a dirty ol' vending machine
Hey guys, long time lurker here. I've been working on this vending machine on and off for waaayyy too long, and I'm anxious to get some crits, improve it and start on something new. I'm going for a (somewhat) tacky 80s style with plenty of use and abuse heaped on. Designed with current gen FPS specs in mind.
Diffuse:
Spec:
Normal:
Wires:
Sitting at about 700 tris with 3 1024s for the main texture and a handful of smaller textures for the cubemap/glass, rendered with Pico. I'd especially appreciate any help with colour choices, metal, glass and the normals as I feel its pretty lacking in those areas.
Diffuse:
Spec:
Normal:
Wires:
Sitting at about 700 tris with 3 1024s for the main texture and a handful of smaller textures for the cubemap/glass, rendered with Pico. I'd especially appreciate any help with colour choices, metal, glass and the normals as I feel its pretty lacking in those areas.
Replies
The beverage selection buttons, the price indicator, and the thing above it really aren't adding to the silouhette of the object so you can probably remove the geometry for that and let the normal map take care of it (especially for the beverage selections, they really aren't adding anything at all).
Plus I can't see any clear indication of where I would put change to make a purchase. Everything else seems to scale though and good.
Story:
When and where is this thing? You said you were going for tacky 80's style. Are we actually in the 80's and its just very beat up and dirty, or is it a relic from the 80's? Why does it still have cans available from the 80's in it if its in modern day? Was it forgotten somewhere? If so why does it have a Sierra Mist beverage selection (Sierra Mist wasn't around until at least 2000)? Also if this was the case why was the owner still selling beverages for $.50?
Whats the story to this vending machine?
...it looks like it belongs in a lodge or shooting range/archery range somewhere.
Edit: I might also make the cans a seperate object with their own really small maps. If its going to be in an FPS, someone is going to want to or try and shoot the cans off this thing.
The spec map is totally off, why would the pepsi logo and other text show up differently? You may need to ditch this one and have a look at some other spec maps for reference, as its not just a grey scale of your diffuse.
Your local is currently doing nothing to add to the piece, so granted you may not want to make a high poly model, but ATM this is wasting memory, and I doubt you would notice if it wasn't there. Bump the detail up.
Edit: More on the spec map, Try making the whole thing greyscale then observing what needs colour and why. For instance the Pepsi can, should be pretty much the same colour as the diffuse because its metallic and if you look at one they actually have coloured speculars. A slight blue works for the metal parts, like you have at the moment. Most of the other stuff shouldn't have coloured reflections. Also try having more contrast in your spec map, and take advantage of it by perhaps putting scratches in it that aren't in the diffuse to suggest slight surface scratches on the metal.
Crits;
Initially I see that the logo's for the beverages are hard to identify, this being the staple ingredient for the prop should be rectified so that it's purpose can be revealed at various different viewing distances/angles.
It doesn't look really beaten up or if it's suffering from general fatigue, the reason is that the entire structure is intact apart from a few little scratches on the wood and some almost unidentifiable peeling of the frontal metallic surfaces.
Some warping, cracks and dampness in the wood plus some dents in the metal all being supported by normal map and ambient occlusion would lend substantial appeal to this asset.
Yeah, the maps are pretty big aren't they? I could probably downsize it to a 512 without loosing too much. Agreed on the paint.
I wanted it to be a funtional (as in you could walk up to it in a game and activate it to get a can of soda), that's why I spent 280ish tris on the buttons. I originally had the change/price indicator box just flat like you suggested, but it looked weird up close.
The change slot should be much clearer now, I made it stuck out a lot more from the metal behind it.
Wow, great stuff about story, really made me consider how little thought I put into the origins. I saved your blurb to a text file so I can read it before I begin other projects.
It would fit right in at a shooting range. I think it was (subconsciously) inspired by an old vending machine outside the front of a hospital I used to see a lot of (because my mom worked there, not because I enjoyed playing in traffic or anything like that
Agreed on the cans being on a seperate map.
I whipped up a new spec map and added/strengthened a lot of stuff in my normal map. Vending machines are pretty boxy and flat things, so naturally it's not going to take advantage of a normal map as well as a nice curvy character would, unfortunately. I've tried to keep the normal map pretty accurate with regard to where there would be indents/extrusions while bumping it up.
I brutalized the wood some more, added a bunch of normal mapped scratches/breaks/burns. I chipped a bunch of paint from the sides as well. It looks kind of thick atm, but reads well from a distance.
I canned my old spec map and start over doing pretty much what you suggested.
Removed some noise and bumped up the contrast in the logos, and also took out the Sierra Mist logo (which was pretty hard to read). I think they're much easier to read now, but I've also been staring at it for so long it makes it hard to be sure if I'm seeing objectively, let me know what you think.
I added some more varied damage and graffiti. I also had some water damage in there until I remembered it was made of fake wood, haha.
I was pretty happy with the wood until you mentioned it, you're dead on with it being out place though. I've browned it up so it feels more in line with ugly 70s brown laminate fake wood pattern: http://www.flickr.com/photos/placenamehere/451885843/ . I tried a lighter plywood but it was kind of bleh.
The end result still looks good (I thought it looked good before but it's better now).
I think your specular map is still the weakest texture here - as was pointed out initially, there's a lot of parts which don't make any sense and read like you've just tweaked the levels / saturation of your diffuse map, which doesn't really make sense.
For example, those "drink logo" buttons should have consistent bright specular value, since (i imagine) they are intended to be those glossy plastic buttons, in which case the diffuse colour comes from a printed card stuck inside a transparent plastic casing. Due to this, the specular would be a constant bright value, since the plastic casing is a smooth shiny surface.
Same applies to the big pepsi logo on top, why is the specular different values for the different colours? That would imply that each type of paint / ink used to print the sign has a different shininess! Which really doesn't make much sense. Again this is the sort of thing that is printed on glossy card, or laminated / faced with plastic, so the specular should be more consistent and bright.
Same applies to the wood facade... why would the lighter parts of the wood be more shiny? Again these things usually have a layer of varnish which tends to even out the specular value, I doubt you should see the wood grain pattern much, if at all, in the specular map. In fact, heh, you even said in the last sentence of your last post that you wanted it to be like '70s "laminate wood" and linked a picture which, while it doesn't show the spec particularly well, is fairly obvious that the surface is not bumpy at all, and in fact has a flat sheen over it.
Clearly you know the look you want to achieve, so try to break down each material into the elements that compose it - for your wood here, you've got the diffuse right, since it's just colour, but you've gone and put the wood grain into the normalmap too, which as you can see from that photo, is totally wrong - it should be completely flat, there's no evidence of the wood grain bumping out at all in the photo.
It just seems like your understanding of what each map does, and how it should be created to give an impression of different "material types" and their surfaces is a little wobbly right now, just think about it a bit more. Clearly you are a good artist and can make quality assets, I just think you can really push this a bit further to hit the look you are aiming for.