Crate - Env. Prop
Taking a break from the mill, getting a bit lost in the details, need to step back and pick it up later. So I'm working on this crate in the meantime. It's 1228 tris, it sounds like too much for a crate but perhaps I'm wrong.
highpoly
gamemesh
Anywhere I could improve before I start uving and baking?
highpoly
gamemesh
Anywhere I could improve before I start uving and baking?
Replies
You DEFINITELY don't need that bevel around the top of the bolts in the lid. You probably don't even need the bolts modelled - I'd just normal map that all.
Those tiny pipes on the sides should be 4-sided instead of 6-sided.
You don't need the recessed holes modelled into the feet of the base either, the normalmap should be doing all that sort of stuff for you.
I reckon you could probably make this look good with under 300 triangles and a good normal map.
The crates in our game are no more than 80 triangles usually
Just remember if you were gonna use a lot of these in a level, the polygon count would add up very rapidly.
You could have 4 crates at 300 tris instead of 1 crate at 1200 tris. This sort of thing is always worth bearing in mind when modelling something intended for use in a game.
C&C Highly welcome on the texture job, I really suck at that...
Any recommended way on improving that?
It's a little heavy on the detail though. This is fine for upclose, but if you want to make this piece more impressive, create LODs down to a cube.
I'll be sure to make some LODs yeah, good idea.
from first glance, it looks ok, but a little too blown out in spots, almost like its a crate made of bleached washed-up beach wood.
The one thing i noticed in the renders, and as it shows on the normal flats, is that there is very little depth/normal detail for the wood beams themselves, where they meet one another. You're losing a lot of potential depth there, even if it is supposed to be air tight. The edges could use a little more depth to be a little more convincing. Your blue channel is almost completely white, which is not helping your cause much either.
This is most likely caused by overlaying nvidia-filtered layers, untouched (while blue). Something to try when adding detail to your normal maps:
- take your detail bump layer, and open the Levels dialog in PS
- switch to Blue Channel in the dropdown
- set white output to 127, hit ok
- change layer to Overlay
When you're complete with your normal, merge visible layers into a new one, and run the Nvidia filter one more time, with the "normalize" setting checked. That should hopefully pull your colors back to reality and ensure the normal map doesn't break on you.
You can also go into your blue channel and adjust the darks of the levels to boost the "pop" of the details. However, make sure never to take it all the way to 0 black.
It also looks like when you processed your normal map, the metal details were still on top of the wood, burning their shapes into the wood itself. You may want to consider seperating pieces to avoid that, and get clean processes of your sections.
Is that last image your specular? You may want to use the Diffuse as a starting point for your spec, and alter its colors to reach the desired specular level of the surfaces, so the detail in your Diffuse, Specular, and Normal are all using one another to look good, rather than hoping it all works in the end.
//edit: image of what im talkin about
You can achieve the same effect by using multiple Smart Layers in PS, which produces cleaner and MUCH more accurate results, but this way is quick, easy, and does the trick