ATV

Temppe

Hello.

Here is a project I've worked on for a month and a half in my spare time. It's an ATV that's been bodged together with spare parts, so it's meant to look pretty basic i.e. no fairing or anything. It's vaguely meant to fit in a Mad Max sort of world, but I don't want to have all the adornment that you find on those vehicles.

I've pretty much finished the high poly and have made a start on the low. So far I have the wheels modeled and unwrapped and have started on the crankcase. I'm thinking that after I may do a few accessories but if I do, they'll be separate (as in they'll have their own textures).

Here is the high poly:

I'm doing this in the evenings here and there so I doubt I'll post updates daily. More like every three days or so. We'll see.

Temppe

I modeled the wheels and the engine - which I think will be the hardest part, so I'm glad I got it done. The UVs are a first pass. I may try some automatic unwrappers and see if they give me a better result. Even if I don't go with auto UVs, they'll evolve a bit as I unwrap more components and combine them on one UV tile.

Ashervisalis

That's really cool. Tons of detail and complex parts working together. Can we see a picture of the UV layout?

Temppe

This is the first pass on the engine UVs. As you can see there is still unused space to fill up. Also one thing I find difficult is getting a consistant distance between the islands. This is why I'm considering playing with an automatic unwrapper to see if it does a better job.

Temppe

I made a start on the carburettor. Still very much WIP as you can see - the mesh is unfinished and I haven't touched any smoothing groups or UVs yet.

Temppe

Finished the carb after an eleven hour marathon of work on my day off!

I think that the engine and carb were the most complex parts of this project in terms of their geometry. So... (hopefully) the pace should pick up a bit.

Aydhe

gotta follow it to see progress because this ATV looks fun. Please make it pale red

Temppe

Did the battery this evening.

Regarding the colour, there won't be many painted elements. Pretty much just the tank and maybe the frame. I could make the tank red, but in any case the intention is to make it very dirty and worn out, so it won't be a nice new shiny paint job!

Temppe

More progress:

Naturally the UV islands will be scaled relative to each other when I combine them on one UV tile later in the pipeline.

Temppe

I've been working away at this project every time I get a chance! I just haven't updated this thread.

Soo... the frame is finally done. In the end, this turned out to be just as challenging as the engine/crankcase. It's one continuous mesh - including the nuts and bolts and weld seams. Although I can say that it definitely was not worth the time it took to make every single little piece merge into one. Next time I'll just use separate floating geometry and save hours.

Temppe

Bakin'.

This is a screen shot outta Substance Painter. I'm doing tweak after bake after tweak after bake to hunt down and eliminate the baking errors. I had to do some remodeling on some parts because I had over estimated the ability of the normal map to round off some corners.

I replaced my workstation in December and I'm soooo glad I did now. In previous projects, when I got to this stage I would typically run out of patience and get frustrated because of the slow response time of my old machine. But now it's a breeze, and I actually find it satisfying to iron out the problems - not to mention that I'm learning a LOT about baking as well.

The low poly mesh is split into three 4K maps. I tried with one 4K map but the resolution didn't hold up. I realise that three sets of textures is asking a lot for a real time model. So once I finish fixing the baking errors I think I'll try optimise the UVs and compress it down to two 4K maps.

Temppe

Okay, so the baking phase is basically over. In the end I decided to use three 2k maps which is reasonable. In the time it took me to get these images on here I noticed a couple of things that need some TLC.

Next up is painting in Substance Painter!

ray40

nice model, but those uvs are too cramped, for a personal project is ok but in production that would create a lot of artifacts, you would need more padding

Temppe

Hi Ray40, are you referring to the space between the UV islands? The image of the UVs I posted a while ago was just a hand-positioned place holder - the UVs have changed a LOT since then!

Here are the UVs of the engine/steering/suspension. It's 2k with 06 pixels of padding. You think it's not enough? I can always repack the UVs easily enough with more padding and re-bake before I start painting.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Ashervisalis

Damn that is one intense UV layout. What size maps are you going to use?

Great work on the modeling btw, it looks rad.

Temppe

Originally I planned to use three sets of 4k maps - but I realised that was a bit rediculous so I'm using three 2K map sets instead which is more realistic. One thing I need to do for my next project is learn to use Unfold3D properly. Right now I barely know how to use it and still did most of the unwrapping in Max, then exported it to Unfold3D just to pack the islands.