SciFi Door crit please!

Blackblade

Trying to improve on metal textures and need more crit on how to make it better (also for some reason my textures are being blurred in the unreal engine 3, does anyone know how to fix that?)

Render
http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/5992/scifidoortestrender09dt1.jpg

Reference:
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9883/doorref01fm7.jpg

Thanks!

Mark Dygert

Not too shabby, off to a decent start.

Crits:
- It lacks the hard bends on the concept. If you're rendering from a high poly it could help to set up the smoothing groups or hard edges, to help give it that hard bend.
- There are a bunch of little details that aren't showing up or were not included.
- The texture is kind of noisy with a bunch of scratches all over the place. Damage and scratches should be localized to areas that make sense. Too much crap and it just gets messy, not "detailed". Less overall damage makes the damage that is there stand out.
- It looks like you made a low poly, and painted the normal map by hand? It might be faster and give better results to knock out a high poly and render some maps from it.
- It would help if we could see the texture(s). The spec looks to be off but can't say how for sure.

Blackblade

Vig wrote: »

Not too shabby, off to a decent start.

Crits:
- It lacks the hard bends on the concept. If you're rendering from a high poly it could help to set up the smoothing groups or hard edges, to help give it that hard bend.
- There are a bunch of little details that aren't showing up or were not included.
- The texture is kind of noisy with a bunch of scratches all over the place. Damage and scratches should be localized to areas that make sense. Too much crap and it just gets messy, not "detailed". Less overall damage makes the damage that is there stand out.
- It looks like you made a low poly, and painted the normal map by hand? It might be faster and give better results to knock out a high poly and render some maps from it.
- It would help if we could see the texture(s). The spec looks to be off but can't say how for sure.

ok cool thx, im a bit worried about changing the texture to less noise on the diffuse and spec, im afraid it will look too bland but i'll definitely give it a shot. As far as the normal, I did create a high poly version but when i baked the normals half the details didnt show up so i crazybumped the complete map.

Diff:
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/566/scifidoordrx7.jpg
Spec:
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/4769/scifidoorsys8.jpg
Norm:
http://img355.imageshack.us/img355/5329/scifidoornai3.jpg
(Illumination map is 512*512 and left it out, also im fully aware my textures are messy :shifty:)

woogity

the concept seems to me like the before shot of some cataclysmic accident and the model the after, not saying its bad at all, what im saying is the model is extremely scratched up and also very dark and grungy, it seems to be from a different space than the concept. also i dont think the colors are the same in concept and model, it looks like the doorframe in the concept is a lighter color than the door, and it looks about the same hue as the door in the model.

-Woog

Dakkon

I think the main thing for me is that it looks like it's giant casted metal pieces, where as the concept looks to be made up of small panels.

I think a big thing is the noise from the metal overlay you put down. It's very evenly distributed. Try to think about what areas would get worn down, and why. Having some smooth areas would really help. Also, some painted areas might be cool as well to show a difference in materials. Try to think about where separate panels meet, and try to break up your metal overlay a bit. A new panel would mean a new piece of metal, so the tile would be different in that area, instead of carrying the same one the whole way across.

I'd definitely work on getting some of the finer normal map details in there as well, if you're trying to follow the concept exactly.

Mark Dygert

One thing to experiment with is to take 90% of the scratches out of the diffuse but keep them in the spec.

Experiment with spec color. You can get some nice greasy grimy dirt with color. Start off with purple/dark browns and play with it from there.

The normal definitely is lacking some of the hard edged details the concept has. It seems to have zero height info for the bevels and pannels. I'd strongly urge you to crank out a high poly version and render out some proper normal maps. You'll drive yourself nuts trying to draw all that by hand. Once you have those sorted out, also do an AO pass and apply that to the diffuse, or on a second UV channel.

Some of your fine details are a single pixel wide. More then likely if this was a game asset the texture would be Mip'ed down to a smaller size and blurred washing out a lot of the fine details that you want to hold up. Bulking up those lines even exaggerating them would help them come thru at a distance.

ImSlightlyBored

Blackblade wrote: »

Trying to improve on metal textures and need more crit on how to make it better (also for some reason my textures are being blurred in the unreal engine 3, does anyone know how to fix that?)

Render
http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/5992/scifidoortestrender09dt1.jpg

Reference:
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9883/doorref01fm7.jpg

Thanks!

when you import your texture files, check DEFER COMPRESSION and it wont compress your images until later on. There used to be a NO COMPRESSION setting, I think, but I can no longer find it myself.

I think using defer compression just makes the editor compress your files when you save the package.

Metal can be a bastard sometimes, excuse the language. It sometimes can flow pretty easy, other times, its dependant on the spec map you are using to really sell it.

As for your normals, you would definitely benefit from a high to low bake, something like this isnt too complex and itll just neaten things up. But failing that, you could get some good results by handpainting the bump map and then running it through the nVidia filter or CB (but be sure to knock out shape recognition and other elements if thats the case)

I dont have too many unique points to make, everyones made the points worth making. One thing I will say, is put a little more love in to the emissive map when you get chance. Often these are skipped over with flat colours, but adding in variants on colours can really help the lights. A little burnt orange/yellow bordering the white lights sometimes looks nice. Just something to play with, anyway.

Cody

ditto vigs suggestion to keep scratches in the spec.

SHEPEIRO

for metal rendering i have a tip...

keep your spec value high and your focus (if you have it low) then make sure the spec map (for worn dirty metal) is mostly within the bottom 1/4 of values (use the histogram) with small points(scratches edge wear etc) that go right up to near white, this should give you a really nice range which is what metal is all about

Blackblade

ok cool, thx a bunch guys, heres a very small update i did, reimported to fix the blur and removed all of the scratches (it was a base metal i had) so ill add some scratches back in when i get some time.

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/9155/scifidoortestrender10yp3.jpg