Airship for UT3 / Crysis

mminnitt

First proper bit of work I've posted on here since joining:

It's a "Plausible Fantasy Airship" I did for a Uni project. The idea was to take something unrealistic, in this case an airship with a massive gun turret, and make it look structurally sound.

Even though it's handed in now I'm going to try and improve it - and yes I know the textures are bland, downfall of my project was that I had so much to do and so little time!

Vanity Render (incl. post in photoshop)


Model Sheet


C&C welcomed!

EDIT: As title suggests I built the model for UT3 and Crysis and put it in both. Though it only works as a vehicle in Crysis.

nrek

Its a pretty cool looking model so far. It might be good to show some close up wires of the smaller things like the turret area and the engines, because looking at the engines it seems like you have a lot of unneeded loops. Then I would suggest getting a spec map on it pronto. Right now it really only looks like there is a diffuse on it, the normal is wasted without a proper spec map. And my last thing would be to ask why you went with a green camouflage texture for something that is floating in the sky? A blue/white camo pattern would make slightly more sense. But yea man definitely keep working on this, it has the potential to be a really nice looking piece.

PixelMasher

cool idea man. my main gripes with it is I cant really see what is taking up the 30k tris, the guns maybe? seems kinda wasteful and over the top for something that looks like its gonna be up in the air off in the distance, unless ofcourse you board it or something. also, 8x2048 im assuming thats including all the diff spec and normals. also seems a bit overboard.

cool comp shot, maybe push the spec a bit more to get some better material definition.

mminnitt

@ Nrek - The camo pattern was shamelessly stolen from US ww2 bombers; the dark part is to hide the airship from a ground view (at night) and the green part is to hide it from fighter attacks (generally from above). I'll definately get a proper specular map on the go. I'll also get working on a Blue/White cloud-like pattern as a day camo varient.

I've just seen the extra engine loops myself and I cant for the life of me work out why they're there. Sigh... should have posted before I handed it in!

@ PixelMasher - The gundeck is designed to be stood on by a player, so most of the tricount goes into the cradle that holds the flak gun, the control system for the aircraft and the defensive machineguns.

Just for clarity: there are 8 diffuse and 8 normal maps, each 2048. 3 for the gundeck and machineguns, 1 for the flak gun, 1 for the girders that join the gundeck to the turntable (the big cylindrical bit), 1 for the turntable and 1 for the envelope itself. Pixel density for the player areas kept similar to UT3 vehicles, and bits that will only seen from afar are very low indeed.

Thanks for all the input guys!

whats_true

If its for the player, to be played on, why on earth did you take a picture of it 3 miles away? Does not show at all why the tri count it so high as well as the texture sizes.

Get a close up on everything, as from the players point of view. Let me see if those 8*2048's are justified, because right now, it looks like the entire thing is on two texture maps from this view.

Mcejn

Just as everyone else said. 8 x 2048s and 30k tri's is pretty insane considering that we really can't see much detail in the diffuse and the models don't really seem overly complex! From the image, the bigger gun seems like it's mostly flat colors, maybe you could show some more up-close shots?

Technicalities aside, I'm really diggin it. Make it awesome! :]

mminnitt

Thanks for the comments guys. Sorry I didn't include close-ups - I just uploaded what I had lying around from my project and that didn't need the close-ups because I included it in Unreal 3 and Crysis.

I've quickly grabbed some other shots to show the gundeck in more detail.

Biggest problem I had was that the textures were going to have a lot more detail in than I ended up having time for, so hopefully I'll manage to justify the huge textures... or cut them down!

EDIT: The extra loops of polygons on basically every surface was because I'd never normal-mapped before and held the mistaken belief that the whole thing had to be one smoothing group - so the additional loops were put in to stop it looking horribly blobby

2nd EDIT: My bad the far right image is normals with wires

oobersli

holy bejezus... 16 2048 maps???

so are you putting this into your portfolio for game art or just art?

it looks cool. but seems a tad overkill in textures. a lot of the camo stuff could just be a smaller tileable texture. I would also put a more interesting floor instead of camo. wood planks or rubber mats...?

BradMyers82

Okay, well I think I see what is happening with your low poly. First off, it looks like you are using 24 sided cylinders. Now if it was a really important piece that the player would walk right up to I could see someone maybe using one or two, but it appears its all you used. This will drastically increase the polygon count.
Also, it appears you didn't create a proper low poly, rather your low poly is simply your high poly not subdivided. I say this because I can see all the extra cuts that don't change your low poly at all, unless you are subdividing. I think you should go back in there and start removing all those unused polygons to optimize this up.
I'm also interested in hearing exactly what maps you have for what. I would think in the most generous of cases, you might use 2x 2048 for the airship, and 1x for each prop. So the propellers and airship would be 2 x 2048 and each gun would be x 1 (2 + 1 + 1 = 4). So roughly half the resolution you currently have. Now if this is an issue with you transferring the maps, you could always down size your textures to 1024 and I'm sure the resolution would not look much different; if at all.
Show more close ups though man, I want to see what this all looks like (and include some flats too).

Cubik

I can't tell what is going on my 1900x1200 screen. You have composited eight different things on a tiny 900x600 image. How should I be able to tell if you have done a good job? Create new renders that twice as big and post again. I am very curious as to where all those polies and textures ended up...

mminnitt

Right: I have another bit of uni work due in monday so I cant really touch this till then, however I'll spend tuesday cutting texture sizes down, optimising the low (if i can still call it that) poly and generally lowering things.

For now here are some of the maps (which I do admit need some serious love):

Zwebbie

About the camouflage pattern; from every reference image I can find, the bellies are always bright white (or, rarely, bright cyan) without any pattern - because that's the closest approximation to the sky. Even then, a plane will still be a dark silhouette against the sky, but at least less so.

whats_true

You could have saved a lot of UV space by overlapping similar components. Not everything has to be unique.

mminnitt

Zwebbie wrote: »

About the camouflage pattern; from every reference image I can find, the bellies are always bright white (or, rarely, bright cyan) without any pattern - because that's the closest approximation to the sky. Even then, a plane will still be a dark silhouette against the sky, but at least less so.

This is the camo scheme I copied, from an Ac119

I altered the actual pattern to be a sort of splinter camo/dazzle camo hybrid