Quick Fast Detour Sign

Quokimbo

I woke up this morning and wanted to model something quickly and texture it quickly as well. I spent about an hour and this is what I finished.
1.


2.


3. Wire frame and poly/tri count


opinions and crits?

Joao Sapiro

is it brand new out of the factory ? if not it needs more grime or signs that it was actually put on a road

Ott

Turn the filter off on your texture map. This is causing it to blur and look low-res.

Don't render on a black background.

Give it a couple lights and some shadows when rendering.

More scratches, worn paint, specularity, dings, and imperfections.

Wilex

You might want to cut up the faces on the front/back of your signs right now they have 8 sides. These are known as n-gons, any face with more than 4 sides is an n-gon. If you were to import your mesh into a game engine it would triangulate the mesh but most likely not how you want it to look or it may give you lighting issues with those faces. In general just avoid N-gons.

If you didnt know how to change the background color, you go to the Environment section of the camera’s Attribute Editor you can set the Background Color attribute to whatever you want.

Let's see your UV setup maybe you could make your color map look a little higher res if you had sections that tiled nicely. Also everytime you bring in any type of texture map into maya it creates a file node that for some reason by default has a quadratic filter set instead of being set to off. You can also change this in the attribute editor.

Good practice but lets see those changes and make them a habbit it should improve your work flow.

Quokimbo

Thanks for the comments and crits! I might try this right now!

Found it, whats a good color to render in white?

Wilex

Usually a neutral color is nice like a grey. Dont forget to add in a ground plane to catch shadows on and don't use harsh colors for your lights make them very subtle or white so your color map shows nicely.

The_Kozmonaut

Neutral grey or even a grey gradient, but definitely not white or black

edit: oops Wilex beat me to the punch

Quokimbo

a new one...



there is now ground, but 2 lights in front set at .like .40 intensity and one in back at .50. Also the the filter turned off pixel-ated the texture horribly, so I played with the different settings and this one is Gaussian. It looked the best.

kio

im just guessing - but it seems like your texture density is extremely uneven, it looks like the two sign textures ate up ~90% of the texturespace. or maybe your stripes texture is just way too blurry...

fix the things already mentioned, like the dirt overlay stuff, and it will look quite nice.

Quokimbo

kio wrote: »

im just guessing - but it seems like your texture density is extremely uneven, it looks like the two sign textures ate up ~90% of the texturespace. or maybe your stripes texture is just way too blurry...

texture density?

I used like a quarter of a 512x512. Also I could also probably find a better picture of the stripes.

Lee3dee

looks like the detour sign last night on North Rt 75 Central Expressway. Coming from downtown Dallas.

GOBEE949

QuoKimbo-

Looks good. Only thing that stands out to me, and I'm being picky here, is on the bottom panel where your orange texture forms a triangle... it looks like one side of the orange texture is lighter than the other, almost forming a seam. Maybe you textured one side in PS and then duplicated, transformed onto the other side? Do one more pass on your textures, and make sure they blend well.

Also, when showing your wireframe, zoom in on the persp view, turn on "wireframe when shaded" and do a screen grab from there.

Wilex

Looks better. I think you should turn shadows on for one of your lights. Also your candy stripes have stepping/aliasing in them.

If you're up to it you could try to third your texture so you can utilize the tiling but it may be hard to get that candy stripe pattern to tile the way you need it. You would place your signs in one third your stripes in the second and make them tile then your generic metal and make it tile as well. This way you don't have to fit everything inside the 512 texture you can cheat it a little and gain some resolution through the tiling. It would be easier to see whats going on if you posted your texture though.

As for the image of the candy stripe you don't really need it just make some nice selections and paint your own using the image as a quick guide.

Quokimbo

Texture map


I was thinking of just making the stripes my self, Might be easier and make it look cleaner.

oobersli

well you should make this 512x256 then. That way you can tile your metal stuff left to right and won't have to worry so much about those blurry black holes. You might want to think of giving the signs more uv space or adding other stuff since the metal is barely used on the asset compared to the rest and it has almost as much space used as all the other stuff.

Trim down the metal part, add the flashy light stuff, sandbag texture in there * to hold the sign down*. Break the signs up a bit.. not so straight and clean fit. Plan on doing a normal map? Some cool dings and folds in the signs could be cool. Just a thought, hope that gives ya some ideas.

Quokimbo

I am reading about this normal mapping stuff as I read your post. Still kind of lost though.

found this?
http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps4.shtml

Wells

use the Catmull-Rom filter
if you're putting lights in the scene, make sure your textures aren't at 100 self-illum

your metal texture looks slapped onto all the bars. looking at your texture - it is. take the time to define the edges of the sides - these might be a bit lighter, as they'd get scuffed and scratched the most. same goes for the rest of the diffuse - there's no texture to it. the only thing defining edges is where colors stop. road signs take a tremendous amount of shit from everyone. they don't even get conveyor belts in factories, they get booted out a window and down some stairs and through a pit with lava pissing alligators. so give it some scratches and some weather stains and maybe some protein stains if you're feeling cheeky.

it's easily recognizable, so it's a success in that regard. but time to make it awesome

killingpeople

Create this mythical lava pissing alligator whom hates signs. If you do it, they will cum.

Wilex

Hey Quokimbo, Your texture needs a lot of work. First off you’re wasting more than half the texture map leaving it blank like that ideally all space on your color map should be filled with detail you created. Seeing that your prop doesn't justify the use of a 512x512 go ahead and crop the texture down to 512x256 textures don't have to be square unless the game engine requires it. If you want to keep the texture 512x512 you can add another prop to it possibly like a traffic cone or one of those barrier barrels.

Here's an image of how I would handle that texture if I was going to crop it to 512x256. You want to scale your UV's up so they are as tall as the section and then the can scale as wide as you need because the texture repeats forever but keep it proportional you don't want the texture to look stretched. The tricky part is making it look seamless use Filter>Other>Offset to check if it tiles. You'll gain a lot of resolution if you do this. Also show off your photoshop skills with your texture re-create or heavily manipulate those images. Here's my example, just to be clear i marked how your UV's should stretch and how you should tile the texture.



Also look at this article by Ben Mathis, http://www.poopinmymouth.com/process/tips/thirding.jpg.

and check out the rest of his tutorials for more info on 3D stuff.

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm

Wilex

killingpeople wrote: »

Create this mythical lava pissing alligator whom hates signs. If you do it, they will cum.

Orly?

Quokimbo

OK here is my first try at some bump mapping.



??? I just played with the setting until i got something i liked. A lot of the renders were coming out very bright. so I have an ambient light kind of far away from it at like .75 intensity.

Ott

errr....k

Lay off the bump mapping. Get the basic unwrap / texture / model done first. You've gone from bad to worse.

Quokimbo

Ott wrote: »

errr....k

Lay off the bump mapping. Get the basic unwrap / texture / model done first. You've gone from bad to worse.

damnit. I am trying to take it off? and found the settings to adjust how much displacement it gives the objects...



I think I need to redo the texture...LMFAO

Wilex

Yeah my eye's are going to bleed man, too many jagged edges. Just remove the bump/normal whatever it is and go back to making your texture look decent res it still looks pixilated.

To get rid of the bump just open the hypershade right click on your shader and graph the network then select and delete the bump node.

Get your color map to look nice and then maybe do a bump after but i really don't think you need one on this piece.