(WIP) Hand-Painted Fantasy Sword

Hayden Zammit

Well, it isn't painted at all yet. Just getting the model down. Eventually I want it to look like something out of torchlight or WoW. For that sort of style, do you use normals at all? Or is it all just Diffuse and Spec?

Would really appreciate some critique on this. it's 548 tris at the moment. That seems pretty high to me, but I do find that I do everything super low poly, so I tried to use a bit more than usual for this.

Is there any obvious problems with the model or anything at this stage?

Hayden Zammit

I done the UVs. Do they look alright? Should I do a high poly version for this as well or just go into texturing now?

Steve Schulze

There's no normal mapping in either Torchlight or World of Warcraft. They're diffuse only. Your poly count doesn't seem especially high and the model looks to be pretty efficient. When considering poly counts, think about how close you're going to get to the model with the theoretical in game camera. If there are polys there that you're not going to notice from that distance then cut them out.

Your texel density is very inconsistent. I'd suggest for something like this you'd probably want to keep the scale of your UV's consistent. If you're having trouble fitting the blade in to the square texture, it's perfectly acceptable to double the length in one direction so that it's, for example, 256*512 pixels.

Mark Dygert

You picked kind of a weird place to put a seam, down the middle of the hilt? It looks like its 100% uniquely unwrapped, why not mirror it front/back? People will rarely see both front and back of the sword at the same time.

The texel density is very wonky like jackablade pointed out.

strayvert

To further elaborate on the uv space...

0. The blade is fine since it looks like a projection map from the side. The only thing I would say is if the curves in the blade not noticeable enough get rid of those polys.

1. I think this piece is a part of the cross guard and in which case it could be connected to the piece I numbered 2 with seams cut at corners.

2. It looks like you already cut it down the middle but you could also use the same uv space for the front as the back. cut and flip that right up onto the other one.

3. This is just the end cap and is 8 polys right now but you could easily get it to 6, no big deal there.

4. This is the what Mark was talking about. I scribbled out in red the parts that should for sure be flipped up and in blue that could be flipped over assuming the top and bottom of the grip are the same.

5. The hand guard is fine other than it looks like it takes up too much space in the uvs. Try to use the blade as a reference point for how big the rest of the pieces are and try to get all of the checkers to be the same size when you test it out.

Once you resize these pieces and start sharing uv space you should be able to fit it onto a 256*512 or so rectangular piece like Jackablades said.

Hayden Zammit

Thanks for pointing out all the problems so far people. It's really helpful.

I knew what texel density was, I just didn't know it was called 'texel density' heh. Should you always try to maintain consistent texel density, or does it differ from asset to asset?

strayvert, Thanks for the awesome explanation.

I used Roadkill to scale the UVs to same size and had a go at fixing the UV problems.

I would split it into a 1024 x 512 map to better fit the blade, but I'm not sure how to actually do that in maya. I just split the blade's UVs in half down the middle so I could get them bigger. Is it okay like that?

Here's what its looking like now:

Hayden Zammit

Bump. Sorry in advance if bumping isn't allowed on here.

sltrOlsson

You get lynched for bumping, you'r technically already dead

To fit the 1:2 or 2:1 ratio you need to first fit every thing in to one of the half of the 1:1 UV space. Lets say the lower part.
When you'r done fitting everything together you mark all the UV shells and select the scale tool.
Then you want to scale in just U or V. I guess it's V for this. Just test it. So, scale with 0.5 by writing in the second box. Don't really know why, but the last little box need to be checked for this to work. Don't have any explanation why..

Something that i think helps is to, while having everything selected with the scale tool, move the pivot and snapping it to the grids lowest point.

Hope this makes sense..



Regarding the texel density, mainly yes! But for stuff like characters you maybe want to bump up the density of the face. Or if you doing a FPS gun, maybe some of the details nearest the player should have some more space to really pop a certain pattern or something..

Hayden Zammit

To fit the 1:2 or 2:1 ratio you need to first fit every thing in to one of the half of the 1:1 UV space. Lets say the lower part.
When you'r done fitting everything together you mark all the UV shells and select the scale tool.
Then you want to scale in just U or V. I guess it's V for this. Just test it. So, scale with 0.5 by writing in the second box. Don't really know why, but the last little box need to be checked for this to work. Don't have any explanation why..

Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still having trouble grasping all this.

What advantage do I get by using a non-square map for this? Will I be able to fit the sword blade as one UV and give it more resolution?

You guys know of any tutorials on doing it?

Jeff Parrott

Yes the texture won't be squished. That said I've clicked on this thread a bunch hoping to see a texture and nothing! Can't wait to see what you do with the texture.

Hayden Zammit

Yes the texture won't be squished. That said I've clicked on this thread a bunch hoping to see a texture and nothing! Can't wait to see what you do with the texture.

heh, I'm not much good at texturing to be honest, so you might be when I finally get to it.

Having too much trouble understanding this 2:1 thing. Have to sort it out first.

sltrOlsson

You want to use a 1:2 map when you got UV shells you really don't want to split. Like a sword, a missile or the barrel of a gun..

I actually forgot to mentioned that after fitting the shells into the lower part of your one to one UV-space and scaling it as described above. You need to render out your uv snapshot as a 512*1024 to get it to square them out again..

Don't want to steal your thread of anything, just wanting to show why 1:2 or 2:1 texture needs to be used sometimes. As mentioned, "like a missile". This is an art test (turned out shit unfortunately) with a very specific texel density and that was so that the missile could fit with 5 pixels over or something.

Sean VanGorder

Not trying to hijack the thread or anything, but it make me think of something.

Do games like Torchlight of WoW ever do high poly models for their hand painted stuff for the sake of getting a nice AO to overlay on their textures? It seems like that would be handy. Or is it simply all just awesome painting?

limesimme

SeanEG wrote: »

Not trying to hijack the thread or anything, but it make me think of something.

Do games like Torchlight of WoW ever do high poly models for their hand painted stuff for the sake of getting a nice AO to overlay on their textures? It seems like that would be handy. Or is it simply all just awesome painting?

Not trying to hijack the thread or anything, but I wonder about this aswell

Joseph Silverman

It is a lot faster and better for style fidelity to just paint it the first time in most situations.

- If you're going photo-real, why use baked ao instead of the lighting in a photo?

- If you're going painterly, why try to reverse engineer baked ao into painterly planes and forms when you can just... paint planes and forms?