Hammer Time! -- Engineering the hammer
Hey Guys&Gals! I just finished my latest piece, an engineer hammer for a mod called age of chivalry for HL2. I hadn't really finished anything nextgenny with normal maps before so alot of things were new and could be done better. Screen captures are made using Xoliul's shader so props to him!
I really like the idea of personal postmortems so thought I'd combine a pimp with a mortem.
Hope it's any use to anyone, here goes:
What went right
I concepted the piece first, which turned out to be decent.
One thing that worked out particularly well when I got stuck going from concept to highpoly was to block out the offending piece in mudbox quickly to get a feel for the shapes. In this case it was the head and the connection to the handle. Making a nice sub-d mesh with the flowing shapes I had in mind was pretty easy with the rough base as guide.
Another one was seperating all the highpoly & lowpoly pieces for baking and arranging them back into position when it had been baked cleanly.
Possible improvements
One of the most obvious things is to make use a better concept. I mistook my illustration for a concept, one thing I def. want to remember is that a concept is to serve a different purpose than an illustration.
Because of some sillyness on my part I had taken apart the high and low poly before doing an occlusion bake and I didn't want to re-assemble them both into final form. So my ambient occlusion bakes are a combination of seperated high to low bakes and a straight up bake of the low, it worked out decently.
I'd like to be doing some more in zbrush and mudbox besides rough form guides next time. Earlier involvement of sculpting will prob help sell bigger damage and deform shapes I guess.
Took a bit long for me to grasp the spec map idea, been doing it very wrong all the time, now I think I get it better, looks like an AO bake is a much better base than a desaturated diffuse.
Replies
The workflow that i tend to do is simple, and pretty easy.
Explode/separate your your chunks, set keyframes in max/maya to make it easy to put them back together. Exploding will give you a much cleaner bake than leaving everything together, and much less time consuming than baking each part separately.
Render ao from the exploded mesh. This will mainly give you ao from your smaller details, you'll miss some from large chunks intersecting and such, but thats ok.
Render AO from just your lowpoly mesh, all put back together. Use a combination of this AO map and the AO map generated from the highpoly to get the best of both worlds. You'll have your large form occlusion, and your small scale detail occlusion. I'll generally just set both of these maps to "multiply" in photoshop, as thier own layers. Final tweak you'll need to make a layer mask for the "lowpoly ao" and edit out the occlusion from parts of your mesh that will move/animate/etc, anything that would otherwise look weird have ao baked into it.