[Finished] Mark 13 torpedo

Anura_Interceptor

EDIT:Project finished and moved to sketchbook https://polycount.com/discussion/213024/sketchbook-anura-interceptor/p1?new=1

For my future practice, I decided I should start building up a collection of high quality WWII naval assets, starting with US Navy planes and their ordnance. This project is to make a game-ready Mark 13 air-dropped torpedo. To start, the most important reference images.

This is the big one I'm using as my orthographic tracing image

This one shows the stabilizer and drag ring, I wish I could have found a real picture instead of a drawing, but none of the real pictures with these two components have a decent angle.

Finally, some of the perspective references.


This is what I have of the torpedo so far. I've been thinking of using multiple separate meshes for baking the normal maps, with those rings of insets being their own mesh, it would be difficult to join those parts to the main mesh. The fins and propeller shaft are definitely going to be part of the main mesh. I'm going to try for under 5k polygons on the low poly, plus a 1k LOD model for when the torps are far away or deep underwater.

Anura_Interceptor

Got the high poly done, bit excessive amount of detail considering I decided on about 1500-2000 tris for the final standard model. If I had known I'd only want that many I'd have left out some of the trickier details that aren't big enough to show up on the normal map. The insets all over the surface will be separate meshes and bakes that will be edited into the main normal map afterwards. Colors are just to provide contrast.

Also got the LOD model done, it's mainly going to be used when the torpedoes are very far away or underwater, they'd run 33.5 knots at a maximum depth of 50 feet, so the lack of detail wouldn't be noticeable even if a player was looking down from the surface of the water. It uses an 8x8 color atlas. I believe this is a historically accurate color scheme, but it's hard to tell since all of the surviving torps I could find photos of have been repainted by museums and colorized photos from WWII aren't necessarily 100% accurate.

Here it is stationary in 8 meters of crappy water. This lacks exhaust bubbles, so with particle effects it'd be even harder to notice the lack of detail.
https://webm.red/Nju2.webm
Working on the standard detail model and will post it when I have it finalized with normal maps and a basic texture.

Anura_Interceptor

I decided to work on the normal map after all, finally started to get the hang of it after some experimenting and reading. I think I can fix the issues on the propeller and fin ring fairly easily, and the pixellation should be fixable with some postprocessing or UV editing, but the nose ring has me stumped. The low poly and high poly both have consistent and proper normal directions, I checked with all modifiers applied too. I scaled them up by a lot and applied the scale to make sure the raycast isn't intersecting too far, tried changing the unwrap around a bit to reduce stretching, nothing works. Note that this is a test resolution I'm using so the artifacts are big enough to easily see, I'm planning on a final resolution of 512x512. 

Here's the back of the model

Here's the nose ring that I'm having problems with, below it is the baking setup.

Here's the baking setup, the HP fully overlaps the LP in the normal setup, I only moved it over for the screenshot so both are visible.

Here's the rudder connector I'm having problems with.

Here's the UV layout. Definitely going to try something different for the fins, here I stretched them out to get the bottom flat, but if I instead rotated them only the top would be non-level, and pixellation there isn't nearly as bad because there's less detail.