Colt 1911
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.
Replies
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.
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:
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:
If this doesn't make sense it's late at night so I apologise x_x
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
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.
(texture is a single 1024x diffuse/normal)
Some fade on the handle where sweat/friction from the hand interacts with the handle would be awesome.
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:
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.
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.