UFO

TOSTITOSg125

In this project I had a base model and did my first manual retopology. I did this because, I felt that the topology for my original mesh would make the colors appear too pixelated and I wanted to go with the approach that I wanted the topology to follow the different colored sections of the ship. Basically, every new part or section of the ship was a new material. I did also paint this albedo by hand, I wanted to try to give an effect that this ship has been through space battles where the hull is damaged by either enemy weapons or possibly meteors. I did have to tweak the roughness and metalness maps a bit because I was getting a shinier smoother surface area than what I wanted to show. While creating the UVs I do at this point feel that my next project will focus on better topology so that when I unwrap the object I won't inevitably have to resort to blender's Smart UV unwrap to help me make sense of my model and painting on it. However, while this one took me longer than what I wanted it to I did finally decide that this project, for now, is good enough to stop and share to start another project!
As always constructive criticism is welcome and while I know that my work is not even close to other creators, I am always open to sources of information to help me hone my craft!
Thank you and have a great day!

SnowInChina

for starters read up on smoothing groups, this will get rid of all the hard edges on your model

then there seems to be some normal errors on this seam on the top side of the model, make sure all normals are pointing outwards and you dont have any double faces or double vertices in your model

for topology, on hardsurface models like this, you might find it easier to model as much as you can with basic shapes instead of pushing and pulling vertices by hand, tools like proportional editing or FFD/Lattice modifiers will will give you a pretty clean look, since they are math based

editing by hand tends to get messy if you don't know what you are doing

uv unwrapping is pretty easy once you understand it, try using seams to mark where you want your uvs to be split, this will make texturing a lot easier

TOSTITOSg125

Thank you so much for the feedback! Any good resources to reference for me to read up on in these particular subjects? I mainly watch youtube to learn and just take time to learn the software and how to navigate it. But I am open to any resource material to help me learn! If no material comes to mind I will just do a simple google search, thanks again!

SnowInChina

not in particular, just search for the terms

-smoothing groups

-lattice modifier

-proportional editing

-normals

-uv unwrap / seams

best to look for beginner tutorials in the programm you are using, there should be plenty material on youtube

you can also check out artstation learning, its free and has some good tutorials

and i would recommend to watch an in depth tutorial on how to create an asset from start to finish for a game engine

something like this (havent watched it, but it looks alright through a glance)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS6gI1bAvPA