Audi Wheel "baking Test"

FrozenCore#6

I decided to learn Baking "wether I like it or not"
So I started on this Audi Wheel about 2 days ago , "time spent = 7-10 hours"
I'm pretty satisfied with the result , and I finally realized that it's impossible to get HD details baked into a NM "you can aswell prove me wrong "

So gimme crits , alot of them , yess spam me with em !

A-N-P

Do you have a reference you can show? That helps give crit much more, besides that there is a lot of optimization that can be done as the tri count for such a simple asset is pretty high imo.

You could also try 'dirtying up' the alloy some to help sell it more, make it look like its been used, as perfectly clean items look 'fake' in the game world.

The logo on the tyre wall can also do with some depth/height and a lighter colour, say a dirty white?

I hope this helps and would like to see what you come up with.

Xoliul

You really, really can't do the "shove together" thing on a rim that is made out of one piece, I can tell straight away and it looks bad.
You're also using waaay to many polygons on the rim itself, they are not helping your silhouette at all so they're not needed. Especially with rims you can get away with keeping things simpler...

Snader

Definitely seems to be on the high side of technical specs, I'd say a 512 would be enough in most cases, and 1024 for a modern racing game, and about 500-750 polies or 1000-1250 for a modern racer. Perhaps someone who's worked on a racegame can help with actual figures?

Personally, I'd try (it might not be possible to get it working nicely) to tile the texture a bit as well, make 2 or 3 spokes and then copy those (to avoid 5 identical ones) and only map 1/3rd or so of the rubber.

FrozenCore#6

Okay here's today's update :

1- Rims Changed
2- Lower Poly Count
3- Minor texture Edits
4- Rim edits in normal map , More Space Too xD
5- Better Lighting Settings

Currently : Making a "Dusty Tire" texture

Notes: 512px texture Looks blurred << is that ok? xP



Wheel ref. :




Edit: Fixed The Normal Map

Snader

4 spokes look rather bad - they're not even evenly spaced. You're probably better off taking your original version and removing a bunch of loops and then try to weld the spokes neatly to the tubular part.

As for the texture, I meant reducing the texture without having to sacrifice quality. How about this:

It has as much detail on a 512 as your layout has on a 1024.

FrozenCore#6

Thanks Snader for taking the time to do this , I'll test it out tommorow

Texture update:

This was supposed to be dusty , but it ended up being screwed by dirt xD


And here is another shot after editting the normal map :

---

I don't think i'll change the rims again Since this was just a baking test , I'm pretty satisfied with what i learned today

I might have some updates but it depends on how busy I get the next few days
soo thank you people for helping me out , if you wanna crit anything I'd be glad if you post it

Cya "gone to bed "

FrozenCore#6

update: ok I admit that i screwed up on the last texture so i tried to fix it up but i couldn't do it well so i'm leaving it for another time .
as for today i tried to make my first spec map ever , It seems to work pretty nicely on the brand new wheel but it messes up on the used one



I think i should fix up the dust part in the diffuse but i dunno in which way i should be fixing it xD

Xoliul

Dude, hate to be direct, but 4 spokes look absolutely terrible. You can not get away with that if your ref clearly has 5. I suggest you practice some more modeling if you have trouble creating that.

Snader

White spec = reflection, black spec = no reflection. Does metal reflect? Quite. Does rubber reflect? Not really.

And yeah, you seriously need to stick closer to reference.

FrozenCore#6

Meh fine here are new rims , sorry for being Lazy :P

Updates:

Made new rims
re-unwrapped the whole model
rebake with 1024px Has Nice Details

Problems : smoothing group 1 isn't applied on the center of the rims .

sorry for the wierd pattern on the tire , I'll fix it when i wake up tommorow

Krazy8

Also your low profile tires like that won't have white wall lettering. Just keep it black imo.

FrozenCore#6

@Krazy8 : Thnx for the notice , makes things easier for me
@Mike5424 : Don't worry about it :P

Update :

1- smoothing group Issue Solved
2- new diffuse map
3- new specular map
4- AO map added

Krazy8

@frozencore#6 lol no problem. I work with tires alot so it just stuck out there as wrong to me lol.

00Zero

darken the diffuse of the metal. metals are generally darker with bright spec. the reflection is what brings out the highlights while most of it is dark.

your reference rim looks white because they probably have a large white board reflecting light from behind the camera.

tda

Right now your tread is taking up a huge amount of your UV space, it looks like the entire thing is unique? You could easily mirror one side of it and half the space, as you never see both sides at once.

Better still, you could just make a 1/4 section of tire with tread on it, make sure the texture tiles correctly and then simply copy and rotate it a few times to make the entire wheel. That'll give you a lot more resolution overall. If you still wanted text on the sidewall, you can have 1 half of the sidewall mapped flat along one of the edges of your UV map, it'll take up hardly any room and also have exactly the same texel resolution as you have now.

Also that sweeping curve on the spokes didn't need to be modelled in the lowpoly and its good that you made it flat, but now the normals don't have that nice shape in there anymore? How come?

Noors

Straight those uv's It's a cylinder, the egdes should be parallel

FrozenCore#6

@ Noors And tda : I tried Making the cylinder's straight but It gave my a wierd outcome near the ends so I couldn't make it any smaller

@ tda : I remodelled the rims on both high and low poly to avoid any further errors.

---

Thanks everybody for your help I've Learned alot from this model , currently I'm working on head Model And trying out sculpting with mudbox since zbrush's interface is driving me crazy xD

Here's The New thread : http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1245120#post1245120

Mik2121

Hopefully this can be of any help.

It's a wheel I made some time ago:



It has 380 tris but you can reduce the loops on the center area and make it plain and add some extra rings on the whole wheel to make the outer curve even smoother if you want.

This is the texture I used (512x512):



// edit - check the posts below for some more info on better UVW layouts //


It's a slightly older version I had lying around so I just used it, but you get an idea of how the UVW layout is. I basically made a very small piece of the outer tire and used the rest of the space for the rubber side (where I forgot to add the tire brand name / model, d'oh) and the rim where I wanted some unique dirt for my wheel.

I'm no pro though, so I don't know all the tips and tools out there and therefore maybe I, too, made something wrong, but it worked pretty fine for me and saved lots of space.

Snader

FrozenCore - have you tried modeling the tire treads as a flat object? Seeing as the thread goes all the way around, you shouldn't have any smoothing issues. I still think you're using too much space for the treads. One of those strips should be enough.

Mik2121 - No offense, but that's hardly an efficient texture. You're spending a hell of a lot of texture on the rim and hardly any on the tread. You can almost cram this in a 256² without any loss of resolution(yes some small parts are missing):

Though I'd personally do something like I showed a few posts up and get a bit more tread on the texture.

Mik2121

No offense taken at all. I know I'm still nowhere close to making the most optimum UVW layouts, but if I do what you are showing on your pic the dirt on the rim would repeat a lot, don't you think?.

I spent a lot on the rim because that part can be seen, whereas the thread is mostly hidden by the truck body (this is a truck wheel) so I didn't think spending all that much for the thread would be the best thing to do in this case.

Your pic is also missing the sides of the wheel, not just part of the rim. Don't think that would fit on the 256x256 texture.

I guess I could have made just half of the trim, rotate it 90º clockwise and for the side only make a small portion attached to the top of the thread piece. Then reduce it all a bit and maybe make it fit on a 256x256 texture, but then again the trim would be mirrored and I would be missing the center nameplate.

What do you think about something like this?:



Posted another variation. Which one do you think would be the best out of these two? I definitely wanna keep enough dirt detail on the trims so the repeat isn't _that_ obvious (though I would still need to touch up the diffuse to make the mirroring less obvious)