LPC #05 - KonamiCode - Big Daddy, BioShock

KonamiCode

Hey everyone, I just noticed the challenge last afternoon and decided to jump in and get to cranking on something to get back into modeling. I think at this point I'm done with the modeling, UVs are unwrapped, but I'd definitely love a little critique, as I'm sure there could be quite a few problems I might have overlooked. Right now he's at 497, and the Drill/Tank I'm counting under the 150 allowed for weapons/equip. I'll spend tomorrow on the texture, so hopefully it'll be ready by the 16th.

KPtoons

The model looks nice, Im surprised nobody else has thought of this one. Not much to say at this point, lets see some textures

KonamiCode

Ask and you shall receive. I really haven't spent a lot of time texturing before so I'm pretty pleased at how this is coming out so far.



Helpful Critique/Comments are very much appreciated! Also, kind of a silly question, but how do I get the alphamap/transparent pieces of my texture to appear transparent in the viewport in Maya?

Honolulu_Ninja

Save the texture as a 32bit tga when you export it from photoshop with the alpha in as a channel instead of a separate map.

remove the connections in your shader for color and alpha,
then just link to your new 32-bit tga with alpha as colormap.
the transparency input should automatically detect the alpha channel from your tga.

love the model!

Enix

lol, you better get truckin, it's due today .

KonamiCode

Yeah, I think I'm doing that correctly. Strangely, if I play around with the viewing options, like if I go from Flatshaded to default lighting, I'll get the version on the left, and if I slightly move the camera it'll change to the one on the right.



If I use no lights, the planes just show up as white.

The areas that are supposed to be transparent look correctly on the swatch in the hypershade, and or even in the UV editor.

I think I've dealt with this before, but I have this bad habit of setting Maya aside every now and then and when I come back to it I've forgotten how to fix stuff like this. I'm sure it's a simple/newb question, so sorry if it's something stupid that I'm overlooking.

Thanks for the comments guys, I'm fairly certain I can get it done by the end of the day.

Funky Bunnies

lookin' good so far, man

are you in High Quality mode?

KonamiCode

I've played around with that a little bit, but strangely if I put it in High Quality, I start seeing parts of my model partially transparent.

Funky Bunnies

ah, I think that's a problem with Maya's alpha sorting and I'm not sure how to get around it other than applying a different shader without alpha to specific faces.
Or you could maybe try a cg shader or something if you can find one that handles it better? I don't know if it'll have hte same problem or not


Anyway, if your alpha map hasn't been working, be sure you check on the 'Alpha is Luminance' checkbox on the filetexture node, if you want it to work without High Quality render you need to go to the hardware texturing section of the shader and change the texture channel to 'combined'

Steve Schulze

Don't use High Quality mode with alphas. They won't sort properly.
Turn off High Quality rendering and turn on Polygon Transparency Sorting in the viewport menu (I think its under Shading. I don't have a recent version of maya close handy). That should solve your problems.

Funky Bunnies

oh nice! I've just been using max to avoid that nonsense

KonamiCode

Well thanks for the suggestions, they were similar to ones I already tried after I searched the Tips and Techniques forum. Still no luck though. Hopefully I'll find out what it is, someday.

So I am at a point where I'm pretty happy with the texture, not sure if it's technically after the deadline (it's still 10:30 here on the West Coast, but I notice the forum time is 2 hours ahead. So I'll post the final here, and if anyone says it's cool, I'll post it in the submission thread.

I really liked this project, it got a lot of ideas for new projects going.


Thumb:



Turnaround:



Construction:



Edit: Just realized I didn't post the textures @ fullsize. Kind of feeling in a bit of a daze after cranking on this for the last couple days.

KonamiCode

Well, I have no idea how it happened, but I restarted Maya after that last post, and low and behold, the Alpha started working. No idea what it was exactly that fixed it, but thanks everyone for your info. If I need to again I'll just pull up this thread and try everything again.




Went ahead and posted in the Challenge thread (11:59 my time!). Hope I did it right, this is my first time attempting a challenge like this and seeing it all the way through to the end. Please let me know if the images should be bigger, smaller, etc.

Other than all that, Phew. What a ride. Learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and even now see things I could really stand to fix (reusing the texture space on the big bar coming down the front, for example. Don't know why I didn't).

I think I'll finish trying to rig him up for animation and pose him in a couple days. For now though, I need a break.