Darksiders Weapon

I_R_Hopo

Hey guys, I finished the high-poly of a Darksiders Weapon I've been making. I found the concept on autodestruct.com, so credits to Paul Richards for the concept.
Paul Richard's Concept:


I plan on making a low-poly, and possibly texturing soon (depending if I get a computer upgrade soon, as my computer can't handle working with certain programs). In the meantime, I can finally learn how to bring something into a game engine! Maybe use it as a personal weapon in Fallout3 or something
Anyways, pictures! Any crits on what I could work on improving, and comments, are always welcomed and appreciated.

TheBlade

All i can say thats pritty dam sweet ,
i would recomend texturing itt

Revel

Yeap it looks nice so far..but I got a suggestion for you, in certain part looks too thin though for a metal or a wood materials. Especially on the 2nd and 3rd pic, the top part almost a paper thin (I'm not sure because I don't know is it a hand held weapon or a heavy weapon that mount on a vehicle?..if its a hand held, compare to the hand size then it looks too thin)

But I just curious what weapon is this?..at first I thought its a rifle, but your last picture shows at the end of the "barrel" don't have any hole but instead on the what I thought of the handle...

_Revel

Lord McMutton

Looking good. The only inaccuracy that I see is the part before the blade with the five holes. Those should go all the way through so the wielder can put their fingers through them. From what I can tell, at least.

n88tr

The five holes are awesome. I still don't see how you guys make them. Either I think its a boolean which is unlikely or you made them by hand. The by-hand method is how I do mine but it takes forever!

I_R_Hopo

Thanks guys!

Revel: Yeah, I thought it looked a bit thin too, so I might thicken it up. I made it thin though because in the reference it looks not very thick at all. Figured it was just some sort of thin metal shielding.
I'm not sure exactly what type of weapon it is, but I figured it was some sort of gun-staff. I haven't played Darksiders myself, but various weapons in the game seem to be oversized gun-type weapons. Either way, that's what I'm making this into.

Marshal Banana: I did have them as holes to start with, but it looked really odd to me. I thought in the reference those are actually lights. They didn't seem to make sense in the way I thought the gun would function, but I never thought of them as a holding point. Now that I look at it, I think I like that idea a lot better and might change it.

N88tr: To make holes, just create a cirlce in front of where you want the hole to be. Make it eight sides, turn on vertex snaps, and cut the circle into the faces. With turbosmooth it'll make a nice circle for you. The "How u model dem shapes" thread in the Technical Talk forum has a few posts on this if I'm not mistaken

Thanks again for the input guys! Gald you liked it

I_R_Hopo

Okay, finished up the low-poly. Still trying to wrap my head around normal-maps, smoothing groups, etc... So it may not be perfect, but I'll fix those problems as I come to them. I have the tri count at 5646, but I may need to add some in spots to clear up smoothing errors, but it shouldn't be too many more if any at all.

Low with wires:


UV mapping progress:

Revel

Hi dude, I think you can reduce the polycounts at the cylinder grip (the one at the back) and that part at bellow the barrel (especially the curved part). It looks too high-poly right now..well that's just my opinion.

Keep updating!

_Revel

dtschultz

It looks good, but there are a few things I see in the concept I don't see in your high poly that I think would make it look a lot better, and give you more info from your high poly when you bake it out. You should make those areas on the cylindrical back piece and around those five circular cutouts more layered, so it's not just a sharp edge. It should look like the paneled area at the front of the body, but make the panels come out more, because as they are now, they're getting lost.

I did a quick paintover of the areas I am talking about.

doeseph

that's an interesting way to show uvs, what is that?

I_R_Hopo

Revel: I tried reducing the polycounts there, but I feel it just kills the silhouette too much, especially for the relatively low number of polys I save. The handle area might be right up in front of the player too, depending on how I position it in-game, so I want to keep that part looking as higher-poly as possible right now. I did reduce some polys on a lesser seen part of the handle though

dtschultz: I'm confused what you're trying to show me in the picture. Sorry about that
(By the way, love the cathedral window you made. I remember when I fist saw that, I was blown away!)

doeseph: Just a grid I've placed as a material, to check stretching/mirroring. I like it more than the black and white checkers. So colorful!

dtschultz

I_R_Hopo wrote: »

dtschultz: I'm confused what you're trying to show me in the picture. Sorry about that
(By the way, love the cathedral window you made. I remember when I fist saw that, I was blown away!)

No worries. It's hard to communicate minute details sometimes via text. What I mean is that it looks like your edges in the areas I circled are too hard. In the concept it looks like maybe there is some sort of outer metal shell, and that there is an interior element that is the same shape, but extends a little bit past the borders of the top piece, giving it more depth. Might seem like nitpicking, but I think it would be much stronger.

I love the Darksiders look, and I look forward to seeing this completed.

Thanks! I appreciate it.

boyluya

Cool work dude. But you may want to loosen up the edges in your high poly, they're too sharp or tight. Those would look crap in your normal bake.

I_R_Hopo

Sorry for not updating in a while. Ran into a problem and have been trying to find out what is wrong the last few days.

First though, answers!
Dtschultz: Ah, yeah, now I get what you mean. I decided not to go for that look on that shield bit (or whatever it is), and just go for a little inset border. I really wasn't sure how to go about modelling it, so I just went for the easier solution. I know this is cheaping out a bit, but I didn't want to spend TOO much time. This is still one of the first things I've made, so I don't want to get too frusterated early on :P (But I am at the moment, and that's the problem I'll explain later )
BoyLuya: Haha, yeah. I still have no idea how normal maps work. I need to fix those up.

Okay, now onto my problem and questions (And sorry for the large amount of pictures in advance). I'm asking this here, because I've asked a lot of normal map questions in the Tech help foums, and I don't want to be rude and create another thread if I don't have to. I just have shitty luck with normal maps it seems. I can never get them to work right.

First problem, it seems that along almost all hard edges I always get these horrible artifacts, or big black patches. I thought maybe it was a texture resolution problem, but I went up to a very large texture to see if it fixed the problem, but it looked the exact same. (This picture is of the 1024*1024 texture). Also, the chunk of normal map affecting this part.



Now, these parts I'm getting artifacts and the features are just not showing up. The first area, the bits or on one smoothing group, but seperate UV islands. The second, one UV island and one smoothing group. Again, resolution size doesn't fix it. In fact, going up makes the area even more pixelated (And how that makes sense, I do not know). I also tried making the details bigger and softer, with the same result.
First area:


Second area:



I'm really sorry for the huge post, but I am extremely frusterated with all this. I hope you guys can help out. If you need me to upload the objects or anything, to see what I'm doing wrong, just say. Thank you very much everyone

Ged

there are 2 things you could do 1. make better use of your uv space, I mean mirror half if necessary, theres loads of space all around the weapon on that normal map 2. create larger more obvious bevels, small sharp 90degree bevels often arent seen by the normal map baking app, sometimes you gotta give that baker a little help. looks like its coming along well anyway.

Snader

Your shapes appear to be way too sharp, like Ged said: use larger bevels.
You might also get nicer results by aligning the the mesh to be straight along pixels, though you'd get a bit of stretching.

As for the higher resolution giving more pixelation, I think that has to do with the low res texture being filtered/blurred more, having the black pixels softened.

I_R_Hopo

The normal map I showed there was just a quick bake to show this one piece. Those areas are filled up by other UV mapped parts.

As for the parts that aren't showing up on the normal map, like in the last picture... That's because of the edge sharpness? I don't even have a hard edge there on my low poly though. I tried to soften it up on the high poly, and it just made things look worse

And I still don't understand what is causing the giant black pixels. As in the second to last picture, you can see them along the edge of that triangular extrusion. Like I said, even if I enlarge the UV map to take up the entire UV space and make the map bigger (like 2048*2048 ), these problems persist. That part on the triangular bit is a very soft edge too. I just seem to get errors almost anywhere that there is an edge in my UV's.

Really sorry about all the questions guys. I've been trying everything I could think of for the last week. Thanks for putting up with me :P

Snader

The bake looks like it does exactly what it's supposed to. The black lines you see are from the crease/gap in between the two objects of the highpoly.So it just shows the detail you modeled in there, but bec....

Oooooh wait. I see what your problem is. Hangon.

The red line is the cut in your lowpoly (approximately) You see how some half pixels below the line are purple and some half pixels cyan. Similar above the line. This causes the normals to change a lot on a pixel-by pixel basis, giving the really bright, stairstepped highlight (and the dark spots).

Try this: render out a huge map (4096²), and scale it to regular size (1024²) in photoshop. This should soften the extreme differences between the pixels a bit.

As for the detail in the top part of that area disappearing: you can see a faint line/crease, but because the highpoly is too sharp, there's not enough contrast.

I_R_Hopo

Hey guys, thanks for all the help! (Thanks to ZombieWells too if he reads this, for the private message. That helped too )

Sorry for posting back so late, I've been going on and off again on this thing in my free time. I ended up fixing some erros I was having, by doing a couple of things:

1. Relax modifier. My edges were WAY too hard, and some details were just too small. I didn't realize how well you had to define certain features for them to come out.
2. Re-sizing of maps. In the pictures below, I haven't done this yet. They are currently using 2048^2 maps (not 4096^2 because my crappy computer takes way too long to do this. That upgrade is hopefully coming soon!). This really helps to get rid of some of that pixelization. Not all, but some.
3. I realized my UV's consisted of a lot of small bits, one face wide, and I think this may have been causing problems. I ended up putting a lot of these into the same smoothing group as the faces they were attached to in the mesh, and welding the UV islands together. This got rid of pixelation along edges, but created nasty smoothing errors. (Very evident in the pictures).

Now, obviously this didn't fix everything. There are still lots of very visable errors in the pictures, but I think I'm starting to figure out what to do and what not to do. I'm not going to make any changes to this model anymore, but I think I have a better understanding of how to tackle whatever I make next.




And one with base colors (notice the hideous normal/silhouette problem at the tip :P )


Thanks for all the help on it, everyone! I think I may hold off on starting the texturing process though for a bit, so I probably won't update again for a while.


Anyways, I was hoping for answers to a few more questions I have:

1. Most important first. UV maps are my biggest problem. Like I said, for this I stuck a bunch into the same smoothing groups to get nicer edges, but it created bad smoothing errors. Everything I've ever UV'ed, I get nasty pixelation along edges if the unwrapped face is small, usually on 1-face wide details. An example would be if you had a box, and on one of the faces there was a rectangular indent not going in very far. The 4 side faces inside this indent would each be in their own smoothing group, and be VERY tiny details. I always get terrible renders on things like this. My question is: On small details, should I be scaling these up in the UV sapce so as to get a better render? Or am I just doing it wrong?

2. On my normal maps I always get big black areas along edges, where the low poly doesn't match the high-poly silhouette. I always thought this happened only if you had a hard edge, but on the below picture the faces are on one smoothing group.

I'm confused by this, because I've seen models by other people that don't match the high-poly silhouette, but they don't get this black edge. For example, a WIP shot of a helmet by Jonathan Fawcett:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/448525/keep/Polycount/silhouette_silhouette_silhouette.jpg
(Snader, you may recognize that. You posted the picture :P )
I'm wondering if it's just because the edge I have is such an extreme angle compared to his? I'm guessing that, if you want a 90 degree edge, the silhouette has to be almost spot-on?
EDIT: Ah, I think I get it. For this not to happen, if you don't want to make the silhouette match perfectly, does the low poly have to be "inside" the high in that area?

3. Normal map seams. Sometimes I get these, and sometimes I don't. I've read various things about these, and I just don't know what's right. I know, from various tests, and someone else having the same issue, that if I bake my normals in XNormal, I get nasty seams on any UV edge, but I don't get this problem baking in Max.
Also, I get mirror seams from a symetrical object, even when I offset UV's. But I've read a post by MoP (I think he posted it), that if you do this you shouldn't get this seam. Now, if I go and delete half of that object with the normals applied, and apply a symetry modifier, the seam is magically gone! (I can't do this on models that I have symetry on only a part though. Deleting just parts results in nasty seam appearing everywhere for no reason :poly115: )
So... Does anyone know anything about seams and why they have to be such jerks? :P

Ah, well, sorry for another very long post guys, and thanks again for any help you can give, and any help you have given! I am learning a lot, and with every bit I learn, the motivation to continue grows :P