Ok, just like I did with
Xoliul's amazing Brutal Rod tutorial series, I'm gonna promote another of CG.Tuts+ releases.
Racer445s Sci-Fi prop vid. It's awesome, some great tips and well worth a watch!
I'm really liking CGTuts, considering they only launched a fairly short while ago, they're really putting some great content up.
Thanks for making the tutorial Racer!
Replies
I wanna say something.
I'm gonna put it out there....... if you like it, you can take it, if you don't, send it right back.
I want to be on you.
One of many quotes, and reasons why I like Racers tuts
This man expresses what a lot of us don't have the courage just yet to say. Thanks Racer.
'Just checking my music... I have to have music... and GOOD music, not just any music obviously'...
awesome
Also, awesome!
Oh does he mean:
1st Turbosmooth- Tick smooth by group. Then seperate sections into groups. To give you a general nice smoothing
2nd Turbosmooth - Add extra edge loops if needed to define further
Racer's tutorials makes me want to try it myself
Racer does mention it in that tut but it's at:
www.autodestruct.com
skylight, light tracer, one omni. colored lights are crucial.
He’d pretty much use a material with a high specular level maybe about 60 and glossiness up a bit. set up a strong light at the front with a redish tinge, and a rim light at the back (slightly blue). In the primary light turn area shadows on. add a skylight to the scene. turn light tracer on. set up your anti aliasing mode to catmul rom. Render it out. open in photoshop and add a colour balance and play with the colours to achieve the green shadow look
From then on I knew Racers vids would always be gems, thanks for another vid
you say you use "Span" a lot, did I hear that correctly? I get the impression it's something related to moving edges? I have no clue where that exactly is, mind elaborating?
Would this be some sort of replacement for Edge constraint mode? Because I never see you use that and it's something I turn that on and off all the time.
Also, you use Connect, you could try looking into the Graphite Tools' Swiftloop function. If you bind it to a hotkey (shift S for me), you can place control edges much quicker, since I started using it, it has replaced my use of Connect for 95%, really saves time in the long run. Or is there a reason you don't use Swiftloop, a burning hate for the Graphite tools perhaps?
Hey and the "double-smooth" is interesting, I'm thinking if it would benefit me, because in the end, assigning smoothing groups might take me just as long as adding control edges.
"Ay yo fiffty, go grab that rocket launcher"
Racer: were you at swordfish?
I have a burning hate for any max version newer than 09. I suppose I could check out the older versions of polyboost however. The insert edge loop tool in maya is the only feature from that app I wish I had in max and this seems like it could answer that.
"Doublesmooth" is sped up a lot by just using autosmooth then manually cleaning up the groups. It has it's advantages but it's not perfect, especially since you still have to keep in mind mesh flow and mesh density. For some complex objects and most simple objects this is fine and can be considerably faster than manually placing edge loops, but sometimes you still need that fine control and have to manually add in edge loops for some objects.
I think the reason why you found the Span buggy, is because it didn't support Edit Poly Modifier yet. Anyway, since I consider you a power user, it would be of great help to me if you could point out any bug you'd find. That's the only way I can fix them, and make the tools better.
I'd like for you to try the Split Ring instrument, it now supports Edit Poly Modifier too. It inserts an edge loop along an edge ring, giving you a preview. Moreover by pressing shift it keeps a uniform distance from one of the border loops, the closest to the first click, indicated by a dot. It seems hard to get, but just give it a try
@ Xoliul: "Span" is one of the selection tools of IC.Shape 2.0. It selects all the elements (verts, edges, quads) between two of them forming a loop or a ring.
Thanks Racer.
I will say that, while modeling in detail is nice, if it's going to take alot more time, or anymore time in general than it would floating, and it's going to be baked to a normal map, I don't really find it worth the time. Unless it's going to cause baking issues. It does look nice in the HP render, but it all comes down to what the final result looks like imo. But if you can model the stuff in just as quick, go for it.
Good stuff either way, keep it up.
"Doublesmooth" uses one Turbosmooth modifier set to obey smooth groups or a tesselate modifier on boxy models, to make the mesh dense while retaining hard edges, then a second turbosmooth to get those nice round subd corners everyone loves.
I posted the render setup in one of the video comments.
Is there a backup somewhere?
You could be right. I remember him saying his AK-47 tutorial was obsolete, but i thought this one had a lot of great info about smoothing groups, exploding your bakes with animation and edit poly modifier (3ds max), smoothing groups, uv mapping process, etc.
On a side note, there is so much bad information out there about normal maps for the self taught to run into, like the blanket statement that you should give your model 1 smoothing group, with no qualifier, in [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFSXtjFI9ig"]this[/ame] tutorial i just watched, that Racers vids sorta act as a force against bad info.
I don't know, i just had had hell of a time getting through the technical learning hurdle of normal maps, maybe its just me. For example, i watched about 30 different normal map tuts, read many others, but i feel like i only really needed about 1 good 15 minute tut to really understand them. Maybe i should make it...