How this model looks so smooth despite its low count tris?

Jimmito

Hi Polycount, I'm really surprised by this artwork of Stefan Engdahl on artstation, but I have some questions concerning this brilliant model, How did he use this low poly model (24k tris) to create this awesome and smooth weapon, I think the holes should appear low poly not smooth like that, also the topology of the barrel is not the best but it looks so great and there are no issues concerning the shaders.. sorry for my bad English!
Artstation artwork: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nQ0NR4

braintrain

Hi there! I can´t give you a definite answer. I think the cylinder which makes up the barrel and the holes has actually a fairly high polycount. Also the normal map helps hiding the jagged corners when you look at the barrel at an angle.
This video shows how normal maps can be improved on cylinder like shapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnuK6xyi-qY
Maybe that can help you

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

24k is not so low, not low at all! I would bet half is shared between the magazine and barrel shroud.

FappaR

I made it for the game "H3VR" so all parts ever visible trough the camera when rotating the gun, getting close etc needed to be visible, i could've made it much lower if it was for a "regular" game anyhow as Ben mentioned most of the poly budget is spent on the heat shroud. There is no magic to it just high-poly baked down to a low-poly, That's it.

Alex_J

the wireframe is right there to see.

just take a small part of it, like the barrel, and copy what you see. Then do your baking and tweak things until you get a similar result.

Jimmito

FappaR said:

I made it for the game "H3VR" so all parts ever visible trough the camera when rotating the gun, getting close etc needed to be visible, i could've made it much lower if it was for a "regular" game anyhow as Ben mentioned most of the poly budget is spent on the heat shroud. There is no magic to it just high-poly baked down to a low-poly, That's it.

Hello Stefan, Thank you for sharing your experience. May I know what was your workflow of this model, Did you create the low poly first or the high poly and which software did you use to create the high poly model?

FappaR

Jimmito said:

Hello Stefan, Thank you for sharing your experience. May I know what was your workflow of this model, Did you create the low poly first or the high poly and which software did you use to create the high poly model?

Now days I usually do the boolean+zbrush method for high-poly and along side that method I get a low-poly "base" to work from when creating the low-poly.

Super short rundown of high & low-poly:
High-poly: Blockout to get general shape and scale of things > Start adding details etc (a lot of boolean is used) > Copy what you got just to makes sure you have the "Base" for when making lowpoly > load it in Zbrush to create the high-poly mesh (Read more on that by this post by Ben Bolton)
Low-poly: Use the mesh BEFORE going trough Zbrush (the one we copied before) and clean it up/add bevels/Chamfers wherever it's needed etc until you got a nice low-poly, UV that thing. 

The software's I use are:
Maya - Modeling & UV
ZBrush - Making the high-poly (If it's a Simple shape I will make it with good 'ol sub-d modeling in Maya)
Marmoset - Baking
Substance Painter - Texturing

Sorry if it's unclear or whatnot I'm pretty tired when writing this

scgstudio

similar effect without normal map usage. Take a look at 2:00