pointed out ) or the overall mesh ?

Regarding the tris count when i usually go very low the shape of the low poly doesn't match the high poly and i get other baking errors so i must create some edge loops to make it more similar to the high poly and the tris count goes up, do you have any tips ?

Regarding the bars i'll make them attached to the glass surface with bezier curves and i'll extrude a cylinder along the curves and then i'll bake them.

Also do you know what causes the black and white spots at the bottom of the bottle and along the edges of the upper mesh  ? Because i read a lot of stuff about baking and high to low workflow but i still don't understand it quiete well, sorry for the numerous questions.

Andreicus

Ok, i solved all the issues with baking and this kind of stuff, at the end it was a problem of UVs so i remade everything from scratch especially the bars.
How they looks now: 



At the end i decided to leave the bars instead of baking them directly on to the glass surface because they were looking too flat and bad.

I finished texturing and rendering everything so here it is the final piece, textured in Substance Painter and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag: