[WIP] Need Critique on My Machine Gun (M2HB)
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Modeled in Blender3D and textured in substance. Want to make sure before I send it into Blender to render it that its looking good. Here is a few snapshots of the model in Substance Painter viewport (using different environments also):
Excuse the large bullet in the back of the first shot, I instanced it in Blender but had to scale it up to see it better in substance.I don't plan to show any close ups so for the bullets the polycount is fairly low. It is also going to be animated, as of now I have a few animations that occur but nothing really done yet. But for the most part, I'm pretty happy with how it came out and am looking to see if I can improve it further.
I also don't know what to do for rendering. Make a small scene or just a dark grey background and studio lighting?
Replies
You mentioned rendering in blender. Are you going to use the offline renderer or the realtime eevee renderer? You can render good quality higher res images using the eevee renderer in blender. Renders are a bit low res at the moment and the background color isn't helping either. The details are hard to discern.
Im probably going to be rendering in cycles, since I’m most familiar with it, though I’m open to doing final render shots in Eevee. The images I posted are in the substance painter viewport, not renders.
I’ll post a wireframe when I get back to my desk. The ventilated tube thing on the barrel is probably the main offender, I tried to keep topology even but there are potentially some areas that are causing issues.
What I meant to suggest was for you to use Eevee to render some quick WIP images at higher res so the details are more clear. I'm sorry if I didn't communicate that clearly.
Can you specify what issues you're having with normal baking? In blender you can use mark sharp edges (video tut) to split normals along an edge. Doing so may cause other issues with your normal bake, requiring edge padding in your UV layout, depending on the type of normal baking tech used. You can also use support loops, and/or face-weighted normals, as well.
Eevee viewport (with basic gloss shader - no maps at all)
https://ufile.io/5wo82tq8
And @ImsumDave, specifically for baking problems, I have been getting odd looking shadows and some places have errors. Granted, I can just paint over most of them (yes I know its bad practice), but for some areas the problem is in the normal map itself and I end up rebaking.
For topology, there are many unnecessary edges that I could just dissolve. I'll try adding some support loops for areas that seem to be having the most trouble normal-wise, though.
EDIT: Turns out there are a lot of ngons and issues with the main body frame and barrel, will be retopologizing both of them.
Some info on baking that may help:
Understanding averaged normals and ray projection/Who put waviness in my normal map?
You're making me hard. Making sense of hard edges, uvs, normal maps and vertex counts
Skew you buddy! Making sense of skewed normal map details.
Marmoset Baking Tut skip to "Baking Basic" section
Polycount wiki texture baking section
Another thing that may be causing your issues is the inconsistency of quad/n-gon triangulation across apps. Slap a triangulate modifier on that bad boy so that your mesh is consistent on import to various apps.
Also, to re-iterate teodar23 's point, you do need more silhouette geo in places, the barrel shroud mainly.
About the only shading issue I see currently is at the tip of the barrel, some normals are darker then the rest of the barrel. I can easily fix that but im looking to see if there are any other big ones I'm missing.
Many of the "less geo" areas have details that could be in your normal map. Many of the "more geo" areas, sans your barrel shroud, could have more detail while only increasing poly count by 10s or a couple hundred polys. Whether you should remove geo in the "less geo" areas or add geo in the "more geo" areas, is down to what your aim is with this piece. You need to find the proper balance.
Shading:
As far as low poly normal shading goes, whether the shading is good enough or not is down to the bake results. If no details are noticeably skewed, there aren't any unnecessary harsh gradients where there shouldn't be, and you aren't getting any visible shading errors with normal map applied, everything should be fine. What you've done is a definite improvement to your shading. There are areas where you've used support loops where hard edges would be more appropriate, but that would require modification of your UVs, which would disturb the texture work you've already completed. Support loops have added polys where they aren't necessary, but, again, removing those would likely disrupt you UVs.
Another thread worth a look for you. Read through to the end.
Textures:
Again, I think your renders are too low res and dimly lit to accurately judge your work. Given the images, I think the textures are serviceable. The grunge/rust in a few areas seems to bridge across geo in unrealistic ways, apt to texture detail added via projection type painting. Grunge in some areas, like on the barrel and shroud, are a bit too consistent across the entire surface, with little variation at edges and crevices.
Side note, modelling a barrel shroud highpoly:
One method is to model it flat, then use a simpledeform modifier to bend it into a cylinder. Add a subdivision modifier before the simpledeform in the stack to increase mesh density and avoid stretch/pinch around the holes.
There's an overall issue with this and that's proportional accuracy.
But for now at a glance, you had better re-model the perforated barrel jacket/sleeve, (cylinder with all the holes in it which also btw the ends aren't capped either!) foresight, rear sight, charging handle plus back plate.
Because they're especially visible up close when the object is in first person view.
EDIT: are you actually working from multiple refs? the barrel aperture is too big, as well
I think there might also be an issue with the lookdev in substance painter. In cycles it looks perfectly fine, textures look the correct res and sharper. At the same time I don’t want to export textures to cycles just yet since they aren’t finished.
In his second (EDIT: THIRD) to last comment he said he is aiming for 3rd person view asset quality, not sure if that's changed. Of course what that means in terms of poly count and texture size varies by game. For example, The Last of Us: Part II has fairly high quality player character weapon assets, but I think it's probably on the upper end of asset quality of current 3rd person games (Video with some semi close-ish looks at tLoU:2 weapons).
@Oren3Ds
I'd like to get this out there before I go on. I'm only giving suggestions. If you disagree on some point, disregard it.
I think you've improved the LP model quite a bit. I think there is more you could improve, but re-doing work in pursuit of perfection is a passion killer.
You have used chamfers at some edges. Are you using face-weighted normals (WeightNormals modifier in blender)? Give it a try if not. Also you could also try using sharp edges at some of those locations.
You need to enable autosmooth in blender to see the results of face-weight normals and/or sharp edges:
select object => object data properties tab (green triangle) => normals category => autosmooth enabled => change angle if necessary ::
Set sharp edges:
edit mode => select edges => right-click => mark sharp
Those barrel shrouds look better but they are a poly hog, although, I think it's necessary unless you get tricky with it (cylinder with transparency at holes with floating intrusions). The edge loops around the shroud intrusions are a prime spot where sharp edges could improve the shading.
You are getting a lot of skewing in you normal maps. The threads I linked earlier in the thread have information about how to minimize that as best as possible.
You've done a good job with the texel density of you UV's, everything is fairly consistent. Although nice and tightly packed, I do think that how close your UV islands will give you issues with padding. I'm not certain on this, but I believe that UV padding is important due to texture mipmapping. Mipmaps are lower res versions of you texture that are either created at texture load or packed along with the texture when saved. That is if the image format supports and the option is selected. Simply, mipmaps are texture level LODs.
Thanks for your critique/comment. I will adjust proportions and some of the shapes as well. Also will try playing with the weight normals modifier which @ImsumDave mentioned.
In terms of the HDRI lighting, I wouldn't stress too much on choosing different HDRI's from another, since most of your lighting work should come from independent light sources (hdri's help, but shouldn't do the bulk of the work). Get some nice strong rim lights to make the silhouette of the barrel/receiver pop