Ork Trukk for UT3 (image heavy?)
Hey guys, I'm making an ork trukk to go into UT3. This is my first real go at modelling a vehicle and really hard surface modelling in general. I'm currently reaching the end of my high detail mesh, due to the nature of ork design there's limited symmetrical detail so it's really keeping me busy at the moment. So main parts left on the high poly are the overhead bars/cage to go on the back, some engine additions, and then the extra bits I'm doing in zbrush like rope bindings and possibly some metal damage depending on my time. The design a mix of standard GW ork trukk components with my own interpretation of the overall layout, like a bit of a conversion project but in 3d. I'm getting this to work as a vehicle factory within unreal so it's been limited somewhat with that in mind, I want it to ultimately function in the same way WH40k or Gorkamorka (for the hardcore) use it so I need it to "seat" around 8-10 orks (ut3 krall for the time being). I can already see the agony theres going to be to get that to work but luckily I'm not there yet.
TLDR - Ork trukk WAAAGH
Apologies for image count
Note that the blower scoop looks like arse, it's just a base mesh really but I decided to spruce it up a bit with a squig skin to make it look a bit more menacing, need to do the teeth still.
Wires, not really been worrying about optimisation as much as maybe I should but just making sure it's going to be fine for normal mapping, quite a mix of a cut in details and floating details, lot's of bolts :whyme:. Oh and the seat is low poly, it was an early normal map test, didn't really have the final tri count planned by then so I going to be doing a more optimised mesh for it later, originally I planning on a 5-6k tri vehicle basing it off the hellbender in ut3, but with the silhouette the way it is I'm thinking 10k, I'd appreciate insight on that though, depending on how much reinforcing I do in the low poly to maintain smooth normals.
Just a jot down of all the bits to do which should hopefully lead to an upcoming update, and I think I might have some queries regarding the low poly workflow to keep it efficient and maximise the normals quality, as I say, I've little experience with hard surface projects so any tips would be very useful.
Appreciate any C&C, cheers.
TLDR - Ork trukk WAAAGH
Apologies for image count
Note that the blower scoop looks like arse, it's just a base mesh really but I decided to spruce it up a bit with a squig skin to make it look a bit more menacing, need to do the teeth still.
Wires, not really been worrying about optimisation as much as maybe I should but just making sure it's going to be fine for normal mapping, quite a mix of a cut in details and floating details, lot's of bolts :whyme:. Oh and the seat is low poly, it was an early normal map test, didn't really have the final tri count planned by then so I going to be doing a more optimised mesh for it later, originally I planning on a 5-6k tri vehicle basing it off the hellbender in ut3, but with the silhouette the way it is I'm thinking 10k, I'd appreciate insight on that though, depending on how much reinforcing I do in the low poly to maintain smooth normals.
Just a jot down of all the bits to do which should hopefully lead to an upcoming update, and I think I might have some queries regarding the low poly workflow to keep it efficient and maximise the normals quality, as I say, I've little experience with hard surface projects so any tips would be very useful.
Appreciate any C&C, cheers.
Replies
Love your work, would be extremely interested in inviting you to join our WH40k mod team for UT3 if you're interested?
ManxViking: Great job man! I would totally be tempted to take this into Zbrush and sculpt some damage. Doesn't look overly busy to me! Nice work!
This looks pretty awesome, 10k tris seems more than fine to me for a vehicle of that design, I'd say you can probably go higher if you feel the need to do so.
edit: almost forgot the praise! looks great!
The squig is in, I had to compromise a little with the size as it impedes the gun sight when its too big, I may heighten the gun to remedy this if anyone thinks that would work.
For the frame I find it looks a little primitive, I don't know if it just needs a roughed up texture to remedy it, I've tried to put some extra bits on like bindings and I've decided to give the Unreal cloth physics a chance and put some loose rags and stuff on, to break up the silhouette (although a full load of orks would do just as well I imagine :thumbup:). The drape at the back will be a 2 sided plane plane with alpha, so I've just sculpted with the intention of robbing the normal bake, why it looks a little awkward.
Had to dial down the turbosmooth on some of the bits like the wheels to take the screenshot without killing my comp from the zbrush doodads, in case they look to have issues. After I've done low poly I'll cut it up into chunks for baking so I can max out the high poly meshes.
Nice! I asked this cause I've got doubts regarding 3dsmax <-> ZBrush workflow. Do you model base meshes in max, then sculpt in ZBrush then take them back into max? If so, how do you do it, do you decimate the mesh or just import the ridiculously high poly mesh straight into max?
This is going to be a really expensive low poly, but thats just because it is a very expensive and detailed model. When you bake this mesh, you are going to want to use a combination of geometry normals and surface normals in the bake settings. The geometry normals will make your edges rounded but make your details distorted, and using surface normals will make your details look great but will create seams on the rounded edges, so you'll probably want to use both methods and combine in photoshop.
FYI, I recently did an Ork style flakk cannon that went through this whole process that turned out pretty well, so if you have any questions or issues let me know.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=69082&highlight=flakk
To clear things up, the smaller bolts which are dotted around the entire mesh are there only for normal detail and not geometry, apart from that most pieces of the mesh are unique in some form so it will to be costly on the maps.
I used this dark grey as it looks a bit like the games workshop plastic, will render this properly, and brighter next update, I remember that my old monitor used to be a lot darker so I can imagine it looks like arse atm.
@felipe - I'm bringing the zbrush stuff back into max, but only really for checking its alright and positioned correctly, honestly I'm not really going excessive on subdivs in zbrush, I know my maps are going to limited due to the complexity of the design so its never going to carry over all the detail. Also I don't know about anyone else but I find that sometimes using an obj exported directly from zbrush often coughs up a fit with xnormal; which incidentally is what I'm planning on using to bake, might need to do some projection cages for certain parts, so I often export it again from max. Decimating if its excessively big.
looks just like the mini.
It is in the advanced settings in the transfer maps tools in Maya. I don't know if Max has a similar setting. If you're using Maya, it makes a huge difference in the bake, and it's something I stumbled on by accident.
Regarding bolts, what I mean is that if you take a piece into zbrush or mudbox, you don't need to import the bolts in with it. The bolts can get really dense really quick when you are subdividing to get the necessary detail for sculpting scratches and stuff like that if it is a part of the mesh.
Yea the bolts on the wheels and how the smoothing looked on the rest of the pieces threw me off, glad you didn't go crazy. Definitely bake any bolts you can into the map, I didn't mean use photoshop for that. Since you've got the modeled detail, you may as well use it.
One of the things that I ran into was that I sculpted beat up edges and scratches onto all the corners, but by the time everything was laid out on a 2k map, a lot of that detail got lost because of the texel density. I think you are going to have similar issues if you try to keep a realistic texture size like 2k because you have a lot of unique pieces. You might want to start thinking about tradoffs at this point. Unique maps are awesome, but they also limit how much you can optimize the uv layout. I prefer not to do mirroring much because it tends to result in bad edges and it quickly becomes noticeable and really limits how much flexibility you have in the texturing phase, but trying to reuse as many modular pieces as possible to conserve texture space that way.
To give you an example, you can use the same wheel for all 6 wheels, and it wouldn't really hurt the look much and save a ton of texture space. After making the flakk cannon, I became very aware of trying to maximize modular pieces wherever possible. Other thing is you can make like 3 different oddly shaped metal plating pieces, and rotate and place them all over the model, instead of the many unique pieces you have. Stuff like that is really important if you intend to get it all on a 2k, which is probably going to be painful, but realistically thats the kind of budget I think you'd be given.
Basically, if you bake with raycast distance you'll get issues around your edges, but you won't get that "camera distortion" look on your interior details, it bakes like this:
"geometry" or baking with a cage, will give you something like this:
This is required to get that "soft hard edges" look with smoothing groups, but since the projection direction isn't directly off the surface normal it makes interior details like bolts or whatever skew and only look good when you're viewing them at certain angles.
just try it with a properly set up cage and if there are areas that really have a lot of warping you could do a second bake with an adjusted cage so it projects straight onto those parts and then fiddle the stuff together in photoshop.
How is a single smoothing group going to help him?
Just merge all the bolts into a seperate object and dont subdivide them. dont know about Zbrush but this isnt a problem in mudbox
I found a nice way of doing indentation maps the other day for rivets that might work for you. if you bake an AO Map with your bolts in place, put it through a output curve.
and increase the near black to light grey it will create an indentation in the surface where the rivit is surrounded by a small lip the same shape as the rivet. multiply that over a grunge map or noise and it can look really cool
I've been testing on the gun model, it's not the most interesting bit of the model but it was an awkward enough shape to test on. It's 467 triangles so I'm not sure currently what that quotas the rest of the model to be, I think it may be on target for 12k or maybe less. Vert count for this was 257 in max, but with the smoothing groups I had to set up as part of the baking which coincide with the UV groups (http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=1104797 renderhjs ftw), it's 464 verts in engine, I don't know if that is particularly bad but I'm assuming it'll be ok. Texture for this is a corner of a 1024 map, I'm considering this with scale to a 2048 map for the entire vehicle, although it's subject to change, I wouldn't let this get any smaller so I plan to afford more texture space for detail.
So these are shots from unreal, normals + ao.
Looking good, can't wait to see it when you are done.
It's using about a 3rd of the 2048 map at the moment, and I think it's probably going to run over texture wise so I'm thinking of having a 1024 additional map which I can put some of the different bits like the squig and the cloth drapes etc that way I can split up the material effects in unreal.
Hoping to have the low poly done and baked in a couple more days.
Same goes for alpha blend I guess since it has to draw the same surface multiple times, we were told by the shaders guy here to avoid it as much as we can. Of course, we're aiming for the game to run with lower PC requirements so maybe it doesn't apply to this situation.
Either way I'm not 100% sure of any of this, I'm also waiting for an expert opinion so I can solidify (or not) my statements. haha
Please c&c so far, been staring at uc scripts too long and could do with some outside observation. :poly122: Cheers.
[ame]
god damn you -_-