Splash Damage art test, too

Dismembered

So I also decided to try my hand at the new art test. I have a few tweaks I still want to make but I think I am near the completion of HP.

-The tweaks I plan to make is to the crates in the middle, just to give more definition to the indentations.

-I also need to play with the triangle like details, they just don't seem right to me. ( I also just realized that I forgot to mirror the top one over)

-And it seems I either need to play with my render settings or okay with the size of my small details, as they aren't showing up.

Any other critiques just let me know

Oniram

just for presentation purposes, you may want to render ambient occlusion. it would help to see the smaller details.

question.. are the triangles modeled into the mesh? it appears as if they are floating.. which may (depending on placement) cause some issues with projecting). also you may want to loosen up the chamfer on the middle boxes.. as the top and bottom creases are looking a bit too tight.

R3D

The top of the top pillar isn't beveled inward, it connects straight.

Dismembered

Thanks for the replies. Here is an update:

@Oniram - How is this render for presentation, any better? The triangles are floating, I am hoping to not have problems out of them, but we will see.

@Ryswick - Thanks for pointing that out. But I have noticed a lot of inconsistencies with the concept, mainly dealing with the pillars. The inset designs on them aren't the same on all of them and the way they connect isn't the same with. If you look closer at the top pillars some are missing the silver piece at the top, others connect straight and the back one bevels. So I decided to take a bit of liberty with it and make them all the same.

Let me know what you think as I would like to keep moving and start on the LP soon.

EarthQuake

Floaters 101:

You need to have an "outline" loop of polys around your floater that lays parallel to your base surface.


Around curved surfaces, your floater's "outline" needs to match the contour of the surface as well, again it has to be parallel to the surface.




For floaters, the goal is too look seamless from a certain view ie: the view the raytracer is going to look at. If you accomplish this, you're in good shape.

Dismembered

EarthQuake Yeah I was wondering about the floating insets I have and I did try it both ways. The reason I went with the way that I have it was because I can still see the lines from the outline, on the curved surface, when it had an outline. I can still see it in yours on the cylinder as well. And I thought that it might affect the normal map. Will it not?

Thanks, by the way, for your response.

Ack Master

thanks for the tips some times its nice to read over stuff again and go AHH YEAH! I get lazy in remembering stuff

EarthQuake

Dismembered wrote: »

EarthQuake Yeah I was wondering about the floating insets I have and I did try it both ways. The reason I went with the way that I have it was because I can still see the lines from the outline, on the curved surface, when it had an outline. I can still see it in yours on the cylinder as well. And I thought that it might affect the normal map. Will it not?

Thanks, by the way, for your response.

I'm not sure what you're saying, the top floater looks seamless and would bake seamless, or 99% close enough to seamless.

The middle one is flat and not curved to match the surface, and you can see the outline.

The bottom is without the outline geometry. I wanted to show the differences between the three methods.

Dismembered

@ EarthQuake - No worries on understanding me I was just concerned about seeing an outline of the outline of polys on the normal map. I did a test bake yesterday and I am happy with the results that I was getting. We will see though. I appreciate you taking the time to show me that tho, floating insets are a relatively new concept to me so I don't understand it all yet.

Anyways here is an update. Ignoring the fact that not everything has symmetry on it and been copied around/put in the correct orientation, I figured I would show my LP.

And I don't understand why, but for the LP that has wires showing I can't seem to get the wires to show up everywhere. I tried two methods, the MR Mat, and the copy mesh with wire mat and push modifier. Both give me similar results. Any help would be great.

Crits always welcome

lefix

i guess if you're baking a normal from the floaters, ou could easily paint out the seams in the normal map afterwards if there are any. but how do you go about baking an ao map with floaters? bake once with and once without floaters soyou can easily paint out the shadows?

Dismembered

Well I have plans, just not sure how well they will work. My test came out pretty decent and had no AO seams. But I have the floaters set up to not cast shadows and I was planning on painting in the AO where needed.

Kitteh

lefix wrote: »

i guess if you're baking a normal from the floaters, ou could easily paint out the seams in the normal map afterwards if there are any. but how do you go about baking an ao map with floaters? bake once with and once without floaters soyou can easily paint out the shadows?

Set the floaters to not cast shadows?

Oniram

lefix wrote: »

i guess if you're baking a normal from the floaters, ou could easily paint out the seams in the normal map afterwards if there are any. but how do you go about baking an ao map with floaters? bake once with and once without floaters soyou can easily paint out the shadows?

i had something about this put in the wiki along with the not casting shadows option

http://wiki.polycount.com/AmbientOcclusionMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29




so i just tested out that cast shadows option.. it didnt really do anything for ambient occlusion.. both mental ray and scanline

bbob

That is because the AO map is not a shadow, it just shows proximity from all renderable objects afaik. You might wanna use a skylight with scanline light tracer instead.

EarthQuake

In xnormal there is simply an option to not cast AO from backfaces or something, saves a lot of trouble.

Dismembered

And here is my bake, I think it came out decent. AO is a bit dark in some spots, I have plans to lighting that up a bit. There are also a few spots I need to touch up. And to save on texture space I mirrored the crate and have planes to add the other details through decals...we will see how that works =p

Any other advice/crits let me know

Joshflighter

For some odd reason, the bottom triangles seem to "pop out" at me, instead of looking like they are going inward. Maybe that's my eyes going wonky. Nice model!

Oniram

yeah i agree. if you baked out of xnormal, did you invert the y axis? there's quite a few areas that look like they are popping out instead of going in.

sltrOlsson

Joshflighter wrote: »

For some odd reason, the bottom triangles seem to "pop out" at me, instead of looking like they are going inward. Maybe that's my eyes going wonky. Nice model!

Nope, you'r right. As stated by EQ, without "borders" on you floaters that's the effect you will get.

Dismembered

That is strange that only the bottom ones look funny, because I did the top ones the same way...hmm strange...I guess I get to fix them now.

Dismembered

Small update. Adjusted the levels of the AO I think it looks much better. Fixed the normals. (I had to learn some how..usually the hard way) I may have a dew small tweaks left but I plan to move to base color and textures next.

As always crits welcome
(Yeah the sizes of the screen grabs are huge...playing with the script on Xoluil's website to see what I can do with it.)

MM

triangulate your lowpoly mesh before you bake and keep that triangulation on the final mesh. if you know maya try baking the normal map there with triangulated mesh. i found this to be the closest/perfect bake possible. it even works flawlessly in max viewport/scanline render.

i am not sure if u are already doing this but this baking with non-triangulated mesh is a common mistake most people make.

Dismembered

You are right, I didn't think about triangulating it before baking. I usually do it after the bake. Is there a problem area that sticks out to that makes you bring this up?

MM

no particular areas but your last render looks a bit confusing over all as if the lighting was upside down or some inverted channel in the normal map or u have that put teh bump channel to 100 in max.

so it almost looks like you have a blend of default vertex normal (the way it looks like without normal map) and highpoly normals.

in general, if the bake is accurate it negates the vertex normal completely or as close as possible within the texture resolution.

may be it is just your lighting. is this a max scanline render ?
if so try render with one directional light instead to make it less confusing.

Dismembered

MM - Haha I feel silly, I did have the normal map inverted. Not sure how I over looked that. And I am not rendering this I am usingXoluil's viewport shader. Thanks for pointing that out, never even noticed.

Dismembered

Here is the color scheme I picked out. Let me know what you think.

I am now trying to figure out how to add the details on the crate, the semi-unique insets that are the the crates. I have the crates overlapping to save texture space. I was going to use decals to do it...my test didn't come out well though..any suggestions would be great.

I am pretty sure I have the normal issues (dealing with the triangles) taken care of now.

Marine

fwiw, for my version of this, i mirrored the sides of the barrels and left the front and backs unique so i had six uv islands for the barrels. would have been simple enough to mirror the front to the back too and add the 5A text as a decal, but i only considered that after i was texturing

EarthQuake

Your bake is all sorts of messed up.

A. You've got smoothing errors in a lot of places
B. You've got nasty seams all over the place, likely due to poorly set up bakes(you need to use an averaged projection, ie: cage in max, not "offset" method).
C. Your lowpoly is just... generally a mess. You've got a very large amount of intersecting meshes, which wastes uv space and just generally looks bad. Optimizing your mesh to be more of a "solid chunk" will result in better uv space and much better bakes, even if it requires more geometry.

EarthQuake

MM wrote: »

if you know maya try baking the normal map there with triangulated mesh. i found this to be the closest/perfect bake possible. it even works flawlessly in max viewport/scanline render.

I'm not sure why you think this, but it isn't really true. The best thing to do with max bakes is to use the proper tangent bias in max. IE: using 3ps shader's quality mode, or the hotfixes in 2011 which fix the tangent bias. With a properly synced up tangent bias you shouldn't need to triangulate or anything either in max(this has been tested and works fine with 3ps shader for instance).

Baking in maya is great, if you're also displaying in maya, as maya has very accurate display of normals because the tangent bias is properly synced between the baker and viewport display. Maya bakes even work well with quads or ngons, provided you lock your mesh normals before triangulating/exporting to a game engine.

Baking in maya to get good results in max is about the last thing I would suggest, its just all sorts of backwards, as maya and max use a different tangent bias.

Dismembered

EarthQuake - While I appreciate your criticism it would be more beneficial to me if you could show me the areas that you are referring. "You've got a very large amount of intersecting meshes..." I was unaware that having intersecting meshes is bad.

EarthQuake

I'll try to get a paintover done a little later, for now just think of it like this:

Every time you have an intersection, you're forcing there to be an ugly, hard-edged pixelated seam. Every time you merge two meshes together into one chunk, you have the opportunity to have a nice, clean and seamless result.

This goes a very long way towards having an end result that actually looks like a highpoly mesh, instead of a oldschool lowpoly mesh that someone just happened to apply a normal map to.

Also, if 35% of your mesh ends up unseen because it is jammed into another chunk, that is a whole lot of texture space you're wasting, that could be used to give the entire asset that much more detail with the same resolution.

Intersections are not inherently evil or bad, and in some cases can save a good deal of tris, but you need to understand how they affect the model.

EarthQuake

Also for now, read: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1283047&postcount=7

Clearly not everything is applicable here, just the lowpoly stuff.

Ironically posted in response to the older SD test asset.

EarthQuake

Ok, paintovers:

#1

First, the red/green/blue ares represent chunks where I would model all of the detail "solid" without intersection. The purple areas are generally fine to intersect, but you may even want to consider modeling some of these solid, again as it will look better(seamless) in the end result

The red lines show intersecting areas that are quite poor as far as intersections, some meshes you've got another bit clipped in just to represent a very small height change, this is very messy.

#2

Here on the final bake we see a few basic issues.
A. Because of the intersecting areas shown in the first paintover, you have a load of nasty seams. I didn't bother highlighting every seam here, as i'm sure you get the picture.

B. You also have a *different* type of seam artifact here, not entirely related to intersecting meshes. Even on areas which are "solid", you have a lot of seams, this comes down to:
1. Having hard edges on your mesh without also having uv splits, for every hard edge/smoothing group you use, your uvs also must be split into seperate uv chunks, otherwise you will get seam artifacts
2. Having hard edges on your mesh and also in your projection mesh(IE: not using an averaged cage, I can expand on this if you dont know what it means)
3. Likely a combination of both 1&2.

C. You've got some pretty noticeable smoothing errors, which can come down to a few different causes
1. Baking in one app and displaying in another
2. Baking in an app that has a broken pipeline like max, where the baker and viewport are not synced
3. Not using enough/proper placement of hard edges to account for issues 1 and/or 2.

Dismembered

Thanks for the in-depth response Earthquake. The main reason that I have some of that as separate meshes is to save on texture space. I have lots of stuff mirrored to save on texture space. Some sides can't be mirrored because they have unique details so I thought I should have them floating instead of connecting.

But I am having some issues that I can't seem to fix. The smoothing/triangulation issues I am having on the base. I don't know what to do to try to fix it, any help would be greatly appreciated.

-I have tried playing with the triangulation, but I only seem to get different shading issues
-I have tried adding more geo but that doesn't seem to get rid of any of my problems
-I have even tried making it over again, but I still seem get the same issues in the same spot.

And in addition to this when I mirror this piece as well as other pieces I seem to get a black "seam" where my symmetry line is. Thanks in advance!

Dismembered

It's been a while, but here you go.

Oniram

looks cool. can we get a slightly bigger shot?

Dismembered

Updated the last upload with a larger SS.