Colt Whitneyville Hartford Dragoon - Crits/Advice Plz
Hi everyone. To be frank I am new to forums and usually lurk in the background but I thought I would join as recommended by 'Cap'. My apologies in advance for any noob behaviour.
I have just returned from a long stint of travelling and feel I have lost alot of confidence with my 3D after no access to a computer. I set a project on my return inspired from the book 'Blood Meridian' by Cormac McCarthy (author of 'No Country for Old Men').
The gang used the pistol below, a Colt Whitneyville - Hartford Dragoon. After searching for ref material I stumbled upon Cap's model and gave him an email looking for advice which led me to here.
Caps' Dragoon:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=73019
My main reference picture:
With my version I would like to include the elaborate engravings and the crafted handle.
Unfortunately I am still an amateur to texturing, this is about where I get fuzzy on what the best workflow is so any pointers would be appreciated, my plan is model the grip engraving in ZBrush (test below had to scrap it as I redid my uv's) and use xnormal/nDo to make the motif??
The model has been made in 3DS Max and is 8674 tris. More than I would like but I am eager to move on. The pieces are seperate so it can be animated or dismantled.
Cheers!
I have just returned from a long stint of travelling and feel I have lost alot of confidence with my 3D after no access to a computer. I set a project on my return inspired from the book 'Blood Meridian' by Cormac McCarthy (author of 'No Country for Old Men').
The gang used the pistol below, a Colt Whitneyville - Hartford Dragoon. After searching for ref material I stumbled upon Cap's model and gave him an email looking for advice which led me to here.
Caps' Dragoon:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=73019
My main reference picture:
With my version I would like to include the elaborate engravings and the crafted handle.
Unfortunately I am still an amateur to texturing, this is about where I get fuzzy on what the best workflow is so any pointers would be appreciated, my plan is model the grip engraving in ZBrush (test below had to scrap it as I redid my uv's) and use xnormal/nDo to make the motif??
The model has been made in 3DS Max and is 8674 tris. More than I would like but I am eager to move on. The pieces are seperate so it can be animated or dismantled.
Cheers!
Replies
For example I would like to texture the hammer but to save time I would flip/mirror one side horizontally on the map and lay it directly on top to occupy exactly the same space as the uv below.
There seems to be alot of finger wagging at inverted faces and no one advocating it. Will I encounter problems later on if I follow this path?
What I am not understanding is when you say 'be sure to flip the normals right side out when you duplicate the pieces'. Do appreciate the help so kudos to you
And yeah, unless you're baking object-space normals, your UV layout is stupid. If parts are symmetrical, both halves should share the same UV space.
You know, being polite is generally more helpful.
What I was referring to it to let the computer make to make sure that they're stacked properly by deleting one half of whatever you want to mirror, so that you only have one copy of each unique UV shell, then duplicate the object and mirror the geometry. When you duplicate the geometry, the UV shell will stack in the exact same place as the original, and that way when you go to do things like bake AO or normal passes, you don't have your software go bonkers on you and make a mess of the bakes.
I can show you what I mean with a project of mine that stacks duplicated pieces. On the UV Sheet, anything that's purple or that is marked with green is a stacked UV by way of a duplicated mesh.
Anyway, hope this helps, Bon
@ Der Hollander - Cheers for your patience explaining that, I understand now. That's a good technique to know, I will use that tomorrow. Glad that I can use this it's going to significantly increase the space I need
Couple of texel density issues really stand out to me. You've made the side of the frame very high res, which is good, but then the cup behind the cylinder is like, half the resolution, which will look bad because it's right in the player's face in first person view. Same with the back of the cylinder. Have you looked at your model with a checker material to make sure your texel density is even?
A quick way to do that in 3dsmax is to, click #1, and in #2 type 1.0, hit enter and toggle off #1. This will move whatever you have selected over one unit/tile to the right.
It keeps from baking ontop of itself. If its not moved to the next sheet it'll just bake the doubles ontop of itself which, well, is interesting...
So thats why my normals have been all screwed over :P
@ RockSteady: Aye mate that is the plan, I did some tests with nDo and it's a nifty little number that, will need further testing tho to get it right. Been gathering a load of ref images of gun engraving, there are some amazing pieces out there! Will be really excited to get onto that stage, but I reckon it is going to get very fiddly and very stressful... cant wait!!
What is the opinion on workflow with engraving?
- Do the normal first then the diffuse
or
- the diffuse then the normal?
That is assuming I use nDo/crazybump/xnormal....
Also, which would everyone recommend?
Thanks for the comments all
My questions still stand, see above ^^^, cheers all.
yeah, those parts are right in the player's face but scaled too small on your UV.
Though how can I be sure what setting (if any) needs to be changed for the channel direction? i.e. swap red green, flip red, flip green etc.
I've included the normal map for the model so far, this was painted in photoshop and created using nDo, many thanks to teddybergsman for a great script and all his hard work.
There are numerous accuracies but please shout them out, if it is geometry related to be honest I won't change it at this late stage.
I've popped in a half finished diffuse for the grip, I am aiming for an antique ivory look. For those who are interested the diffuse texture was originally a zmaterial which filled the cavity's in the sculpt with a dark colour. I then baked this out to photoshop and painted over the top. As I said it is half finished but I wanted to get some feedback on its' directon.
The girl is not my drawing, I found this sketch in Google by Charlene Chua and felt it would be cool to deveop it further. Bunged it into PS and developed the line work.
One concern I have is the fact I shot myself in the foot by putting the screws on the normal map, yet doubling up the UV's on eachother to conserve space. Getting good detail but the screws are identical both sides. Any ideas? I was thinking about either going back to the modelled screws (not keen as the poly count shoots up) or creating alpha planes for the screws, that way I can model the screw head on place it on top of the texture, which in this case would be the tip of the bolt, being smaller than the head it will hide behind it. Bad/Good idea?
Pedro: Aye mate, I did have a bash a couple of days ago to try to achieve this but I feel out of touch with modelling in max, I can't remember how to bake out normals either. Can you recommend a tutorial for max normal baking settings?
I do agree with you on this, it does look strange with the sharp edges. I was trying to look for a script to speed up the process which could make cuts around all edges / selected edges so that the smooth applied would be controlled, couldn't find anything that worked though. I will give it another go as I am not happy with it either. If you can recommend a time saving method of doing this I am all ears.
Perspective
Side1
Side2
Back
Under1
Under2
Top
also they're way too uniform and plentiful on the dark metal. grip is crazy bright too
also your normal map seems to be making the sides of everything look indented, I've never seen that in any refs even of engraved Colts and it looks odd
que?
Here's another shot with standard shader settings. Just the one light in this, think the lights were making the edges brighter, this should give a better indication
I'm not sure which area you are pointing to when you say the normal seems to be making the side of everything look indented. If it is the embossed borders you are refering then I am going to tone those down, they are appearing to jut out too far.
Aside form that here's a screendump with some changes to the spec map. The grab above was with no scene lights just the default light. The one below is with the 3 omnis just like the one a few posts above with the glaring grip. I have toned down the fresnel effect for this one. Is this more of what you meant?
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/grabviewport-2-1
and spec for the metal still really needs a push
Still has the problem every now and again, not quite narrowed it down as to how. It does disable AO if I open the grab script, then I re-enable it and try to save an image out, the model will appear in the window as grey. Annoying.
Upped the spec;