Seems I've hit a wall here..
So after lurking for a few years now, i am long overdue to take my Polycount lumps. The project that will take up the bulk of this thread means a lot to me, as i hope to use it in my portfolio when i leave school. Some brutal honesty and hopefully some advice will go a long way, ya?
So heres a quick summary then on to the pics:
A high-tech thief breaks into a storage/research facility, in the basement of a museum that houses various artifacts and weapons.
Goal of the project: To show off prop modeling skills aimed at a MMO Spec
To begin:
1. The Storage room walls
The Dilemma(s):
a. Im calling this the low-poly version for now, but TBH, i have only a general idea of the poly limits for a MMO. What can i improve/change?
b. I know somewhere along the workflow, i will want to make hi-poly versions of certain areas to bake the normals for the low. But i have no idea how to go about that in an efficient manner.
Do i chop my mesh up more to make it easier?
c. speaking of chopping my mesh up, i know that floating geometry is pretty well supported in many game engines, but is it reccomended? If so there is a lot more optimising i could do.
d. I figured out how to bake a quick and dirty AO map for the purpose of this thread using a Skylight, Light Tracer, and the Render to Texture rollout. But something tells me there is a more efficient and better looking method.
i ended up combining all the parts of the wall into one mesh and then baking it that way.
So in summary, i have very little Normal/AO baking experience in MAX and would really appreciate some advice on how to go about it,
while any and all crits or advice are more than welcome.
So heres a quick summary then on to the pics:
A high-tech thief breaks into a storage/research facility, in the basement of a museum that houses various artifacts and weapons.
Goal of the project: To show off prop modeling skills aimed at a MMO Spec
To begin:
1. The Storage room walls
The Dilemma(s):
a. Im calling this the low-poly version for now, but TBH, i have only a general idea of the poly limits for a MMO. What can i improve/change?
b. I know somewhere along the workflow, i will want to make hi-poly versions of certain areas to bake the normals for the low. But i have no idea how to go about that in an efficient manner.
Do i chop my mesh up more to make it easier?
c. speaking of chopping my mesh up, i know that floating geometry is pretty well supported in many game engines, but is it reccomended? If so there is a lot more optimising i could do.
d. I figured out how to bake a quick and dirty AO map for the purpose of this thread using a Skylight, Light Tracer, and the Render to Texture rollout. But something tells me there is a more efficient and better looking method.
i ended up combining all the parts of the wall into one mesh and then baking it that way.
So in summary, i have very little Normal/AO baking experience in MAX and would really appreciate some advice on how to go about it,
while any and all crits or advice are more than welcome.
Replies
a.) I see a lot of welded mesh, which chunks up the tri count. Make sure to count tris because polys can have many triangles and at the end of the day most engines are counting tris. It depends on what engine and workflow you are doing but quite a few engines handle details like thisjust fine if they are floating. Floating the details also means you spend less time welding and optimizing, it also allows you to keep working in quads instead of forcing in so many tris. If you where to float a those pieces and optimize whats left I bet you could smooth out some of the chunky details.
b.) You have a few options open to you for inorganic high poly modeling. You can go the sculpt route and take it into ZBrush, you'll run into topology issues because you mixed quite a few tri's in with the quads, which will subdivide weird. Again, not welding everything would help keep things in quads which subdivide better. Or just go nuts in max, beveling, extruding, booleaning and cutting in details. Depending on which you are more comfortable with, pick the fastest most detailed. Know that you could run into some issues with all those tris, if you choose ZBrush. I hear it handles tris ok, but I haven't tried tris on inorganic modeling so it could cause some issues. Quads FTW!
c.) I would say its law in saving yourself polys which translates to more details to work with because you can delete the back faces trapped inside the main mesh. Don't delete anything that goes outside the main mesh, yes even things you assume would clip into the floor or walls. Those pieces will need to be capped and closed otherwise you get some weird lighting issues.
- There is much you can detach and float.
- The round inverted sphere detail trim could be done with a lot less polys, those polys could be put back into rounding out the edges of those spheres.
- 118 tris (original). Quite a few polygons have 3+ tris. So you have more than 2 tris in some polys. Again make sure to count tris because polys can have many triangles.
- 100 tris. Rounded and optimized. Faking most of the sphere detail with the texture/normal map will work great for recessed details like this. I would caution you on making them too deep because at some point the player might see thru the normal map illusion, but you can get away with quite a bit of depth with very little geometry.
- 88 tris. Same shape as the original, only optimized. That's 30 tris for more details somewhere else. That's 15 quads for dirt overlays, opacity mapped hoses and wires ect.
d.) Ben Mathis has a really good tutorial on standard normal map generation.
Andrei Ichim has another tutorial that covers adding in paint/text details using the PhotoShop plug-in from Nvidia.
Back in 2003 and for some time after that, Eric Chadwick maintained a nice little thread about normal mapping over at CGTalk
Honestly, I say get your feet wet and crank out a few normal maps, you'll find its not as scary as it looks. All the reading in the world will only get you so far and hands on experience has always taught me more than any yabba dabba I read on the innertron.
Good luck, its a good start and looks very promising!
Im also going to read over all those tuts when i get a free moment.
I love wall design it looks ace. i', sick and tired of scifi design now, but this is something refreshing. I like how u combine circles and flat surface. Imho u could add a little more very tiny details, like flat surface and little square with cables, all electro thingy.
The 3d is not so bad but it needs more polishing. If u want made normal for it, avoid hard angeles cos normal will screw on hard edges, and it will looks odd when u put smooth all on angle higher than 90 degrees.
If its mmo u can make highpoly wall and just bake it on plane, adding ( snaping not merging and welding) some bigger elements.
For high poly modeling different than organic (especially scifi thingy) avoid zbrush. In the beginning it might be a bit harsh, but in the end u will do faster, end easier all the scifi designs than in zb. Zb u can use when u need to do rust and wholes, but imho baking normal from displacement or using famous crazybump is a lot faster with similar result.
Be careful with ao/lightmap baking when using normals and speculars cos sometimes it can messed up ur final effect pretty badly. Very soft ao only as a detail/dirt map, and LM only for whole lvl not plane with texture ( to clarify more like baking light map for corridor, not i tile on floor ^^)
And thats all i can add to Vig's post.
keep it coming, looks promising.
I sliced it up a lot and optimised the mesh, then I used what was saved to add more details to the low.
Oh and if you see some edges missing its because the wireframe mat was not cooperating
They are there though.
Now i am working through the high poly bits.
"Por@szek"- Thanks for the feedback, i am trying to eliminate all the hard angles without losing the crisp edges in my hi poly, its a bit tougher than i thought in some cases, but its coming along.
Now, by no means am i under a real "crunch" right now, but i do have to pick up the pace considerably, as the high poly is kind of not going smoothly for me.... rawr..
So, please look foward to more progress soon.
This didnt come nearly as quick as id hoped, but nevertheless here it is.
Ive gotten a better grasp of the Hi-poly workflow, by no means have i perfected it but i can now retain very crisp edges when applying the NURMS subd in MAX.
High Poly: (around 97k tris)
Low Poly w/ AO and Normal maps applied: (1730 tris)
Wires:
Aand a few simple layout views:
Eventually i will have this section bent around in a "C" shaped room as part of the environment. I also have a section that serves as the end caps. (Force Field Generators of sorts)
Happy Holidays and more to come!
In this picture here it looks like you're setting up to bake a high poly for a normal map, which would probably be suitable for an MMO.
The, in this picture here, it looks as though this is a modular piece for an FPS hallway.
Why do you want to build for an MMO? Just curious.
Unfortunatley i dont have access to how places like EA/Mythic, Blizzard, or Cryptic do thier workflow, so im just trying to become more proficient in what i think would be important. I.E. getting as much detail into as few poly's
possible.
i hope it wasnt just a case of my post not being clear enough on my intention. My apologies if i mislead.
In the exploded view i was showing the optimization, compared to the first iteration, which was quite messy.
And to answer your final question, i have been interested in persistant worlds since playing Dark Ages of Camelot many years ago, and many, many subsequent MMOs afterward.
I've has so much fun playing in these massive worlds, and now id like to step to the other side of the fence and contribute to a team that produces and delivers content in this manner.
In short, it would be wicked sweet.
i was going under the idea that as MMOs, and peoples internet connections evolve, higher resolutions would be available.
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bandwidth has little to do with it. the MMO games are rendered by the client just like any other game. only, for MMO's, you have to consider the polycount of a potentially large group of players being rendered at once, along with nearby environment assets, particle effects, etc. you must maintain a smooth framerate. blizzard knew this, and aimed for a more low poly colorful style accessible from anyone's hardware.
if you want to display your intentions for developing an MMO, the best advice I can give is focus on modularity. design a mesh that can be used in many different ways. also, design several different textures that can be applied to it. one thing you notice in MMO's, many mobs you encounter will often use the same base mesh, but with a different color and design (green dragon, bone dragon, fire dragon, ice dragon). one shield mesh can have numerous patterns.
Textures are still something im working on getting comfortable with.
I have a few concepts that would be ideal for texture swaps. After this room is finished ill be working on those.
Thanks for the advice
Thanks for posting that link Vig, there's alot of stuff that Ben points out that I hadn't thought of. It'll help me alot.