Please help me improve my textures

AirmanEpic

G'day y'all! 

I'm working on improving my textures. 

Here is the best state I can get it.

I'm interested in knowing - how do I bake normals properly? How do I go from low to highpoly properly? I feel like I have a lot to improve on my textures and have essentially no idea how to go about doing that. I'd be happy to provide models, substance painter files, and anything else that might be useful for improvement.

Thank you for the help ahead of time.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Have you EVER baked normals  before?

AirmanEpic

I've tried various programs and not had much luck. I have Zbrush, Cinema 4D, and Substance painter, and the maps baked with each tend to... well not work very well so I've gotten frustrated with the process. would be 100% interested in tutorials to that effect.

zaha

Hey!

Not a professional here, but maybe I can give you some tips anyway. Your texture looks like a nice base but left unfinished. It's lacking details like wear & tear, markings, engraved text or simply something like texture on the grip. Weapon grips usually have a rough texture to them to improve the grip (just google weapon grip to see what I mean).

I recently watched a video about an important artists skill: Observation. This might help you improve your texture: https://youtu.be/qpd1AKwJLUg

Regarding baking, what's the problem exactly? To me this was pretty straightforward and easy to do with Substance Painter, even as a hobbyist. Plus there are hundreds of tutorials out there that explain it way better than I could in a forum post. There might be some artifacting at times, but that's something to solve on an individual basis, best with screenshots of the problem.

Zi0

If you want to make models like weapons I would suggest learning subD modeling, baking for a high to low poly and then getting into textures.

AirmanEpic

Ok, @Zi0 I'd be interested in that. The problem is I don't quite know how to bake from high to low. When I do that the lowpoly tends to not have any of the detail and instead the whole thing looks quite bad. Maybe I should post a new thread about my struggles in that department. Thank you for the suggestion.

Zi0

I would suggest to check out a couple of tutorials on baking in substance for instance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEixVr6elpw

Ashervisalis

If your baked textures tend not to have any baked detail on them, you've gotta delve deeper! Do a simple project: Create a plane and put a bunch of small details into it. Then, create another plane that takes up the same amount of space, UV map it, and then bake the details down from the high poly to the low poly plane. If the details aren't showing up, you may need to increase your distance (in settings). Does this work?

Check out Allegorithmic's Substance Painter baking tutorial on YouTube.

Brian "Panda" Choi

You might actually want Marmoset Toolbag's baker instead.

Substance Painter is crap for quick iterative fixes.

Toolbag visualized the bake cages and lets you manage your baking groups on the fly, among other features.

Unless something has changed with Painter.

Painter's baker sucks.

Marmoset has a tutorial for their Toolbag baker on their website fortunately.

AirmanEpic

I'll definitely give that a shot though @Ashervisalis I wouldn't really know how to do that. I have marmoset toolbag so why not.

Hurtcules

What software are you using to model? Found a great article for baking right inside max, but even if you aren't it's still a great resource to read.

https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/tutorials/tips-creating-perfect-normal-maps-every-time

As a max user, when I'm doing PBR metal / roughness workflows for unreal I find baking in painter with a cage after triangulating the low poly mesh gave me the best results. Anything else I'm doing I just bake inside of max. I've used toolbag and it has a great baker, especially with bake groups, but I found it doesn't give the right results for my workflows. Not sure if it's like a tangent and binomial thing or something with how it computes its normal maps(which I don't fully understand and I don't mean flipping channels), but regardless of what you go with, painter, designer, xnormal, toolbag, handplane, max, maya, etc it might be worth searching for some information or asking directly about that pipeline so users who bake directly though that can post their tips on it as it took me some time to get my painter workflow down. 

https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/tutorials/tips-creating-perfect-normal-maps-every-time