Environment Stuff - Pagan Monolith + more when it's done

ArchangelZero

Nothing to write home to mother about, but I kind of like how it turned out. It's for web so didn't go too fancy. Comments and crits and stuff always welcome!

more on my blog.

1100 Triangles – Diffuse Map (512x512) Normal (512x512)


Thanks to Sammykay1sStamps over at DeviantArt for the use of Pagan Symbol Brushes!

• check it out in-game in Unity Web Player

Cheers!

ErichWK

I feel like the placement of moss could be more cleverly placed, seems a bit random and unnatural. Also your diffuse is a bit blurry and could be crisper, might also be that your normals don't come out very well. I say push it some more, let's the cracks and pocks and hilights from the minerals in the stone.

vofff

your NM looks very flat and Ive no idea why you put NM on the blue lights when you cannot see the bump anyway.

BlvdNights

That beveling is really unnecessary. You should have baked it into the normal

Jungsik

yea..those normals doesn't really make sense..its flat except those blue lights..but being lights you wont even see it

iniside

BlvdNights wrote: »

That beveling is really unnecessary. You should have baked it into the normal

I can't agree. Beveled model alawyas look better than baked beveled model. Few polys more ? Of course if you have to count every poly this might be a case. But if you doing Crysis like game, then.. really.

Anyway, look bit flat, and unintresting. You should sculpt it, to add big details, that would need higer res texture 1024, because each side would need separate uv space. Or you can just split model into two sides and later use symmetry.

PredatorGSR

iniside wrote: »

I can't agree. Beveled model alawyas look better than baked beveled model. Few polys more ? Of course if you have to count every poly this might be a case. But if you doing Crysis like game, then.. really.

Anyway, look bit flat, and unintresting. You should sculpt it, to add big details, that would need higer res texture 1024, because each side would need separate uv space. Or you can just split model into two sides and later use symmetry.

That's not necessarily true. In this case the bevels are just for smoothing, but a proper bake would take care of the smoothing anyway. Big rounded edges benefit from having bevels, but for a thin edge like this a hard edge + baked normal would probably look much better.

Depends on the type of model, but in this case hard edges and a proper bake would probably be the best way to go.

00Zero

For something this big, its totally fine to bevel the edge in the mesh.

however, this is something ive been seeing so much with peoples assets in unreal. use proper vertex normals. nobody thinks of this anymore and all I see are objects that are rounded all over. it looks wrong and nobody says anything about it. its not something that you should rely on your normal map to fix.

Fix your vertex normals. Max and Maya have different ways of doing this. frankly, i forgot how to do it in max, so if anyone else could help out here it would be great. but in maya you can set vertex normals to any direction you want.

maybe youre not exporting correctly to unreal? that could be the issue. make sure youre exporting mesh normals in the ASE. or else unreal just puts a single smoothing group on your object.

i made a quick diagram of what your vertex normals should look like on a beveled cube. the top one has default vertex normals and it makes it look like a ball because its being smoothed all over. you cant really use hard/soft edges to fix this, so you have to manually fix your vertex normals. flatten the normals on the faces so that only the beveled part is rounded. it will give you a MUCH nicer effect.


just to reiterate, the number one thing that totally kills an image for me is when the artist obviously paid no attention to vertex normals (which is such a basic thing im surprised nobody is teaching it) yet spends all their time on fancy normals, shaders, etc. its an important part of making assets, learn how to use them.

ArchangelZero

Thx for comments everyone!

Ok, sorry for newbness, but what's the difference between a vertex normal and a regular normal? (Sorry 00Zero, I'm not seeing any kind of diagram btw... )

This is not supposed to be for next-gen, it's for a browser-based unity game, like I said in the op, so I'm trying to minimize the performance hit from big textures and multiple smoothing groups. Now maybe I'm doing it all wrong, and I'd love to hear about that.

Well, I have to gogogo, running late, I've been working on code past few days so nothing (semi) pretty to look at, but I will post here when I get some more graphics stuff done.