Excellent accuracy and detailing, no crits. Especially nice work on the painted variants, and the wear and tear around the muzzle device. 3x4096 is definitely a bit much these days, but maybe not for long, and in any case I am sure it would scale down to 2048 beautifully. Thanks for posting.
also Could you give some insight on your texturing process, especially how you created the scratches on the barrel please? It would be much appreciated.
The model is nice but the texture is very, very noisy, pretty monochrome, and most of the details seem to be tertiary.
The high level of noise looks nice when viewed up close at a near-planar angle and in high resolution, but a lot of it is going to result in poor aliasing and lots of moir
here are a few things which i think keep this from being a great texture:
firstly: lack of color. no color in the specular map and desaturated overlays show me that you're being far too timid with it. color is such an important thing when making real-life items, and simply boosting the saturation in photoshop makes the texture so much more exciting:
because your specular map has no color either and your diffuse values are very similar, all of the materials blend together. personally i would suggest that you darken the plastic on the diffuse and tint the metal and plastic different colors. it's a shame your overlays have barely any color because that would help immensely.
while i'm on the topic of specular maps, the camo version should not have different tones in the specular map for the paint itself. think about it; why would the darker paint get less light than the lighter paint when they're both the same material?
secondly, you have no large shapes, only micro details. while this might impress a regular polycounter, you lose the chance of having readability at a distance, at a glance, or when the maps are scaled down to lower than 2048. let's zoom out and take a look:
because you have no large shapes and only scattered micro noise, all those nice details you made just got destroyed and only the generic cloudy overlays/textures added show through. and because the gun is very desaturated and doesn't have tons of tonal separation as mentioned before, the metals and plastics all blend together even more. here's an example of what i'd do:
nice clear tonal separation between materials, brown plastic mag and tinted materials along with strong lighting gives it a nice color boost. i also cleaned up the mag and receiver noisiness and added some nice big details to the important bits. big details like these will make the asset look real chunky at all distances. wearing mechanical surfaces is all about clean surfaces for readability, and then awesome big chunky shapes to make it look nassty.
lastly: listen to what my boy in the above post said about the aliasing, because aliasing should be minimized as much as possible on all aspects of a model and texture. just zoom in and out and pan all around your model and the things you need to fix should become pretty obvious.
so yeah, keep going. most people on polycount are just going to blindly praise once you get near a certain skill level and i think you're approaching that. the gun just needs some work to elevate it past the CG look.
while i'm on the topic of specular maps, the camo version should not have different tones in the specular map for the paint itself. think about it; why would the darker paint get less light than the lighter paint when they're both the same material?
I think what he's - possibly - trying to mimic there is the fact that many times field-expedient camo finishes on rifles are done with scrounged paint that has wildly varying specular qualities. You're right, it's not technically correct, but if he's using just that single grayscale spec (no split spec color & spec power / gloss), it does sort of carry that subtlety through and show the mismatching paint decently. Again, not technically correct from the art execution standpoint, but... the end result looks a LOT like real rifles I have handled that have seen the same type of field painting, and those have been everything from old AK parts kits to Rhodesian FALs to M4s and M16s fresh back from AFG and Iraq (still had sand in the nooks and crannies).
Finally got some free time to edit textures of ak, by great advices of racer445 and Amsterdam Hilton Hotegreat. Materials still unfinished as i see it right now because i somehow didn't saw last messages earlier.
cool. I know you are using maya, so did you use xoliul shader for maya or did you import it into 3ds max. Also idk why but i thought u were using Vray :P
Replies
also Could you give some insight on your texturing process, especially how you created the scratches on the barrel please? It would be much appreciated.
thanks,
-mike
its awesome!
gauss, exactly. And i wanted to test that in arma2 engine just to make sure how bad it handles it.
mike670, i did most of scratches in modo, the scratches on barrel were made in ps, just tried to draw them like on refs.
Thats some badass texturing u`ve done here. Congratz.
And now gimme your brain....:poly118:..I'm hungry
The high level of noise looks nice when viewed up close at a near-planar angle and in high resolution, but a lot of it is going to result in poor aliasing and lots of moir
firstly: lack of color. no color in the specular map and desaturated overlays show me that you're being far too timid with it. color is such an important thing when making real-life items, and simply boosting the saturation in photoshop makes the texture so much more exciting:
because your specular map has no color either and your diffuse values are very similar, all of the materials blend together. personally i would suggest that you darken the plastic on the diffuse and tint the metal and plastic different colors. it's a shame your overlays have barely any color because that would help immensely.
while i'm on the topic of specular maps, the camo version should not have different tones in the specular map for the paint itself. think about it; why would the darker paint get less light than the lighter paint when they're both the same material?
secondly, you have no large shapes, only micro details. while this might impress a regular polycounter, you lose the chance of having readability at a distance, at a glance, or when the maps are scaled down to lower than 2048. let's zoom out and take a look:
because you have no large shapes and only scattered micro noise, all those nice details you made just got destroyed and only the generic cloudy overlays/textures added show through. and because the gun is very desaturated and doesn't have tons of tonal separation as mentioned before, the metals and plastics all blend together even more. here's an example of what i'd do:
nice clear tonal separation between materials, brown plastic mag and tinted materials along with strong lighting gives it a nice color boost. i also cleaned up the mag and receiver noisiness and added some nice big details to the important bits. big details like these will make the asset look real chunky at all distances. wearing mechanical surfaces is all about clean surfaces for readability, and then awesome big chunky shapes to make it look nassty.
lastly: listen to what my boy in the above post said about the aliasing, because aliasing should be minimized as much as possible on all aspects of a model and texture. just zoom in and out and pan all around your model and the things you need to fix should become pretty obvious.
so yeah, keep going. most people on polycount are just going to blindly praise once you get near a certain skill level and i think you're approaching that. the gun just needs some work to elevate it past the CG look.
I think what he's - possibly - trying to mimic there is the fact that many times field-expedient camo finishes on rifles are done with scrounged paint that has wildly varying specular qualities. You're right, it's not technically correct, but if he's using just that single grayscale spec (no split spec color & spec power / gloss), it does sort of carry that subtlety through and show the mismatching paint decently. Again, not technically correct from the art execution standpoint, but... the end result looks a LOT like real rifles I have handled that have seen the same type of field painting, and those have been everything from old AK parts kits to Rhodesian FALs to M4s and M16s fresh back from AFG and Iraq (still had sand in the nooks and crannies).
Done base hipoly of modern SVD sniper rifle.
Rendered in Xoliul shader too.
I'd like to know too!
cool. I know you are using maya, so did you use xoliul shader for maya or did you import it into 3ds max. Also idk why but i thought u were using Vray :P
Vray is so slow and it's good only for hipolys.
Chicken Dip, sure
Have you tried using PBR shader?
Love to see the results.