thanks for comments guys.
The yellow looks ok ingame to me. I know there are some yellow elements in sawmill, so i will pick it, but i don't think it's more orange but more desaturated. http://i29.tinypic.com/14ihf09.jpg (the holders above)
I'm not particullary fan of blood too. Dirt, oil sounds fine. It's hard to keep the texture simple and yet making details. It tends to look too realist or "noisy". The binksi logo was a good idea imo, thanks to Simski. Never realised there were so many companies in tf2 =D
The heart is supposed to be carved in
Still have a lot to do anyway.
thx
WIP of my Harpoon, item one of a 3 item set I'm working on .
The rope may seem a bit heavy in tris, but the weapon overall is still a few thousand under both the Eyelander and Scottsman's Skullcutter.
Make the rope with normalmap and cylinder rope without that cordage. You will gain thousands of tris !
[/quote]I agree with ya em. The way that it is right now the tris aren't effecting the silhouette that much and it looks normal mapped as is.
However the normal map will add to the overall file size of the weapon quite a bit more than the few kb that will be saved by dropping the tris. That addition weighs heavy on valve and normally they have been removing normal maps on weapons that are submitted as well as on previously normal mapped weapons.
The normal map is kind of hard to create because of the way the shaders handle normal maps.
If he plans to jiggle bone or do any other skin weighting on the rope besides all to one bone like the skull crusher and eyelander, then there is a chance that all those verts transforming on screen can cause some issues and the performance gain (if there is a loss) might make up for the added MB of the normal map.
Personally I think the strands/cords in the rope need to be bigger and effect the silhouette in a more meaningful way which would reduce the overall twist count. Bigger cords less tris, more of the TF2 look, the rope could be stiffer to help save on any vert transformation and no normal map. Win win.
noors, as i can see from the screen shot of yellow ingame, it looks like the valve creators often use dark to black colour to even it out. i hafta say that the yellow that holds the log looks really good id look awesome on ur chainsaw
thanks for comments guys.
The yellow looks ok ingame to me. I know there are some yellow elements in sawmill, so i will pick it, but i don't think it's more orange but more desaturated. http://i29.tinypic.com/14ihf09.jpg (the holders above)
I'm not particullary fan of blood too. Dirt, oil sounds fine. It's hard to keep the texture simple and yet making details. It tends to look too realist or "noisy". The binksi logo was a good idea imo, thanks to Simski. Never realised there were so many companies in tf2 =D
The heart is supposed to be carved in
Still have a lot to do anyway.
thx
Are you going to make that yellow parts teamcolored?
The heart looks fine, I think, just like the parts where the paint has come off . You'll want to make them really stand out in your alpha mask for the phong if you hadn't do that already, tho.
How would the Chainsaw look in teamcolors?
Not to criticize your choice of colors, I do think it looks good.
It's just that Red chainsaws feels a bit more iconic for me, and I think it would also look good in blue, yellow feels a bit more like modern chainsaws from my memories of having seen chainsaws in my days. This is just a thought though, not a complaint.
QUOTE=vig]However the normal map will add to the overall file size of the weapon quite a bit more than the few kb that will be saved by dropping the tris. That addition weighs heavy on valve and normally they have been removing normal maps on weapons that are submitted as well as on previously normal mapped weapons.
[/QUOTE]
Seriously ? It's stupid to remove normalmaps...
If it's part of the weapon and necessary : normalmap are the only method to get depth in object saving a lot of perf (tris, shader computing, etc), it's also part of game mechanics.
So, to my opinion, all he can do he should do. Use normalmaps, even small texture size to not explose the tricount ! Also, he could try to get the rope effect on the texture (even without normal, just diffuse and spec) but i find very weird to forbid normalmapping :S
Bah, you guys don't like ma yellow
Well, team colored was my first choice but
I don't think other weapons are team colored ? Except sentries.
It could be painted with the game custom paintings ?
i'll give it a go in blu/red tho.
I've been working on a pack of heavy items for months. (I'm still learning more about Blender as I go.) I have previous 3d experience using Animation Master, but the software was completely incompatible with Source. I have no previous game-design experience. The pack has 1 hat, 3 weapons, and new taunts. The hat has a 256x256 texture, and the weapons have 512x512.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7toSMazzi2g&hd=1"]HD video of the items in action[/ame]
The first item is Ninotchka, which is an armored minigun powered by a tractor engine (I'm still working on getting the smoke to work.) It was inspired by the Russian tractor-tanks of WWII like the NI tank. It uses the Iron_Curtain animations.
I would like a brutally honest critique. And if anyone has advice for how to make the texture look better (particularly the text) I'd love to hear it. The pack has received many positive remarks on the steam powered forums, but they may not be judging its specific technical merits.
@Noors: I think dirt's worth looking into, it might bring the yellow down a bit without having to change the shade.
@Zipfinator: Rope detailing like that seems like it be painted in rather than modeled.
I just bombed the steam forums with mod releases if anybody around here was interested in using the stuff I've been making recently, head over here if you are.
@All of the people worried about the tris on the rope, I think I'll test out baking AO of this rope onto a cylinder first. If that doesn't work I'll probably bake a normal map for it too although I was trying to avoid normals because as Vig pointed out Valve has been removing them lately.
A few months ago they removed the normals from The Wrangler and Frontier Justice and I'm sure that if I get a semi-decent effect with just AO they'd rather just use that over a normal. It seems like they're more open to normal maps when they're part of a pack though, as shown by most of the hats in the Polypack sets having normals.
Initially I wasn't worried about the amount of tris on this since it's still a good 1k tris under Scottsman's Skullcutter and The Eyelander. I hadn't thought about vertex transformations with jigglebones though. I'd imagine this many verts transforming could get a bit heavy for the small amount of jiggling it's going to give off.
If I can get good results with AO or AO + Normal then I will ditch the tris and use jigglebones, but if that doesn't work I have no problem keeping these tris and ditching the jigglebones.
Bah, you guys don't like ma yellow
Well, team colored was my first choice but
I don't think other weapons are team colored ? Except sentries.
It could be painted with the game custom paintings ?
i'll give it a go in blu/red tho.
Bah, you guys don't like ma yellow
Well, team colored was my first choice but
I don't think other weapons are team colored ? Except sentries.
It could be painted with the game custom paintings ?
i'll give it a go in blu/red tho.
nooooo! keep the yellow! (or use the yellow from the pyro oxygen tank) it stands out! i like it. you could add a bit more red rusty shades to it, to break up the uniform yellow a bit. but please dont change it to red and blue, I mean thats so boring!
I'm thinking that using the extra polys like I had it originally is the best. I think it'll definitely look the best once it has the TF2 shading on it.
I'm going to experiment with the geometry rope a bit more to get the indents more pronounced and the silhouette more significant from a distance along with having it a bit lower poly.
With normal maps being worth about a couple of thousand Tri's and your rope needing at least a reasonable amount of subdivision to support the current shape/jiggle (even with a supporting normal map) im thinking the extra Geo option looks totally viable.
With normal maps being worth about a couple of thousand Tri's and your rope needing at least a reasonable amount of subdivision to support the current shape/jiggle (even with a supporting normal map) im thinking the extra Geo option looks totally viable.
Yeah I'm going to do the extra geometry option definitely. I tested a few more normal maps and they just don't look nearly as good. Even with the detailed rope, the the triangle count is still way under some of the other melee weapons in the game.
Here are a few variations on the extra geometry options.
All but A are lower poly than the old one by 48 triangles per section which will add up to quite a few less overall. C is pretty much the same as the old rope, just lower poly. I'm thinking I'll use B since the indents are more pronounced than C and it doesn't look like complete shit like A does.
Hello Polycounters,
I would like a brutally honest critique. And if anyone has advice for how to make the texture look better (particularly the text) I'd love to hear it. The pack has received many positive remarks on the steam powered forums, but they may not be judging its specific technical merits.
I really like that weapon, and overall it's very well done. The part I don't really like is the barrel cover. I think it hides the most interesting part of the weapon in the first person view and makes it rather boring. The broken section of the pipe is a good step but it doesn't look very well done. I think you should just redo the entire barrel section.
I realize that I've been working on this forever, but finally I'm nearing completion on my snowshoes
In order to work around the materials issues, I'll be submitting diffuse, normals, and phong for both the mesh (netted) version with the transparency mask (the problem here is that the phong doesn't seem to like the transparency)...
and the solid version which would be the alternative if the phong can't be worked out
I like the netted version a lot better. Don't know why your phong isn't working well with it.
@Fodder, if I understand your post correctly you haven't uploaded your images anywhere. You need to upload your image to a site like dropbox or photobucket and then get the image link from that site to paste here.
Hello misterdevious, I'll continue the dicussion from SPUF here.
The main problem is that you've somehow created the text without any anti-aliasing. Did you perhaps use the pencil tool instead of the brush tool in Photoshop? (that's how it looks, anyway)
I'd also suggest sticking a brightness/contrast control in there and just playing around with it, yours has very little contrast and it's making it less eye-grabbing than it should be!
Dude. Zipf. Normal map. You can have it use a separate tiling 64x128 (or some other small resolution) normal map and diffuse for the rope. Thing is, you're throwing away thousands of polygons that you could be using for things like a grip and cracks in the wood or dings in the metal.
Dude. Zipf. Normal map. You can have it use a separate tiling 64x128 (or some other small resolution) normal map and diffuse for the rope. Thing is, you're throwing away thousands of polygons that you could be using for things like a grip and cracks in the wood or dings in the metal.
I tested out normal maps and they didn't look good. I'm not worried about the triangle count that much. I'm nearly done with the geometry and it's still considerably less than some of the other melee weapons in the game as I've said before. What I have left on the model will only take a few hundred to a thousand more triangles at most and even then it will still be less than Scottsman's Skullcutter and Eyelander.
I've been working on a pack of heavy items for months. (I'm still learning more about Blender as I go.) I have previous 3d experience using Animation Master, but the software was completely incompatible with Source. I have no previous game-design experience. The pack has 1 hat, 3 weapons, and new taunts. The hat has a 256x256 texture, and the weapons have 512x512.
HD video of the items in action
The first item is Ninotchka, which is an armored minigun powered by a tractor engine (I'm still working on getting the smoke to work.) It was inspired by the Russian tractor-tanks of WWII like the NI tank. It uses the Iron_Curtain animations.
I would like a brutally honest critique. And if anyone has advice for how to make the texture look better (particularly the text) I'd love to hear it. The pack has received many positive remarks on the steam powered forums, but they may not be judging its specific technical merits.
Just about done texturing I think. Happy with everything except the box and the bullets. For the ammo box, I feel like its missing something - I can't seem to detail it without it just looking like the barrels but with a brown/green hue. Similar problem with the belt, I can't seem to settle on a design without it looking too simple or too detailed.
Very satisfied with how everything else has turned out though. I should also mention that I got an email from Robin pretty much confirming their c_model only policy (if there was still any question), so I went back and added more geometry into anything that would be seen in first person.
Critiques welcomed with open arms, tell me what to fix!
Yeah the design is cool, and yeah the green box lack of color variations. Try big strokes !Rust, subtle white highlights on the edges. The dark grey thingies on the box lack of love too, shud look like the upper part.
@Neodement, When I first did the writing it was using an ink tool in Painter. After that I attempted writing a very hi-res version with liquid inks and then shrinking it down to fit, but that just looked junky. The digital airbrush seemed to produce better results.
Here's the original and the airbrush versions side by side with extreme close-ups in modelviewer. Being slightly narrower, the spacing is a bit off, and I'll fix that.
As far as contrast goes, is your concern with the text not "popping," or is it more of a general concern? It took me a long time to be happy with putting this huge green object in the game without it being distracting.
My idea for a Spy pack:
Transylvanian Terror:
Primary: Helsing's Hellraiser (ornate flintlock pistol)
Watch: Transylvanian Timekeeper (Silver pocket watch). alt fire to pull the watch out (like Dead Ringer), then press primary fire to cloak. Pros: if the watch is out, an EMP pulse is relased upon death, putting a sappper on all nearby buildings. Cons: only 5 seconds of cloak
Knife: The Impaler (wooden stake)
Hat: Widowmaker's Widow's Peak (with fangs)
And here's a Medic pack:
The Dentist (couldnt come up with a better name atm)
Primary: either calling it the Novicator or the Annoculator. either slows targets on contact or adds 1% uber per hit. conversely, it would decrease the medic's speed to that of a standard class (demo, pyro, etc)
Medigun: either Der Gaswerfer, the Holy Molar, or The Incisor. ups the speed of healing targets but builds uber slower.
and i figured a Dentist Face Shield for a hat.
Also had an idea for a medigun replacement unrelated to this pack. The Overhealer. It's a backpack that acts as a portable dispenser. It heals automatically and can heal multiple allies at the same time while replenishing ammo. However, you cannot uber with it equipped. What do ou guys think? I'll try and get some art done this week, but I'll def have some around the xmas break
Any improvements I could make to the texture/normal map?
looks nice... idk about the tassels... im kinda neutral on them... i was going to make something like this, only less "witch" looking wizard hat and more of a gnome looking one
looks great so far, i'd totally use it
looks totally badass. if i could make a suggestion, perhaps make the BINKSI logo a little worn. and ive been meaning to ask... how will this weapon work? if its a minigun replacement... then us sandvich lovin heavies dont have ANY long range means of attack... it looks incredible, but im curious as to how it could work... *shrug*
looks totally badass. if i could make a suggestion, perhaps make the BINKSI logo a little worn. and ive been meaning to ask... how will this weapon work? if its a minigun replacement... then us sandvich lovin heavies dont have ANY long range means of attack... it looks incredible, but im curious as to how it could work... *shrug*
The Scout has a primary weapon that uses the secondary pistol animation. I'm sure they could give the Heavy a melee weapon that uses the primary minigun animation.
Replies
Pyro casts flare!
The rope may seem a bit heavy in tris, but the weapon overall is still a few thousand under both the Eyelander and Scottsman's Skullcutter.
http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/List_of_companies
http://tf2wiki.net/w/images/c/cd/Binksi_logging_sign.jpg
:P
The yellow looks ok ingame to me. I know there are some yellow elements in sawmill, so i will pick it, but i don't think it's more orange but more desaturated.
http://i29.tinypic.com/14ihf09.jpg (the holders above)
I'm not particullary fan of blood too. Dirt, oil sounds fine. It's hard to keep the texture simple and yet making details. It tends to look too realist or "noisy". The binksi logo was a good idea imo, thanks to Simski. Never realised there were so many companies in tf2 =D
The heart is supposed to be carved in
Still have a lot to do anyway.
thx
Make the rope with normalmap and cylinder rope without that cordage. You will gain thousands of tris !
However the normal map will add to the overall file size of the weapon quite a bit more than the few kb that will be saved by dropping the tris. That addition weighs heavy on valve and normally they have been removing normal maps on weapons that are submitted as well as on previously normal mapped weapons.
The normal map is kind of hard to create because of the way the shaders handle normal maps.
If he plans to jiggle bone or do any other skin weighting on the rope besides all to one bone like the skull crusher and eyelander, then there is a chance that all those verts transforming on screen can cause some issues and the performance gain (if there is a loss) might make up for the added MB of the normal map.
Personally I think the strands/cords in the rope need to be bigger and effect the silhouette in a more meaningful way which would reduce the overall twist count. Bigger cords less tris, more of the TF2 look, the rope could be stiffer to help save on any vert transformation and no normal map. Win win.
What do ya guys think?
The heart looks fine, I think, just like the parts where the paint has come off . You'll want to make them really stand out in your alpha mask for the phong if you hadn't do that already, tho.
Not to criticize your choice of colors, I do think it looks good.
It's just that Red chainsaws feels a bit more iconic for me, and I think it would also look good in blue, yellow feels a bit more like modern chainsaws from my memories of having seen chainsaws in my days. This is just a thought though, not a complaint.
[/QUOTE]
Seriously ? It's stupid to remove normalmaps...
If it's part of the weapon and necessary : normalmap are the only method to get depth in object saving a lot of perf (tris, shader computing, etc), it's also part of game mechanics.
So, to my opinion, all he can do he should do. Use normalmaps, even small texture size to not explose the tricount ! Also, he could try to get the rope effect on the texture (even without normal, just diffuse and spec) but i find very weird to forbid normalmapping :S
Well, team colored was my first choice but
I don't think other weapons are team colored ? Except sentries.
It could be painted with the game custom paintings ?
i'll give it a go in blu/red tho.
I've been working on a pack of heavy items for months. (I'm still learning more about Blender as I go.) I have previous 3d experience using Animation Master, but the software was completely incompatible with Source. I have no previous game-design experience. The pack has 1 hat, 3 weapons, and new taunts. The hat has a 256x256 texture, and the weapons have 512x512.
[ame="
The first item is Ninotchka, which is an armored minigun powered by a tractor engine (I'm still working on getting the smoke to work.) It was inspired by the Russian tractor-tanks of WWII like the NI tank. It uses the Iron_Curtain animations.
I would like a brutally honest critique. And if anyone has advice for how to make the texture look better (particularly the text) I'd love to hear it. The pack has received many positive remarks on the steam powered forums, but they may not be judging its specific technical merits.
@Zipfinator: Rope detailing like that seems like it be painted in rather than modeled.
I just bombed the steam forums with mod releases if anybody around here was interested in using the stuff I've been making recently, head over here if you are.
A few months ago they removed the normals from The Wrangler and Frontier Justice and I'm sure that if I get a semi-decent effect with just AO they'd rather just use that over a normal. It seems like they're more open to normal maps when they're part of a pack though, as shown by most of the hats in the Polypack sets having normals.
Initially I wasn't worried about the amount of tris on this since it's still a good 1k tris under Scottsman's Skullcutter and The Eyelander. I hadn't thought about vertex transformations with jigglebones though. I'd imagine this many verts transforming could get a bit heavy for the small amount of jiggling it's going to give off.
If I can get good results with AO or AO + Normal then I will ditch the tris and use jigglebones, but if that doesn't work I have no problem keeping these tris and ditching the jigglebones.
Yellow sucks, team colored all the way.
I'm thinking that using the extra polys like I had it originally is the best. I think it'll definitely look the best once it has the TF2 shading on it.
I'm going to experiment with the geometry rope a bit more to get the indents more pronounced and the silhouette more significant from a distance along with having it a bit lower poly.
Yeah I'm going to do the extra geometry option definitely. I tested a few more normal maps and they just don't look nearly as good. Even with the detailed rope, the the triangle count is still way under some of the other melee weapons in the game.
Here are a few variations on the extra geometry options.
All but A are lower poly than the old one by 48 triangles per section which will add up to quite a few less overall. C is pretty much the same as the old rope, just lower poly. I'm thinking I'll use B since the indents are more pronounced than C and it doesn't look like complete shit like A does.
I really like that weapon, and overall it's very well done. The part I don't really like is the barrel cover. I think it hides the most interesting part of the weapon in the first person view and makes it rather boring. The broken section of the pipe is a good step but it doesn't look very well done. I think you should just redo the entire barrel section.
I realize that I've been working on this forever, but finally I'm nearing completion on my snowshoes
In order to work around the materials issues, I'll be submitting diffuse, normals, and phong for both the mesh (netted) version with the transparency mask (the problem here is that the phong doesn't seem to like the transparency)...
and the solid version which would be the alternative if the phong can't be worked out
@Fodder, if I understand your post correctly you haven't uploaded your images anywhere. You need to upload your image to a site like dropbox or photobucket and then get the image link from that site to paste here.
The main problem is that you've somehow created the text without any anti-aliasing. Did you perhaps use the pencil tool instead of the brush tool in Photoshop? (that's how it looks, anyway)
I'd also suggest sticking a brightness/contrast control in there and just playing around with it, yours has very little contrast and it's making it less eye-grabbing than it should be!
Well, at least now I know I'm not ADDICTED to TF2.
Cool.
Haha
I tested out normal maps and they didn't look good. I'm not worried about the triangle count that much. I'm nearly done with the geometry and it's still considerably less than some of the other melee weapons in the game as I've said before. What I have left on the model will only take a few hundred to a thousand more triangles at most and even then it will still be less than Scottsman's Skullcutter and Eyelander.
Very satisfied with how everything else has turned out though. I should also mention that I got an email from Robin pretty much confirming their c_model only policy (if there was still any question), so I went back and added more geometry into anything that would be seen in first person.
Critiques welcomed with open arms, tell me what to fix!
Here's the original and the airbrush versions side by side with extreme close-ups in modelviewer. Being slightly narrower, the spacing is a bit off, and I'll fix that.
As far as contrast goes, is your concern with the text not "popping," or is it more of a general concern? It took me a long time to be happy with putting this huge green object in the game without it being distracting.
Transylvanian Terror:
Primary: Helsing's Hellraiser (ornate flintlock pistol)
Watch: Transylvanian Timekeeper (Silver pocket watch). alt fire to pull the watch out (like Dead Ringer), then press primary fire to cloak. Pros: if the watch is out, an EMP pulse is relased upon death, putting a sappper on all nearby buildings. Cons: only 5 seconds of cloak
Knife: The Impaler (wooden stake)
Hat: Widowmaker's Widow's Peak (with fangs)
The Dentist (couldnt come up with a better name atm)
Primary: either calling it the Novicator or the Annoculator. either slows targets on contact or adds 1% uber per hit. conversely, it would decrease the medic's speed to that of a standard class (demo, pyro, etc)
Medigun: either Der Gaswerfer, the Holy Molar, or The Incisor. ups the speed of healing targets but builds uber slower.
and i figured a Dentist Face Shield for a hat.
Also had an idea for a medigun replacement unrelated to this pack. The Overhealer. It's a backpack that acts as a portable dispenser. It heals automatically and can heal multiple allies at the same time while replenishing ammo. However, you cannot uber with it equipped. What do ou guys think? I'll try and get some art done this week, but I'll def have some around the xmas break
looks great so far, i'd totally use it
The Scout has a primary weapon that uses the secondary pistol animation. I'm sure they could give the Heavy a melee weapon that uses the primary minigun animation.