unreal/quake style fps gun
polycounter lvl 12
found a fan colored version of the ut flak cannon concept art and decided to turn it into a lazer/plazma gun
heres my high poly so far
heres my high poly so far
Replies
got a count?
do you get what i mean? may be due to the sharp edges,i guess.
think over it
Vj
all the other details have no obvious purpouse so its impossible to tell if theyre fucked for any reason. Having an old style tangent sight which doesnt actually have any sight picture breaks suspension of disbelief bro.
On Topic:
The modeling looks clean (except for those circular indents near the middle/front of the gun) though wires would be nice. Is this intended to be a one handed weapon? I dont see any place to put a second hand to balance the device. Although there's some nice stuffing going on there, it's mostly just a lot of shapes thrown at each other for the sake of having shapes. It would be nice if you pared everything down to a few pieces and worked on the overall shape and silhouette and THEN went in and started adding details and tubes and wires and such.
Some things to consider for details/parts to add would be:
-ammunition counter (or in the case of a plasma or laser rifle maybe a battery charge?)
-ammunition source
-reload mechanism (think of the animators, with nothing to reload and no mechanism to activate that new batch of ammo the device will be very still and boring. In the case of a sci-fi gun you have every opportunity to add movement/moving parts like rotating coils building up electrical charge, blow off vents to get rid of operational heat, etc)
-Forward grip/handle/hand well , as stated above it could use a place to put your other hand to balance the gun since it looks pretty heavy.
-clear barrel or firing mechanism, right now I'm not sure where the gun fires from, making that clear would be nice and would make a logical point of origin for any muzzle flashes, laser beams, etc
I think the only thing that looks off to me is that where your front grip is, it is too far back on the gun to offer any real support to the person holding it.
I dont think you need to worry about the backlash if its a laser gun. (but i dunno) Nice stuff Racer. I like Ninjas pistol version also :P
Seems like something like that would suit the proportions you've got going on.
This idea really puts the gun into a 'working form'...i would love to see a revision with these ideas in mind.
And i also agree about the barrel(s)...where are they exactly? And i would love to see some more renders at different angles and maybe a wire too.
oh but wait i just want it to look like an ak47 because im a dumb fuck
WHOOPZ
Chill out man, racer is cool with it. Unlike you jive-ass mother fucking TURKEY.
anyway. i really like the shapes you have in your gun. i agree, that thing in the back and the thing on the top to hold it would make it way cooler.
you have a nasty seam on that circular part.
Sandbag, the barrels are the bottom two blaster thingermabobs. Keeping this true to quake there would be no reload animation. Think about the plasma gun in quake 3. I'll do a test pose when i finish the low poly to show exactly where the hands go.
00zero, the "seam" on that big circle in the middle is intentional. It's temporary and will be redone in photoshop though because how it is now is not how I want it.
here's some wires. much of the extra geo and loops were added for smoothing.
brought it down to 7900 tris btw
edit: 7500 now
I like the gun but make it a bit more smooth,better when generating a normal to.
My other concern is that this is not 7900 tris at all. I haven’t seen a shot yet of this in tris, its all been nurbs/quads... Which means when you finally convert it into tris, its gonna shock you just how high poly it is. I hope I'm wrong and I've simply missed this in the thread some place...
But yeah, so far:
1) Quads/Nurbs, not tris, so you are using far more polies than you think you are.
2) Harsh angles like 90 degrees wont work well with a single smoothing group at all. You can get around it by splitting the UV up where these angles meet (Bad) or using multiple smoothing groups (Slower, uglier), but the best way is to add chamfer edges along those sides, which will result in a much nicer smoothing group and normal.
3) Far too high poly in spots, those tubes and round parts? Way too high poly. The normal map could take care of that no problem. look at some of your wires and bolts? What exactly are they adding? Nothing much...
4) You just aren’t thinking about this in the way you should be. Its a "First person weapons" and yet a LOT of your detail/polies will be hidden from view when in "first person". The entire lower half of the back wont be seen, but you have stupidly high poly counts on those bolts there. The tubes on the top/front are hardly visible at all, but you insist on making them really round.
Anyway...
These are my views and thoughts, and if I'm wrong on that whole quads/nurbs thing and you know this already, with these pics just for show, then please ignore that. But these are a few points that I feel are lacking or needed saying, regardless.
2. I am surmising from what I know about him that he's going to split the UV clusters and there won't be edge problems.
I'll let him deal with the rest but I don't think those crits are particularly valid.
And the problem gets worse on the full version I think. The sides are boring until the end piece which will be barely visible, and the top looks about as un-UT as possible, with pointless iron sights, with adjustment knobs of all things, pinned to the top of it.
Essentially you've crammed a bunch of detail in and then made it all invisible to the player, which is wasteful. Also you have so many hard edges that you might as well forgo normal mapping the majority of the gun, because it's really going to be more trouble than it's worth. I have a feeling you'll find yourself hand painting normals a lot with this baby.
Kinda late unless you want to redo it though.
So hes going to fix one issue by adding another...? How do you define "Valid" then, because while splitting it all over the place can work, its also going to actually be slower to render thanks to more smoothing groups, maybe not by much but its still an issue. Even if you apply a single smooth over the entire model, splitting it will still smooth it based on UV coords, and thus splitting the smoothing up...
Which brings in the issue of it looking ugly as sin. If you texture a box, you want to make sure that the edges in your face, the ones that will be seen most of all, are joined together on the unwrap so that you can a) give them a snice, smooth gradient over the normal and b) keep the texture flow consistent, so that it doesnt have jarring transition from surface to surface.
With weapon models, you dont want to just start splitting it all over the place unless you really are sure you can handle the slight uglyness and the slight texture error you are bound to have. While these things are small, simple things, they can actually make or break a model in terms of visual design and readability, and thats why i would lower the slices count on the cylinder's so that i can spare a few polies to add chamfer edges to the really harsh 90 degree angles, thus making it look better over all.
And while never using hard edges on your low poly is ideal, it would add 3-4x the amount of tris to the model to get the same results, which would be unacceptable by anyone's standards.
http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/article_normalmaps/normalmaps.html
Heres some more information for the uninformed^
So while you may think I'm wrong, you have to remember that polycount isnt always your enemy, and sometimes you have other aspects to think about. Our engine, for example, doesn't have a polygon bottle neck as much as it has a fillrate bottle neck, and sometimes its better to make a 1000 polygon model over a 500 polygon model simply because fillrate is more important to our engine.
So straight out calling one method wrong over another because you don't use it isn't exactly fair.
EDIT: I'm also very influenced by md5mesh you ahve to udnerstand. With MD5mesh, you have to stick to a certain style, with certain ways of doing things, or your model will look very poor ingame.
also looks like some of the early flak cannon models from ut, there's even a hangy tube
LOL
Yeah, it was a hack job on my part, which further goes to prove my point, that you need to set up your uvs differently, if you want them to work well with smoothing groups. For this to work well you also need to your renderer to not split the edges on your cage mesh, the latest version of max does this.
The model you're talking about is literally the reason I looked into any of this to begin with, because of the terrible quality you get when using smoothing groups, but not separating the uvs as well. Which is absolutely the wrong way to go about doing it (setting up different smoothing, without consideration for the uvs, and transfering from an OS to TS map), but i just wanted something quick and dirty.
Also LOL @ complaining about poor smoothing on a model using OS maps, dude c'mon, smoothing is irrelevant when you're using OS, thats one of the key benifits to using it in the first place.
ooo I didnt know this. Thats what I get for not using Max to render normal maps for IDTech.
Keep laying the smack down EQ.
Vj
Looks great! I am very much liking the design of the gun, hopefully the texture can hold up to the standard of the rest of the model.
Excellent tips here, but what do you mean by"renderer to not split the edges on your cage mesh"? Excuse my ignorance on this matter.
EDIT: Also earthquake thanks for this post
http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/a...ormalmaps.html
This is some shit I didnt even know about.
new max splits the cage along the smoothing groups so that the cage is pushed out along the 2 norms, therefore not capturing pixels along the join and causing a seam, if the cage doesnt do this it pushes along the joined/average norm and captures everything
nice looking bake, personnaly id consider adding a few chamfers in the region of the FPS camera to make it slightly more solid and a better sillohette
Ahhhhh. Okay now..Im testing this info out right now. Thanks Shep!