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Colt 1911

greentooth
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marks greentooth
First actual work post, be brutal - crit anything you see. Just finished up the lowpoly, unwrap and bake headaches tomorrow. Low-res is about 2850 tris. For an indie shooter. The magazine is pretty awful if you ask me, but it's hardly gonna get seen so I'm not too bothered.

highpolyfinal.jpglowpolywires.jpg

Replies

  • Rang3r1
    First off, there is a lot of redundancy I can see in the low, you don't need those serrations on the hammer if you are going to bake it, and I really wouldn't model the slide serrations either, normals should do a good job of expressing those. Also, slide release lever, you don't need all of those extra polies. Other than that, looks great man.
  • roosterMAP
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    roosterMAP polycounter lvl 12
    Very nice. Cant wait to see the textures! What else you gonna do wth it tho?
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    Yeah, the reasoning behind my modelling the slide grooves onto the lowpoly was that when it's seen ingame (first-person perspective) the face normals of the vertical sides of the slide will be pointing almost perpendicular to the player camera's view. Its my understanding that normalmaps work very weakly when viewed at extreme angles such as this, hence why I decided to model the grooves rather than rely on solely a normalmap. The serrations on the hammer on the other hand, I just wanted to squeeze a little more mesh detail into the back of the slide area, as thats what will be seen most of in the ingame view. It's still inside my budget, so I figured what harm can come from it.
    If any of that is just plain wrong or my logic is faulty, please correct me as I haven't had a lot of experience working with baked normalmaps.
  • roB0T
    how u rendered the highpoly model?
  • timwiese
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    timwiese polycounter lvl 9
    marks wrote: »
    Yeah, the reasoning behind my modelling the slide grooves onto the lowpoly was that when it's seen ingame (first-person perspective) the face normals of the vertical sides of the slide will be pointing almost perpendicular to the player camera's view. Its my understanding that normalmaps work very weakly when viewed at extreme angles such as this, hence why I decided to model the grooves rather than rely on solely a normalmap. The serrations on the hammer on the other hand, I just wanted to squeeze a little more mesh detail into the back of the slide area, as thats what will be seen most of in the ingame view. It's still inside my budget, so I figured what harm can come from it.
    If any of that is just plain wrong or my logic is faulty, please correct me as I haven't had a lot of experience working with baked normalmaps.

    This is correct, when making a weapon for first person perspective its always better to model out more and leave less work for the normal map. The extreme angles will blur out the normal map.

    nice work can't wait to see it textured.
  • Kimono
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    Kimono polycounter lvl 10
    Nice work mark, I was going to suggest collapsing the mesh towards the beavertail to save on triangles and UVW space but I see you already have =) aside from that if you can be bothered I'd take 20 minutes of your time and tweak the loops on the high poly cage, many of your edges look too sharp. Not just in terms of aesthetics but also in terms of accuracy, it would be quite uncomofrtable to have the edges on a frame be as fine as serrations on the hammer :) Also a couple of floating circular insets in the side of the mag would go along way and take no time at all.

    edit: Also I fear that details such as the screws in the adj. sights are so fine they'll lose all fidelity once baked (unless you're using an insane map size). This errant tri on the magazine will also give you pains, just spend an extra tri and cut an edge in, it'll provide a cleaner bake for the mag and prevent any errors:
    mt12dd.jpg

    edit2: last one, I swear. On the hammer there are alot of fanning tris where you have many edges converging on one point. What would ease this for projection's sake and also save you a fair amount of triangles (whilst still retaining the serrations) could be to collapse the edges like so:
    73h56d.jpg

    If this doesn't make sense it's late at night so I apologise x_x
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    Nice to see you still around Kim, and some solid advice thanks. The mag insets I was actually planning to do in photoshop, as they're simple cutouts. My texture budget is 1x 1024^2 normal/colour/spec of which about half the texture is gonna be large/prominent parts of the model in the ingame view, eg the slide/sights, back of the slide and hammer area, so I'm hopeful that the fine details there will keep from becoming a blurry mess.
    Regarding the hammer serrations, I'm actually using like a bevelled quad for each one not a sharp triangular shape, are you suggesting that I collapse those edges into a triangle shape? I was concerned about keeping a strong silhouette on the serrations, due to that part of the model being so 'up close and personal' with the player view, for the purposes of idle animations and such.

    fig.1
    hammery.jpg
  • Kimono
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    Kimono polycounter lvl 10
    It's extremely easy to be tempted to want to keep as much detail as possible in areas like this and you can sometimes forget how powerful a decent normals bake can be. That area should look near identical with the serrations (and the face seperating them) collapsed to triangles. Perhaps my best advice would be to seperate that piece off from the rest of the mesh, duplicate, make the suggested changes to one, do a quick test bake on both iterations and make a judgement.
  • Ghostscape
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    Ghostscape polycounter lvl 13
    I would definitely exaggerate those screws you have all over - you've got them nearly flat. They really want big fat chunky curves on them. Right now they'll bake down to nearly no normal information.

    When making a high poly for normal maps its generally better to have softer edges rather than a more realistic harder edge, because when you bake out at low resolution you lose the detail completely.

    With that in mind I would definitely go over the cut around the mag release and all of the divots pins/screws, and the edges of the screws a bit.
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    some texture progress! The wood texture is placeholder, need to paint the normals on it. Magazine also has little work done so far, no damage/grunge pass on anything yet. It only took a week to get my head around the normalmap at least ¬_¬
    (texture is a single 1024x diffuse/normal)

    1911normals.jpg
  • roosterMAP
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    roosterMAP polycounter lvl 12
    good. but wood is too perfect. dirty it up a bit. and I dont mean just scratches.
  • Progg
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    Progg polycounter lvl 11
    roosterMAP wrote: »
    good. but wood is too perfect. dirty it up a bit. and I dont mean just scratches.

    Some fade on the handle where sweat/friction from the hand interacts with the handle would be awesome.
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    marks wrote: »
    The wood texture is placeholder

    I havent painted the normals for the grip yet, hence the wood texture is kindof a placeholder, I'm gonna probably chop and change the wood diffuse under the normals until I find something that looks 'right' (though I suspect the current wont look far off).
    This is the look I'm aiming for eventually on the grips:
    contagionref.jpg
  • AlecMoody
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    AlecMoody ngon master
    Rang3r1 wrote: »
    and I really wouldn't model the slide serrations either, normals should do a good job of expressing those.

    Keep them on the slide. from a fist person perspective it will make a big difference in how they look for something like 70 triangles.
  • bbob
    Aside from what has been said, more contrast between the metal shades on the frame to the metal on the slide and thingies would make this look a lot snappier. Colour blockouts are a bitch to nail in solids, but it pays off!
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    mostly done, magazine detailing needs doing, then the damage/wear pass and specular/gloss maps (just using max material settings for specular at the moment). For some reason the text on the slide doesnt read well with the diffuse applied, having a little trouble with that.

    17730742.jpg
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    I'd make less spec on the text but more spec around the edges of the text
  • kodde
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    kodde polycounter lvl 18
    Looking good. I'd get some cube map reflections going on and play with different lighting.
  • 3DLee
    I think it could use a little more wear, but this is really awesome! I've been wanted to do a gun for a while, and I think you may have inspired me to do a 1911. :)
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    Textures are pretty much final now, barring ingame tweaks. Any crits/feedback would be appreciated. My biggest niggles are that the spec map doesnt pop that much, and the wear/scratches etc should be a bit less subtle. Kinda needing to put this to bed though and move on.

    19119526150.jpg
    1911wire0859959.jpg
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    double post ftlllll
  • Kitteh
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    Kitteh polycounter lvl 18
    The slide texture looks stoney. It needs less noise and less consistent texture overall. Same goes for the frame, but not as much.
  • Harry
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    Harry polycounter lvl 13
    the contour of the grip is generally too flat and it clips that little rod.

    i'm not sure what to say about the textures other than that i wouldn't call them final. they need more... i dunno, everything. work on spec, diffuse, gloss.
  • Harry
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    Harry polycounter lvl 13
    edit: doublepost, why in the fuck is this forum broken atm
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