[wip] Psg1

Rhys

Hi first post here, Im 16 from Australia and use blender and gimp as my tools.

Here is my latest project, Psg1 rifle, its actually my first gun and I will try to make it as high standard as I can.

Thanks to racer445 for his awesome gun tutorial.

I've started onto the high poly, obviously its no where finished, but if you can I would like your comment and critique please.








Thanks

Latest image:

Lonewolf

looks pretty cool for now

Rhys

Hehe thanks, hopefully not just for now.

Funny, it looks kind of futuristic without the barrel hand guard thing.

HAL

Looking pretty nice, how are you controlling the subd shape above the two screws behind the grip? I am interested in this, wires would be cool :O

Belias

distinguished , you can pimp it in elysiun.com's forum .

Rhys

Looking pretty nice, how are you controlling the subd shape above the two screws behind the grip? I am interested in this, wires would be cool :O

Hi, you mean this part?:

I didnt bother modeling that triangle part into the mesh, didnt think it was worth it. The couple of loops going down the centre seemingly doing nothing are to make holes for the bolts.

@ Belias thanks man, you mean BA? I think I will post there later on.

HAL

Exactly what I meant. Thx for sharing.

Rhys

Built the scope:

Rhys

Bit more :


edit, oops the scopes subd level isnt up enough in the first picture.

imb3nt

lookin good!

makes me want to play mgs.

Rhys

Thanks imb3nt !:)

Ok I think the high poly is done, Im pretty happy with it.







Now onto the low poly (might be a while yet) What do you people think a reasonable tri count for this sort of gun is? if it was in a modern game like cod4/farcry2 etc

Xoliul

Looking good man, some really decent highpoly modeling there. I don't know about any CoD polycounts, but when I made a gun last month, I aimed for 5000 tri's with a small SMG. So I guess 8-10.000 max would be a fun ,yet still responsible count to work with?

Ged

wow that is an impressive highpoly a bit dark/hard to see in these pics though

Rhys

Thanks people, sorry about the dark images

Heres low poly, around 7500 triangles (including magazine not pictured). Its not all that great but Im not very good at low poly




What do you think of this sort of thing below, should I seperate the sections or keep it as one piece and hope the normal map will fix it? How much bad smoothing can the normal map fix?


What do you think, cheers.

Xoliul

Those indents aren't adding to the silhouette at all, and they're really screwing up wires and smoothing; I'd just make the lowpoly geometry flat and have them completely normalmapped.
There's probably more of the same optimizations you can do on your lowpoly, feels a bit heavy in some areas for the small detail you created there.

HAL

I agree with Xoliul here.

Also please... please use a few smoothing groups on the receiver...

odium

I would remove them, they are on the stock and never seen in first person anyway, which is where you would get the most detail visible, in any other mode you will never notice the difference...

You have two choices really, remove the indents, or add a slight chamfer.

Rhys

Thanks for the crits:) I have removed some of the details on the stock. Also joined some of the parts that were overlapping over other parts to help with baking and texturing(I hope) plus some other reductions. Triangle count has reduced to around 6500. Still posibly some reductions in more areas.

Now smoothing groups, basicly they just split the mesh into seperate pieces right? Blender doesnt have 'smoothing groups' so we use edgesplit modifier and mark the edges. Ive put some splits in the reciever and other areas, cylinders and such, it does increase the vert count +400.

Since im rather new to this baking I will bake without 'smoothing groups' and another with smoothing groups to see if theres any advantage.

EarthQuake

Hard edges will double the vertex count along those edges.

BUT

If you have hard edges where your uv splits are, they are doubled already, so there is no extra cost in doing this.

Also, when baking normals you must have uv splits where your hard edges are anyway, or else you will get render artifacts on your hard edges(it tries to blend together the two sides on 1 pixels and gets all screwy). So it works out in the end, just make sure to plan your uvs along with your hard edge usage and you will be ok.

Rhys

Does that mean if I dont want a uv seam in a particluar spot I should try to avoid having a hard edge there?

I guess I will start getting this thing more ready for unwrapping now.

Thankyou

EarthQuake

Nope, quite the opposite! If you want a hard edge in a particular spot you need to have a uv seam there! Also hard edges are "free" anywhere you have a uv seam.

Generally this is a pretty straight forward and natural process when you think about it, the areas where you break your uvs tend to be the areas where you would want a hard edge(caps on cylinders, etc)

Rhys

Ok thats ounds simple enough


Hopefully the unwrap is ok, probably I can get a higher score on the tetris though, moving some bits into the large gaps.
Unwrapping is soo time consuming:(

Electro

EarthQuake: Hard edges don't necessarily double the vertex count where used It depends whether or not the model format being exported to supports vertex normals. Formats like MD5 that don't bother exporting the normals for geometry, assume completely averaged normals, so to get something that simulates a hard edge, it's required to double up on vertices there (physically breaking the surface).

Good work so far Rhys.

Rhys

So the overlapping geometry did create a few problems while baking, so I split up some of the pieces.
It took 2.5 hours to bake the ao:poly141:
Ive cleaned up the normal map a bit still more to go, ao map needs tons of cleaning which i havent done any of yet and its getting late now.

So screenshots

Pedro Amorim

perspective view pics plz

Rhys

Ok perspective. Starting on the texture... I think I will go for low wear only (not many scratches or marks) 2048x2048 btw

Needs a spec map badly



I wish I had a better screen
Edit: took a look at these pics on my laptop screen(brighter, more contrast, newer etc) And the texture looks so dull:(

Kitteh

Do you think you can get some screengrabs with a lower FOV? The gun's getting a weird fisheye effect that makes the proportions look weird. The normal maps look friggen flawless though.

Rhys

OK been a while...
Calling it done. What do you think?

C4Engine:


Please let me know if the brightness and contrast are way off or something:\


Cheers

Ged

its good but not amazing in c4 engine bet it would look better in marmoset?

eld

Electro wrote: »

EarthQuake: Hard edges don't necessarily double the vertex count where used It depends whether or not the model format being exported to supports vertex normals. Formats like MD5 that don't bother exporting the normals for geometry, assume completely averaged normals, so to get something that simulates a hard edge, it's required to double up on vertices there (physically breaking the surface).

Good work so far Rhys.

which is exactly what hard edges is in the end, its where the hardware is told to draw an extra set of vertices, since if they would share that vertex, they would share the normal.

its essentially splitting up the geometry.



Rhys, its looking really good!

you have a few tiny baking errors though, and an easy way to spot them is to render out both the highpoly, and the lowpoly with normals on it, in the same lightingconditions, and if the lowpoly with normals dont shade exactly the same way, then you've probably had some issues with the lowpoly shading.

a perfectly baked normalmap should be shading exactly the same way as the highpoly, the specular will usually show it even more.

eld

oh and the obligatory blender question: how did you get around mirroring normals in the realtime view of blender?

are you getting around it, or are you not mirroring any uv's?