portfolio props

joe gracey

Hello everyone, these are my first two props for my portfolio. I have six months left of school (yeah it's the Art Institute), and would really like some crits to make sure I'm going in the right direction. Thanks in advance for the crtis! Both the texture are 512x512, the gas can has 924 tris and the lantern has 1,345 tris. Both these props were made for PS3/360 games. [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image]

Armanguy

instead of just having props on yo portfolio why dont you try to make a scene with a bunch of props in it? then you got a scene a a shit load of high quality props to show off?

joe gracey

Thanks, thats a good idea, these props are for my senior project and they will eventually go into a jungle camp scene. I want to be a prop artist so I really want the props to look good. I want the environment to look really good, because sometimes I see good props but the environment isn't that good, and it hurts the props.

Jesse Moody

Looks like more AI work.

As far as props go these are decent but to really catch attention a scene is needed. It helps tell a story.

Look at Adams thread on here for his remake of a Lucasarts Classic...

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=223400&an=0&page=0#Post223400

He has a huge collection of props in there and while I'm sure they would look good by themselves for the most part they really look amazing in the scene all as one.

You really want to make something that is going to set you apart from the crowd and show that you can do next gen stuff. As in model high detail, high polygon objects to get your normals from. Crazy bump and nvidia filter are nice but a lot of companies will want you to be able to build a 3 million poly computer console as the basis of the normal model.

Don't just limit yourself to being a "props" artist. Many companies include props in environment art but if you only show you can build mailboxes, trash cans, gas cans, and the sorts they might not know you can build full on buildings, tanks, weapons, etc.

Just a heads up...

joe gracey

Thanks for the advice Jesse, I want to do environments as well so I should include them with the props. I was just looking for some crits on the props before I put them in my scene, but I will build the scene and then re-post. Thanks again.

Em.

Looks good, I'd add a little more dripping effect to some of the dirt and rust since they're in the jungle and it rains a lot.

Ghostscape

I don't know about other companies, but Props Artist at Volition means Weapons and things that the player uses 0 lamps and shit are environment art.

Additionally, you're going to want to show that your props work in a full environment nicely.

Your models are ridiculously overusing polygons and are incredibly wasteful. I'd guess you're wasting 700 or more triangles in your gas can. If you built it properly you could have three times the number of objects of that complexity in the scene. Your lamp is just as wasteful but I only feel like doing one paintover:

Jesse Moody

also it's good to host your images on your site (ftp) so we don't have to click on them and go to imageshack and deal with that nonsense.

and yeah Ghostscape beat me to it on the gas can. That thing is like total definition of poly wastage.

Joseph Silverman

.... You asked him to remove almost every single edge, many of which are defining form. Plus the bottom blue edge is defining silhouetting, and definitely can't be normal mapped.

Ghostscape

None of them are defining form except for the red ones, and I that was simply me judging it to be excessive poly use. He could keep those in, removing the green and blue ones only, and still save 400 triangles EASILY.
The blue edge on the bottom provides such a slight silhouette change as to be almost unnoticeable. Removing it and adding a slight taper to a high poly model to bake from would accomplish the same thing visually. The detail it provides to the silhouetted is so slight that unless the gas can is filling the entire screen at 720p for significant periods of time, the detail will not be noticed and is therefore wasteful.
While we're at it, the textures are really large, but if this is a showcase item then it's okay to have large textures to show off your texturing skill.

Joseph Silverman

No, look at the top rim of it. With all of the edges you highlighted he'll lose the outer border -- it'll taper from the top of the 'cap' to the bottom, which is absurd. You marked one edge too may.

Ghostscape

To clarify - he has a very small chamfer on the edge - he should remove one of them. I used too thick a brush and didn't make it clear.

joe gracey

Thanks everyone for the crits, I am getting some useful information for it. The only thing I'm confused about is my instructors at school tell me to never have a hard edge, meaning always put a chamfer on an edge. Some of the crits are the opposite of what my instructors are telling me so I'm at a bit of a crossroads here.

I completely agree that the props are a bit high with poly's but again I'm just going with what my instructors are telling me to do. They tell me with "next gen" upon us we can have rounder shapes and chamfer the edges now, and that if I wanted to have the blockier shaped props that I should aim my portfolio for MMO's and not next gen.

As far as normal maps are concerned, I'm not trying to pass my props off as normal mapped. I'm still learning how to normal map my stuff, and agree that I should go back and make a high poly model to use as a normal map.

Thanks again for the crits guys!

Jesse Moody

Well something you can do and its usually in UE3 and many other engines is using as few smoothing groups as possible creating a softer edge by using normal maps and the same smoothing group along edges and letting the normal control the edge sharpness.

While we can use more polys these days and more things are restricted to shaders / texture memory you never want to "waste" polys.

joe gracey

Can I achieve the roundness of the cylinder on the right with a normal map and smoothing groups, and when I mean roundness I mean the bottom edge being less sharp when compared to the left cylinder. I'm trying to avoid that "MMO" look.

HarlequiN

No, you can't. Normal maps are very cool things, but they're not magic - they can't add definition to a silhouette that isn't there already, they're just altering the way light acts across the surface.

Naturally, the more "center stage" an object is going to be, the more polygons you'll want to define that shape, but the sort of props you're modelling are going to be very small in most situations.

Lets use the davy lamp you've made as an example (no images, I'm too lazy, it's too late, and I don't have a modelling package at home). You've got a lot of detail modelled into it, with a dent and nice smoothly rounded cylinders and a large texture of course.

Now, what would that object be used for in game? Just hanging around, being held up by a character? In both cases (on a hi-def console output in a 3rd person game) the lamp is going to be maybe 100 pixels across at most during the majority of the time it's on the screen. At that size if your cylinders are three sided, you don't model the dent and you chop out half the poly's of the lamp's overall curvature, no-one will notice except other game developers (we do love to pick apart the art of other games). In fact the higher number of polys will be slowing down the game more, not just because there's more of them, but because they're smaller on screen - game engines generally don't like polys that are really small, or really big on screen.

The texture would also be an issue - you'd never see the full texture, just the scaled down mip map, wasting all your hard work.

Of course if your lamp was going to be held by a character in first person (like the torch in Doom 3) then the way you have it is probably acceptable, except the dial on the side still looks a little high (IMO).

As for never having a hard edge... sure, that's awesome if you're going into movies with unlimited poly and texture budgets, but you can't get away with chamfering every hard edge in a game environment (it's those super small polygons again). Even normal maps aren't going to help on every hard edge as they're limited to the size of the texture (1 pixel can look awfully wide when you're limited to a 128x128 texture on an object 3 feet square). You do have the benefit of anti-aliasing on most console games though, and they do have the side effect of smoothing out those hard edges a little.

In your case I'd keep the objects you have as they are (no sense wasting them), and labeling them "cutscene props" or something similar, as props for real-time cutscenes can be higher res if they're going to be close to the "camera", and then doing a series of lower poly, lower texture props (maybe the same ones, maybe all new) that are for in-gameplay use.

Ask yourself not just what the prop is, but what it's used for and where on screen it's likely to appear, and then make it with that in mind.

joe gracey

Thanks Harlequin for the help. I guess what I should ask next which will probably get a lot of different responses is, if I put these props in an environment with a bunch of similar props, and use that as my portfolio, could I get a job on a PS3/360/PC game? Will the props turn employers away because they are higher poly, or will they see my skill and tell me to tone down the polys a bit. Not sure if that can be answered.

Ghostscape

You are wasting too many polys in the props and not taking advantage of normal maps for detail that you should be, so employers are not going to be as impressed with the props.

"Next Gen" polycounts are not an excuse for being wasteful. In the gas can example, you could leave all the red edges in, but you should still generate a normal map and remove the green/blue edges.

Employers will never be turned off by higher polycounts - the number isn't the issue. The waste is the issue. Where is Johny's great example of 6 different 100 triangle guns? That's the best illustration of the point.

I'm sorry if I'm being blunt here, but "nextgen means more polys means I don't need to be efficient," "everything needs to be uniquely unwrapped for a normal map" and "here is my 100triangle model with 2048x2048 textures" are the unholy trifecta of shit that gets passed around as acceptable when it's all fucking wrong.

joe gracey

My prop texture is 512x512, isn't that a good size? I totally agree with the normal mapping issue, and on my new prop I modeled last night, I made a high poly model to be used for normal mapping. Thanks for the crits Ghost.

Ghostscape

512x512 isn't bad for your portfolio, as you want to show off your texturing skills. But depending on the game the amount of texture space you should use for that varies wildly. If it was a player-held prop, like say a third person game where you can beat people with it or throw it, 512x512 would be okay. If it's just going to sit around and neverbe in front of the camera, then using a 256x256 and mirroring the sides would be much, much better.

The important things to consider when making assets for a game is that every jump in texture size is the equivalent of 4 smaller textures - there are 4 256x256 maps in a 512, etc. And so every time you increase the texture size by one level, you're functionally quartering the amount of that prop you could put on the screen at once. So if the gas can is important, will be seen a lot/by itself, etc, a bigger texture may be warranted. If it's going into a scene that looks like a garage/workshop and is full of stuff, a 256x256 would be better because it means you can fit a 256x256 gas can, wheeled stool, lamp, and toolbox all in the same amount of texture space.

Something I do a lot to decide on texture sizes is to take the object and scale it to the size it will actually be in game on the screen - most games run at 720p IIRC, which means the screen is 1280x720 pixels in size. mark off that amount on your monitor (resize the max window so the viewport is that big, for example) and then zoom in/out until the object is about how big it will be on screen.
Then apply this checkermap:

It has a 1pixel checker on it, and is 512x512. If you can't see individual pixels, cut the tiling value in the material editor by half and check again. You're looking for the sweet spot where you just barely can't spot the individual pixels - that's the texture size you should use. The map is a 512x512, so if you need bigger, just tile it twice and work from there.

joe gracey

Wow, thanks for the help, I have never thought about texturing that way. I'm gonna bring that up with my fellow classmates tomorrow. Very cool info.