High Poly Practice - Vatican

Pope Adam

Hi

trying to learn to do some high poly stuff. I've been experimenting with Sub-D with moderate success but I thought I'd like to try some straight up polygon modeling.

I'm going to work on this until it looks kickass, so I'll start making posts now, and hopefully receive a lot of crits and helpful tips.

This is a sculpture from the Vatican. Just fleshing out the base right now, and I"m not really sure how I'm going to go about making all of the small details with the figures etc, but I want to take a real stab at it.

I don't think my current workflow for the small details is the one I will stick with, so if anyone has some advice on a solid way to go about making models of this kind, I'd love to hear your methods!

thanks in advance - fire away!








o yah - the rendered shot has a big obvious seam, but i just wanted to see how it would look so i hastily slapped it together for the screenie
cheers!

EarthQuake

Spend more time modeling, less time rendering! AO renders are such a huge waste of time, thats a half hour or however long that ao render took that you could have been using to model more of this If you really want a quick preview of what your mesh will look like with ao, just export an obj with no uvs, and load it up into faogen( http://www.rusteddreams.net/faogen.html ) you can calculate per-vert AO in a matter of seconds.

Pope Adam

Roger that EQ. Thanks for the link.

I work at a library so I just turned on an AO render while I shelved books away and it was done before I got back. Long render times FTL.

Cedar Falls? I'm from Davenport lol - cheers to Iowa.

stimpack

if your just practicing modeling, lets start with something a bit easier. You are gonna go nuts tryin to make all that detail, specially the characters in there.

ps. the swirly thing you have made doesnt dead end, it flows into the next swirly thing on the edges.

Pope Adam

good point. I maybe should be hitting something a bit easier in nature.

I feel like I understand the principles of how all this works so I wanna try to make this work through trial and error.

The swirlies that I started aren't yet finished. I planned on just modeling the corner swirlie piece out of the existing piece. I'll stick with this project for a bit longer and see if i start making any decent progress.

How's business in LA mr. phil?

stimpack

slow as poo! haha polishing up some stuff in my folio and hiting the job hunt! seems to be a bad time to do tho, lots of people are out shoping for new gigs

keep modeling! only way to get good is to fail then learn why and improve. there are honestly 10 diff ways to do any 1 thing it seems. I usually stick with poly pushing, lofts, path deforms and a few other random functions to make stuff. Others like to use displacements, and more advanced crap. in the end its what ever makes the best result for your piece, so keep it simple and organized.

Lord McMutton

Pope Adam doing something from the Vatican? How fitting.

Pope Adam

ha, didn't even think of it. Pope's just been my game handle for like 10 years.

Pope Adam

I'm gonna take phil's advice and start off with something a bit simpler before going balls out on the zany model from the vatican. here's a model I started today.


reference image





Proportions don't match the image exactly but I was just kinda looking at it for a general guide.

Pope Adam

A bit more

breakneck

i didn't say you could stop. any progress? looks good so far

Pope Adam

Okay, it's been a while since I worked on this.

Here's what I'd like to consider the finished product (aside from the mammoth seam at the base that I'll paint out in the morning)

Any suggestions before I make a sheet for this item?

it's 2k tris, and I've used 2048 maps for it (I know that is an unreasonably large map size but I figured I would rez down to a more appropriate size after getting some guidance from the community).

So yah, it's 5 am and I'm tired and drunk from solo-beer-modeling night. cheers

Joe March

Spec on that?

stimpack

Hey man, looking good. I think your textures are a bit 1 color at the moment. And pretty saturated overall. You have alot of construction pieces on there, like bolts and such that could be a diff color/material to help bring some contrast to the piece. I did a quicky paintover for ya, this ofcource isnt something you have to do, but just something to think about.

SHEPEIRO

wheres the alphas on that thing

Pope Adam

ah, thanks phil. I had a feeling it was a bit monochromatic but was up way too late to come up with a valid solution. I'll paint in some details this aternoon.

Shep - alphas for the glass? Haven't had time yet. The inside of the lantern is not modeled so I didn't actually think I was going to put any alphas on it, but go for a more stylized look with an emissive glow.

Oh yah, and Phil, I don't know if I agree on the saturation. touch

stimpack

Hey good deal. after viewing that reff pic, you got the color pretty darn close. I still think your a bit heavy on just 1 shade tho, might just be my old eyes tho Ill be the first to tell anyone im terrible with color, so i usually make a color guide (especially if i have reff to go by) Heres what I do. You may know this, but if not, hopefully its helpfull.

in photoshop, i just crop down the image to the area of the item, then i go "image - mode - index color" in that, i turn down the colors to 16ish. then in the dropdown i hit custom and it gives you that sampling of the colors from the image. You can either print screen and make a tiny jpg to sample from, or just save that pallet off and load it into photoshop.

Pope Adam

oh tits, this is quite nifty! thanks dude :P

Microneezia

wow that's a such a great idea, so simple too that not doing this now seems ludicrous.

Thanks so much Stimpack!

Nice hipoly lantern!

Pope Adam

Okay here's what I'm gonna go with for now.

I didn't end up getting time for an Alpha for the glass, perhaps in the future I'll get that done and add some emissive glow to the glass panes.

Reverenddevil

Hey man, I noticed on your uv layout for the lantern, there is a ton of wasted space. You have uniquely unwrapped the glass parts of the lantern on all 4 sides. All you wold have needed to do was unwrap them and overlay them on each other givng yourself more UV space. If this is a portfolio piece I would go back and re uv it. You do not want to be showing that much wasted UV space, be as efficient as possible..

UncleBezo

Great tip stim.

PixelMasher

your highpoly of the street light looks great. I definatley agree with the comment about wasted UV space also 2048is pretty high for a smaller prop like this you could probably get away with a sharped 1024 for the diffuse and a 512 for the normal and spec, something to keep in mind for next time. cant wait to see more textured props.

stimpack

kewl, glade that little tip could help guys the piece is lookn beter now! i do how ever agree with the uv thing. If your interested in fixing it, or perhapse have this problem in the future, its actually not as big a hassle as you would think. Heres a quick tutorial on how to do it....I didnt write this tut, an old art manager of mine did.....


1: Add an Unwrap UVW to your Editable Poly.
2: Under Parameters hit Save and save your current UV layout from channel 1.
3: Change your map channel to 2.
4: Under Parameters hit Load and load your UV layout from channel 1 onto channel 2.
5: Fix your UV layout in channel 2 to your new desired layout.
6: Collapse the stack to apply UV channel 2 changes to the Editable Poly.
7: Add an Unwrap UVW to your mesh and save UV layout from channel 2.
8: Unstack any overlapped or mirrored UVs so you just have one piece from the stack in the 0-1 space on the UV sheet. (Just as you normally would if you were rendering out a normal map or AO map).
9: Change map channel to 1 and collapse the stack
10: Assign a clean material to the object.
11: In the diffuse color map select bitmap and put your diffuse color texture into the slot.
12: Keep Map Channel in the bitmap set to 1.
13: Open up render to texture and add a DiffuseMap to the output. (do not enable projection mapping)
14: Select the height and width and spot to save the texture.
15: Under Mapping Coordinates select "Use Existing Channel" and change the channel to 2.
16: Hit render.
17: Your diffuse texture should now be changed to coincide with your UV channel 2 layout.
18: Go back to direction 11 and replace your diffuse texture with the specular texture in the DiffuseMap slot. Repeat steps 12-16.
19: Go back to direction 11 and replace your specular texture with the normal texture in the DiffuseMap slot. Repeat steps 12-16.
20: Keep repeating 11-16 until all your textures are re-rendered to the new UV channel 2 layout.
21: Add an Unwrap UVW to your mesh and make sure the map channel is set to 1.
22: Load your saved map channel 2 (the one that has your UVs stacked properly) onto map channel 1.
23: Rebuild your material with the new textures you've generated.




a forewarning. if you delete and faces or verts. or even cut around on the mesh This will scrap your saved uvw file, and not reimport it. so uhh make sure your absolutely done with the model when you go to change uv's like this. if you need to make changes on the model do so after or before you attempt this not during.

ps. Those directions look long and confusing, but i guarantee once you do this it will be soooo easy, and make tons of sense. I cant tell you how many times ive done this. Its an invaluable method.... for me atleast.

Pope Adam

rightous sir, thanks very kindly. quick question on my UV layout though... I understand that the wasted space is because of the four identical faces of the lanterns are each layed out uniquely... but here's what I was thinking.

If you get in and look closely, I've painted each one of the faces differently. Some of them have bird shit on them, some dont, etc. How can I get unique sides to each face of the lantern if they are all stacked upon each other? Would I have to go ahead and make some additional detail maps at maybe 128x128 and use them as decals?

Kawe

Pope Adam wrote: »

rightous sir, thanks very kindly. quick question on my UV layout though... I understand that the wasted space is because of the four identical faces of the lanterns are each layed out uniquely... but here's what I was thinking.

If you get in and look closely, I've painted each one of the faces differently. Some of them have bird shit on them, some dont, etc. How can I get unique sides to each face of the lantern if they are all stacked upon each other? Would I have to go ahead and make some additional detail maps at maybe 128x128 and use them as decals?

map it as you did but instead of having them separately you can just move them on top of each others so everything without bird shit uses the same texture space. right now the smaller lanterns got 8 sides total. let's say two of these need to have bird shit.. different bird shit at that. you'd have to use 3 "unique" areas instead of the 8 you are using now.

however.. uhm.. unless it is a lamppost climbing game no one is going to notice it. you could map quite a lot of other things onto the same texture space and probably reduce this to a 1k texture and keep about the same detail level (although a bit more repetitive)... it might look a little worse but hey.. you can fit 4(!!) 1k textures on a 2k texture. You could make 4 different lamp post textures with it! (or you could fit your diff, spec, normal and greyscale glow/alpha/specpow into a 2k texture).

Also I believe you could cut down on some of the tris at the topside actually.. since you are using a normal map (and no one is going to see it).

Erh... and just so I don't forget. This looks really good but for being a game asset I think you could compromise some more.