Horse Model

commander riker

Here are a few renders and maps of a horse I'm working on.
I do not have a diffuse map yet.
This was all done in 3D Studio Max 8.
The low poly is 3110 polygons, and the high is 12476.
Any c&c would be great.

Low Poly:



Low Poly Wire:



High Poly:



High Poly Wire:



Bone Structure:



http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/10/622010/bonestructure.jpg



Normal Map:



Thanks in advance!

notman

The neck seems really short. The hind legs should also be beefier at the top. The front legs almost seem too thick to me Where you using a reference for this? If so, can you post it?
I think you have a pretty good start. I tried doing a horse also, and it's a lot harder than it initially seemed

HonkyPunch

Where's the giant horse cock?

Josh_Singh

Yeah Horses are Tricky. They have a lot more joints than you might think. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you didn't use any ref. It will help a ton! you have a good base to take in to zed brush or mudbox though. Also your normal looks whack. Looks like object space. Try Tangent space. I dont want to start a debater here, but in my experience it's the most common.
Also Jimmies_The_Squirrel, Dude before you go requesting Horse Cock, Post some art! I checked out your Deviant Art Gallery, and you need to start getting your shit up in P&P STAT for some serious Crit Intervention. One sucker Slug in the modeling thread aint gonna cut it.
Oh yes, Commander Riker, Please render your stuff out onto a medium grey background, and ditch the Pink Disc, it's not helping.

systmh

i think your normals are in world space instead of tangent space. that'll cause problems when you try to animate the model or move it around. might want to re-bake 'em in tangent space real quick.

commander riker

I used many references.
These are the two main ones.

Horse:



Skeleton:

notman

You did a pretty good job of matching your references... I guess it depends on the horse type. The horses I'm use to, aren't that short, nor short necked

Mark Dygert

It's a good start.

Crits:
- Neck is too short, the ref pic you worked off of, was taken at an angle, not exactly from the side. As a result the neck is forshortened. If you put the scene camera at roughly the same angle as the ref the neck would look really short. but if you lengthened it, it would match. The skeleton ref is better but gives you a false sense that a horses neck is shorter than it really is because it is arched in the ref.

- Horses have eyes on the side of their heads, not really facing forward like a predator would. It's why a horse will never look at you down its nose it always rotates its head. If it was to look at you straight on, it would actually cross its eyes and screw up its vision. That's why horses spook so easy when you wave your arms in front of their face. Any horse owner would also tell you not to stand right in front of the horse, you're in kind of a blind spot and stand a greater chance of getting your face stomped then if you stand off to the side. It's also why horses freak when they run straight at things, and why the baulk at fence jumping or why they'll run right off a cliff if you make them. It's not that they are stupid its that they trust you enough to follow your direction. Why go into all this horse talk? Because the better you know your subject the more accurately you can recreate it. These are all key things to keep in mind when it comes time to animate. Anywho...

- The legs are really thick which makes the horse look shorter than it is. They are also very straight, horses legs have all kinds of kinks and knobs to them.
- The hooves are straight across at the top, not so with real horses. They slope, like this;


Paint Over:

- Notice the length of the neck in the paint over, its double the original.

commander riker

Alright.
Hey thanks for the paintovers Vig. Got some good points.

I worked out a texture. Here is a render. Its not done yet. Keep in mind this is 3110 polys.



Thanks again all!
Any more c&c would be greatly appreciated!

Asherr

a horse's eyes are located on the side of the head, not forward facing. nor are the ears located directly on top of the skull.

you need to study a lot more reference.

Smirnoffka

Looks more like a donkey imho

notman

Vig's paintover really nailed it... The angle of the joints is what looked out of place... I just couldn't place it until his paintover.

D4V1DC

That's his pink pony and he likes it how it is...

Uhm awesome critics vig, i'd listen to the critics and change what needs changing it will benefit your portfolio a lot if you fix it, if it's not for the folio go crazy or just keep doing what your doing.

HonkyPunch

I'd post some shit but I want to get a basic idea of anatomy first, as of right now I just draw and hope it looks right

Lolz, nice model regardless of missing cock

commander riker

Round 2:

Up until now I was using the picture reference for my geometry and the skeleton reference just to eyeball how a skeleton should be.

I took Vig's suggestion and used the skeleton reference for my geometry as well. The body definitely looks more like a horse now than a pink pony or donkey. His head, however, needs some help and I can't pinpoint what it is. In the side view it aligns perfectly with the reference, but from a perspective view his forehead is very flat and his snout is having a few problems too. I'm starting to think maybe the neck and head in the reference are a bit exaggerated?

Are the eyes alright now? I shifted them too far at first, and then came back to what seemed alright.

As you can see in the neck and a few other areas I need to make a new high poly and render a new normal map. I'm not going to bother with that until I can get the head looking alright. I also need to add another joint in his lower legs in my bone structure.

Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Daz

I really would not use that skeleton diagram for head reference If I were you. It's positively wrong. The bridge of the nose of a horse is more convex than it is concave. Get some better ref of a horses head.

notman

I think you're closer... it's hard to tell by the angles of your screenshots, but I would agree with Daz. The skeleton reference is a hand drawing to demonstrate the bone structure and isn't meant to have extremely accurate proportions. It's not bad to use as a reference, but not to build your exact shape with.

The first thing I think you should do is to round off some of the edges, and relax some of the harsh dips in the model.

D4V1DC

It is getting there, also never too much references:
G-image is your friend.

commander riker

Okay so I changed my geometry a lot, and thus will have to redo my maps and some of my bone structure, but I'm a lot happier with my geometry.

Whoda thunk the only good side view of a horse I could find on either an image search or a library came from a children's encyclopedia.

Current polycount: 3316 tris.

Let me know what you think. As always any c&c is much appreciated.

References:





Renders:

The Umbrella Man

Man that looks way better, even the eyes. I'm sure there are anatomy problems I probably can't see, but it looks good at first glance.

Only thing I can critique is to add some cuts into the joints where major movement happens. Especially at the top where the forelegs meet the... Ahem (Do horses have shoulders?) Basically add more cuts to the major moving parts so they deform correctly.

MoP

yeah that looks much better, great improvement!
keep it up

commander riker

Now here's a riddle...

I learned zbrush for this project. My first attempt (at the top of the page) seemed to work fine.

Now my maps turn into this when I hit the Col>Txr button so I can export it:



Not so pretty. What gives?

I've both re-UV mapped it and checked my OBJ export settings in max, all with the same outcome. Ideas?

notman

I'm not sure what's going on there.... but the model has definitely improved now. I'm glad you finally moved/fixed the ears The eye looks WAY better now also.

MoP

I think it's something to do with the "Decimals" precision setting in the OBJ exporter when you export it from Max. What are you set to? I think someone said that values over 6 don't work properly. Or maybe it's that values of 12 are the only ones that work.
You could also try Guruware's OBJ exporter which might be better. Google for it, i think it's guruware.at or something.

commander riker

Thanks MoP. I tried many different things in both Max and Z but Guruware's OBJ exporter was the only thing that worked.

Here's my map and a render. For the map I used Z, blurred it a bit in Photoshop, then added a noise filter.

Thanks ahead for the c&c.

danpants

Great advice so far "The skeleton reference is a hand drawing to demonstrate the bone structure". The texture is a nice start base color. I would start to add layers over it to get some of that detail to start showing. I would even use photos "references" of a horse's hair and then tweak with the filters in Photoshop. Good luck.

Steve Schulze

Before you get too far into your texturing, you might want to fix the nostrils. They need to be more on the front of the muzzle and a slightly different shape. Look carefully at your references.

You need to build up the musculature around the hips a bit too, particularly the rear ones. Horses are pretty buff beasties


For what its worth, The skeleton picture looks like an Arab horse. They've got peculiarly shaped heads. Observe:
http://www.horsesoftheworld.com/images/fotografie/essteema.jpg

kiril0t

that really is great improvement,one thing about the ears look a bit weird, you might want to have them pointed forward some and sharpen them up at the tips, unless i guess you're planning to do that with bones, great start on the textures

Spark

Yeah you are definetely heading in the right direction, might I suggest though that you mirror your horse a bit more to get better results? As the way you are going, the horse doesnt have any major asymetry points, such as a detail on one side, so mirroring will allow you to get higher detail. I did 3 horses for Age 3 Warchiefs that you can find on my site in the 3d section, and all were mirrored. If you need me to post flats to help you further, let me know.

Spark

commander riker

Hey thanks for the crits.

Here's my latest render. He's normal mapped now.



Danpants - Yeah, I need a lot of work on the textures.

Somehow whenever I tweak it in photoshop the edges come out a bit different thus the seams become really apparent when rendered out.

Jackablade - I've done a bit of tweaking on the nostrils. Might need a little more.

Thanks for the ref.

Kiril0t - Yeah I was planning on using bones. Its hard to tell where the ears should be because every reference I have seems to be a bit different.

Spark - I'm not sure what you mean by mirroring it to get more detail. I looked at your site - nice work! The horses are great. I also like your 2d sketches - they're really detailed.

Yes, any flatwork you could post up would be great, thanks.

Mark Dygert

I think spark means mirror your UV's, so you can size the pieces up and then you will be able to paint on bigger surfaces. And the normal map will have more pixels to capture more detail.

Notice the size of the checkers.

Looking great btw, HUGE improvements from the first version!

commander riker

Thanks Vig!

Ah yes! Makes sense. My only reservation is that I do my texturing base coat in zbrush before I take it into Photoshop, and I've had a few issues with overlapping polys in z. As far as I understand that was the problem with my map earlier -> even though max showed no overlapping polys, z seemed to think there were quite a few and thus exported a map with a bunch of black triangles over top of the paint. Any ideas on this? Maybe I just need to get bite the bullet and do my maps in photoshop with a wacom.

Anyway that's a good bit of advice to keep in mind. Thanks Spark (and Vig for the clarification).

Mark Dygert

Two ways you can handle this.
1) Move one set of the overlapping UV's off to the side when you render out the normal maps. Outside of the renderable area. Ben Mathis has a nice little tutorial that covers using chuggnuts UV tools to quickly offset and move back one set of UV's.
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow_2.htm

2)Depending on what app you're using to unwrap you can place one set of the pieces on top of the others. You get the black tris because they are sharing the same space. What is the W in UVW stand for? You've used XYZ well UVW is kind of the same idea, since 99.999% of games only deal with UV space W(forward/back) is never mentioned. In the UVW Editor of Max you can change the viewport to show UW space instead of UV space, its the drop down menu next to the checker box at the top right of the window. Think of it as a top down view of your UV's It lets you see what is in front and what is behind. In UV space (normal mode) select one group, then change it to UW space and move that group in front or behind the other group. This will render out both sets but one will be on top of the other instead of sharing the same space.

Technically I add another UVW Modifier on top of my history stack, move the overlapping pieces off to the side, bake my normals and then delete or deactivate the modifier when I'm done. I don't like having the tacked on interface of the chuggnut script when 95% of what the script does was included in newer releases of max, and is not broken. The only two things I would use the script for are, the offset, and the horiz/vert align. Since I found separate scripts that do those functions and I could hot key it, I don't see the need to install a big clunky, redundant, interface.

Let me know if that was a trip to the twilight zone and you're lost, I can whip up some images that explain it better.

Spark

Yea, sorry for the slight confusion Commander Riker, but Vig pretty much summed it up for me in one nice shot:) (Thanks Vig) Just was trying to say, if you find yourself mirroring (reusing) the same texture for one side, then for the other side. Stop and flip your uv's (mirror) so you can then make the uv's larger and get better use out of your maps. You can also try this trick, shrink down the uv's of one side your object, and place it onto a dead area within your map, and set the W of the UVW to 1.0. This is another way like Vig suggested of seperating the space of your uvs from each other, to advoid having problems like you are experiencing. Hope that helps.

Spark

commander riker

Vig - Makes a lot of sense. That way the modifier won't affect the actual uvw map when its gone, but the normals should map out the same for both sides. Wouldn't have thought of that. I didn't realize there was another axis on the map. I thought it just referred to mapping a 3d model. Good to know. I'll have to see if this still works when I export to .obj and import to zbrush to make the base coat of my diffuse map.

Yeah, thanks again Spark. The maps I have for this horse are 2048x2408. I've been exporting them to 16-bit Targas at 1024^2. This will save me the headache of making such big maps.

I'm working on hair now. I was working with some transparency maps using alphas. I wasn't too pleased with the results. I also tried the hair and fur modifier thinking if I converted to renderable splines it would save me some memory -> then max crashed.

Still working on it...

Mark Dygert

I wrote this up a while ago, it might be useful for you. Its a way to make low poly transparency mapped hair out of the fur modifier. Basically you make splines as guides for the hair, and then copy those same splines to make low poly planes. I see it working perfectly for the horses mane. The tail might be more work but I bet it would be easy to pull off.

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php...true#Post224703

commander riker

Very helpful tutorial.

I used a wacom to make some alphas for a solid colored targa. I used a cylinder with a taper and bend modifier for the tail and a plane detached from the neck and edited to fit around the bridle for the mane. The mane is alright, could be better. The tail is not so convincing.

notman

Looking pretty good. I'd make the main longer though. There should also be a bar in his mouth (not sure what they call that thing).

commander riker

yeah. I kinda skipped the bit.

Steve Schulze

Lots of bridles don't have the bit. If you don't feel inclined to add it just eliminate the piece of leather that goes up to the mouth.

notman

That's more of what I was getting at... if the leather is going to go there, the mouth piece should be there too

commander riker

Alright, I eliminated the mouthpiece.

I think I'm done with the modeling and most of the texturing.