Yo~
Long time reader, first time poster.
For one of the classes that I'm in we were assigned to build a weapon of our choice. My girlfriend has a pretty kick-ass modded
Nerf Maverick, so that's what I chose to do.
Needed to a High-poly bake and have it textured and rigged for UDK. So first of all, here's my high-poly. (There's a few things not included in my model, mostly detail on the round-bit. I'll be adding this later, hopefully.)
Aaaaaand here's my low-poly; it's far from being.. good. And it's definitely not optimized, but the assignment was due and I had to plow through it. I also have a texture for it, but I don't even want to show it yet, as it's just not good enough.
And here's the bake.
So, while I'm really happy with the high-poly, everything else needs a ton of work to make this thing look any good. I'm also getting some really weird issues happening when I bring it into UDK. Several chunks of the gun are mirrored in an attempt to save some UV space but this creates weird and horrible lighting seams that I can't seem to fix. I've taken all of the mirrored chunks and moved them by exactly one in the UV Space (you can see my UVs
here), which I thought would fix it, but it doesn't. I've also generated unique UVs in UDK but that didn't do anything either.
Here's the not-so-screwy seams (it depends where the light is);
And here's the error;
I would really love crits on the project as a whole as well as some advice on how to make the bake a little better. Also, texturing guns is really hard.
I've been trolling through some of EarthQuake's old gun posts to look for some pointers on how to get that great looking material, but I'd love some tips on that too~
♥
Replies
So I'm bumping your thread hoping someone sees it and knows haha.
A) You baked the model while it was cut in half and then mirrored it after the fact. If you did this re-bake the final mesh exactly as it would be when you export it to ensure the vertex normals never change.
Your Y channel is baked in the wrong direction.
...Nice model btw!
As for how I did the bake; I built the low poly as a whole, cut large chunks of it in half and unwrapped so I could save some UV-space, used Symmetry and offset all of the mirrored UVs by 1 and then baked. I assumed this would save myself from having this issue, but it didn't seem to.
As far as I know, I baked using object space because that's what we've been taught to do. I'm not sure what the real difference is between the different methods though.
Would it be better to use World Space or Tangent space (or whatever they are)? Could I still use the normals in Unreal if I did it that way?
I haven't seen a Object space normal map in Unreal, they're all tangent space.
But that's your problem. Just rebake with tangents space, and have the green channel (y axis) in the negative direction for unreal or 3ds max.
Read more about it here: http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map?highlight=%28normal%29#head-45cb26379c2660d0c4b2ad2d3e94588288df8da5
Also, thanks for the comments guys. I'm really unhappy with the bake right now, but I'm pretty sure I'm just tired of looking at it.