Here's another update. I had to do the body over because the work flow just wasn't workin. On the main body what I did was take a plane and cut it up and move the points around until it looked like the back of the saw. I did the same thing with the front of the saw and bridged the two planes together. After that then I cut and moved some of the points and edges to shape the middle part of the saw. If there a better way to model the body of this tell me. So far this method got the job done.
Some Ngons had to be made but only on flatten parts of the model.
Thanks. The front part of the saw has to be a separate high poly mesh because of the high amount of detail on that grill part. After extruding and cutting the front part I optimized it back down to med poly.
Yeah its really important to focus on keeping your blockout simple, and focus on flow instead of adding in a bunch of extra edges and all of that stuff. In those first shots one of the big things there is you have all these extra edges for rounding out the handle that just do not need to be there, and would be better smoothed by sub-d instead of having so much geo anyway.
But its a good lesson to learn. The new bits you've posted are looking much better. Try not to focus too much on each section and keep your eyes on the overall picture. =D
Yeah its really important to focus on keeping your blockout simple, and focus on flow instead of adding in a bunch of extra edges and all of that stuff. In those first shots one of the big things there is you have all these extra edges for rounding out the handle that just do not need to be there, and would be better smoothed by sub-d instead of having so much geo anyway.
But its a good lesson to learn. The new bits you've posted are looking much better. Try not to focus too much on each section and keep your eyes on the overall picture. =D
Finally done with this hi poly. This was a real challenge, but I learned a lot on how to go about my work flow next time. The modeling could have been done a bit cleaner. Now onward again to the low poly bake.
Hey great job dude, congrats on getting the full thing done! I'm sure i could find a few minor nit picks to make, but the exercise was more about the overall model and yours looks good. Now the real test will be how well you can translate all of your detailing to the lowpoly mesh, good luck!
I'm starting to bake the normals now, but getting those pesky normal errors. Here what Ive gotten so far. I didn't need to really bevel the edges because most of the edges are not angled at 90 degrees avoiding black creased edges. So I'm wondering should I have the mesh all quads to avoid these smoothing errors? Any suggestions?
just put that modifier on the low with the viewport shader applied. should fix some of those errors. couldnt tell you what it does tech wise. works kind like a relax on the normals to make em snap into place or something. make pretty mod is what i call it. heh.
Forget it. I'm going hard edges to bake out the normals. It's just giving me a way better map. Even though I heard hard edge can blow up your vertex count.
hard edges or not it will still improve your normals. hard edges up your vert count if you dont have them on uv seams. you could just add edge loops and have some better control on 1 smoothe group.
wel you do have kind of 90 degree angles, the insets inside angles and the outer angle kind of add up at the corners creating an angle too large to smooth propperly, with stuff lik ethis i often make the inside shallower or less angled than the highpoly, can often mean that you can get away with it without resorting to smoothing groups
wel you do have kind of 90 degree angles, the insets inside angles and the outer angle kind of add up at the corners creating an angle too large to smooth propperly, with stuff lik ethis i often make the inside shallower or less angled than the highpoly, can often mean that you can get away with it without resorting to smoothing groups
Actually making the inside insets without smoothing group helped a bit. Thanks Shep.
hard edges or not it will still improve your normals. hard edges up your vert count if you dont have them on uv seams. you could just add edge loops and have some better control on 1 smoothe group.
After some experimenting. This edge loop method works best because putting an extra edge loop next to main edges reduces smoothing errors. This is working out fine now.
Decided to call it quits. Wanted to finish this low poly bake early but things got in the way that created messes. So here's the final product. All 4,688 polys of it, and all critiques are welcomed to tear this apart! Textures are 1024 by 512 BTW. Onward to workshop 3!
Well, it has been a long work, and can be clearly seen. There are problems in smoothing, but I cannot tell why. Anyway, congratulations for reaching the end, see you on the next gory workshop
The biggest issue here is that the uvs could have been packed together *much* better, as you've got kind of an overall blurry end result, this is very important. You could have mirrored a few things, but generally just scaling everything up and puzzling it together better would have given a decent amount more detail.
Looks like you could stand to paint out the AO errors from the floating bits too, that would help a lot. I would suggest turing on multi-sampling in max, or rendering double size and sizing down to get rid of some of the aliasing as well.
There are a few other things that are obvious, bake errors and such, but if you cleaned up the first two points above, i think you'de have a much stronger final result. Congrats on getting it done, and apply what you've learned to the next one!
Actually I baked this in xnormal, but yeah I tried to scale things up to get a much sharper result but things wouldn't fit right. Should I have scaled the more bigger uv chunks up a bit more than the little chunks to get more room? As for the the smoothing errors I got rid of most of them just by adding extra edges on the sides of the mesh to get rid of the dark errors on the sides. Thank for the critique though. I'll fix this up later.
Replies
Some Ngons had to be made but only on flatten parts of the model.
Thanks. The front part of the saw has to be a separate high poly mesh because of the high amount of detail on that grill part. After extruding and cutting the front part I optimized it back down to med poly.
But its a good lesson to learn. The new bits you've posted are looking much better. Try not to focus too much on each section and keep your eyes on the overall picture. =D
Thanks. Ill definitely keep that in mind.
It's been a while since I used edit normals. Can you refresh my memory?
Actually making the inside insets without smoothing group helped a bit. Thanks Shep.
After some experimenting. This edge loop method works best because putting an extra edge loop next to main edges reduces smoothing errors. This is working out fine now.
Looks like you could stand to paint out the AO errors from the floating bits too, that would help a lot. I would suggest turing on multi-sampling in max, or rendering double size and sizing down to get rid of some of the aliasing as well.
There are a few other things that are obvious, bake errors and such, but if you cleaned up the first two points above, i think you'de have a much stronger final result. Congrats on getting it done, and apply what you've learned to the next one!