Sawnoff O/U Baikal Shotgun WiP
Update: Sunday 15th. Finished the bleeder! Thoughts and comments please!
S'up Polycount. First time poster long time lurker.
Over summer, my dissertation project for my uni course involves making 5 character models, 3 guns and a bass guitar all to a reasonably comfortable next-gen polygon count/ texture res.
The first model I'm working on is the shotgun model shown below. I'm essentially looking for any constructive feedback prior to UV unwrapping, texturing and doing the funky normals/specular painting.
Polycount is currently ~3200
Thoughts before I go ahead and texture it?
S'up Polycount. First time poster long time lurker.
Over summer, my dissertation project for my uni course involves making 5 character models, 3 guns and a bass guitar all to a reasonably comfortable next-gen polygon count/ texture res.
The first model I'm working on is the shotgun model shown below. I'm essentially looking for any constructive feedback prior to UV unwrapping, texturing and doing the funky normals/specular painting.
Polycount is currently ~3200
Thoughts before I go ahead and texture it?
Replies
Other than that it looks good.
Looks nice.
I was wondering about leaving the polygons like that while modelling it. Thanks for pre-emptively clearing that up!
Seeing as I'm going to texture this thing, would it be wise to texture it as two separate pieces seeing as the barrel and the stock/receiver are two individual meshes. I'm wondering this because I intend to keep the pivot of the barrel at the hinge and attaching them together means the whole gun shares a single pivot - AFAIK in 3DSMax8.
Is it wise? Does it matter at all? Thoughts?
EDIT: Also WOW at Max going fucking *wierd* with the n-gons on the sight-rail, now that I look closer at it.
You can fit the whole gun on one texture map easily. Just attach them once you've got the UV's setup so you can render a UV snapshot then collapse back to editable poly and detach them so you can have the pivot point you need. It's a waste to do two sets of textures for a gun. The three most common maps you would use are Color/Diffuse, Specular and Normal if you cut it into two parts that would be 6 maps total for just a gun. Which is very expensive for a game asset.
I think you could easily work this into a 1024x1024 or a 512x512. If you really needed the detail try a 2048x2048 before going to two sets. I would push to make the texture as small as possible yet looking good. The gun is symmetrical so you don't really need unique UV space unless you're adding some intricate details to each side.
Good Luck.
Thanks so much for the advice Wilex! I'll keep this thread updated with progress!
Welp, sadly can't do much about the normals now, I have to press on with the project this is meant for, but there'll be plenty of chance for more practice baking with high-res meshes. =P
Although the saturation I addressed with fewer omni lights and by desaturating the wood a bit. Also this does look a lot better to me so you were right on the money!
Most often spec is in black-and-white because specularity is the reflection of the lights around your objects; a red light should cause red spec on most materials. In this case, you have your diffuse color, and then areas emitting spec are stacking on top of that with the SAME color, blowing them out to super-saturated.
I've only really noticed colored spec maps used for more organic materials like skin, special types of glass and oily things. It's a good way of cheating things that would otherwise use subsurface scattering, in realtime.
Edit: Looks like you posted as I was typing! It's looking much better - but perhaps still take a look at your spec. What you've done might work for this certain shot, but not for another, so just play with it - if you're satisfied, then stick with it!
This is my first spec-map enabled model and I admit I know very little about specular maps and how they're normally used. This info about them being mostly greyscale is completely new to me, so do you have any links or something which goes through the common uses and the generation of spec-maps? Treat me as a total newbie! (Cos I am!)
Also I never knew spec-maps amplify the colour of the diffuse if it's similar, that makes the point of desaturated and opposed-colour spec-maps a shitload clearer!
I don't have personal experience with colored spec maps, so I don't want to lead you down the wrong path and say 'don't use them' - I know they do have use, so I'd rather if someone else with more knowledge on the subject of colored spec maps would interject.
For now, I'd say try painting with just black and white (and of course all shades of grey) and see if it does the job for you until we get more info on colored maps, because I think there are certain precautions to understand when dealing with colored spec maps, like when a colored light hits colored spec. Or, of course, play around with it yourself - you can learn a lot from experimenting.
For Spec Maps you can down rez them by about 50% of your original diffuse. So if you used a 1024 use a 512 spec and so on. It just helps save memory.
Does anyone else recommend downrezing spec? Does the benefit of memory space outweigh the penalty of detail?
Yeah this isn't really good advice, it really depends on material. For something like metal that has a LOT of detail in the spec, you would want to size down your normals or diffuse before your spec, thats where you should be getting most of your detail from.