Canon GL2 camera
polycounter lvl 13
Ok! so this is this week prop model! I think I need to fix up a few things though... I'll do that before I finished up the low poly and texturing for this week. This thing was pretty tricky to model. Trying to keep a good flow of geometry with all these crazy shapes on this thing was a challenge indeed. And I totally underestimated this!! I thought it was going to be easy. Lesson learned! 
Replies
to first adress the wire.
You seem to be a happy welder, some areas are dense and get welded to a lowish middle part.
Try and balance those out and dont weld away some of the main shapes. If the tri count is quite high already, dont worry about a few extra to keep your shape intact.
For the presentation you can remove a lot of edges that just break a quad into tri's. It becomes a lot cleaner and easier to view.
To prevent nasty looks, keep the direction of the edge in a quad in mind.
Right now alot of edges are concentrated to one area, divide those, everything from halfway down go down, others go to the upper corner ect.
Make use of the flatten/x y z function to straighten out some shapes, it looks a bit organic in some areas that maybe need to be flat.
The uv is ... organic aswell.
Think there are a lot of shapes that can be straightened out and so placed better.
prioritise when placing your parts.
LEFT of the uv box, place your key parts that need a lot of space
UNDER, place your semi key pieces
RIGHT, your little parts, these will be fitted in last
Now you concentrate on how these big pieces fit in best, and spot how much room you still need for the semi parts, and go from there.
I'd suggest fixing your edges, dont weld them to one spot, and do the uv's over, it will help you a lot learning wise and with the end resold.
good luck man
Dur23- thanks man! yeah, still a learning process and developing that eye to notice these things
Progg - here ya go, I did one with the green channel flipped and one just normal how it came out.
Rens - haha, yeah. you are correct sir all all those levels and I will for sure take note to all of that for the next model.. I am on a dead line for this one and will just continue on this one for now. Hopefully will be able to come back to it later on and fix things up like you suggested. Thanks man for looking into it!
by the way jonathan, at least in my end. Every time i make a nm in max i have to flip the green channel in photoshop. After a while u just can tell if its fliped or not.
-low poly to fix
-new UV layout
-new bakes
-texture
-presentation
I CAN DO IT!
Raul- thanks for not commenting on my work.. lol.
Well, what i was going to suggest has been said. lol...so there..
Just to be clear, you sort them out, OUTSIDE the uv box, not inside.
What i also look at is how i want to draw pieces, do i feel comfortable drawing a piece upside down, or do i know that i get the best out of it if i keep it horizontal.
the further you get into the camera, less detail can be used, for instance go from say 18 sided to a 14, to a 10,
or you can just keep it high if its not too much in difference and keep the detail, depending on the models projection in size
-The reason I have those extra divisions on the lens areas is to really keep the circle shapes. This is more of a portfolio piece and wanted to look really good. I had it like you do now in those areas when i first started and it just gets to blocky looking.
- Also, why you delete the triangle flow? it will be there anyways in the end right?
as for the triangilation, yes it will be there, but!,
it sucks to view a model that way, not only for an outsider, but also for you when you work on it. It just becomes messy really fast, and you want to come over as someone who can model and present clean work.
For this one, im not saying some pieces must be mid or low priority, but keep in mind how they will be textured and viewed. If the inner shutter circle is just black.. a solid like color, give it less space. If you have a 1024 piece of black or a 256, it doesnt matter \o/
Some stretching on some of the edges in the front side of the camera isnt a huge deal aswell, just past that row around the circles, it will create a hard seam in your normalmap otherwise, and you need to find another uv space for it.
Another thing would be, if you place a plane into the front of the camera to save some tris ect, keep an eye out on wasted texture space. If this plane reaches in quite far, and you never see it, move it close to the borders of the item it is placed in, so you only waste a few pixels and not an entire ring.
stack em up \o/
oh and i wanted to scale some pieces down, but they just dissapear so thin, so find out how much space you give each level, scale them accordingly
Make sure to keep a good few pixels inbetween when you stack circles and everything into eachother
thanks to Rens, he helped me out by telling me to redo the UV map... if i hadn't, this would had been hell texturing. Also other great tips that I will carry out from here on out.
Now to the mesh itself.
atm you have no smoothgroups or beveled edges at 90° angles of your mesh which results in really messy smoothing (artifacts while shown with normal maps etc)
adding those especially around the handle area should make it alot easier to read I suppose.
Also the hard surface parts seem kinda organic to me... almost like there is some kind of topology noise or something... (verts out of place?)
And some extra wires...
as well the UV map... I didn't get a chance to do everything the Rens said I should do. I do see those mistakes and will for sure to use his advice next time. I do see a lot now that I could have done different on here