these are some of the guns I made (high, low, bakes and resistance variant high)
also did lots of environment mats, a few gun mats, some attachments, items, etc...
some were already posted though since ben did some of the mats there.
Yeah, i'm with JFleatcher. I really love how the materials play in the light. Would it be possible with just one tiny little flat on like the revolver? :P
pfffft. Shit sux. Joe needs to learn to model better.
Seriously though, mind blowing work guys. A couple folks on the art team here were buying Brink just to pour over the amazing art. I think I'm gonna save my pennies and do the same sooonish.
I love the revolver and the can silencer best Really nice work. How many tri's for a few of these weapons? I tend to spend whatever I need these days, after hearing some weapons in Killzone 2 were as high as 13,000 triangles.
Really nice stuff there, I like the texturing style a lot. Its fresh and sharp. Pushing out of the regular dirty green/bluish pale colors. the palette is great with those strong colors. Thanks for sharing.
Per, the whole waviness thing depends on the situation/model then? Obviously for the angles these guns will be seen from this is better, but I'm trying to think if there are some cases where it's better to straighten them? Or I'm thinking that would just happen when you use more sides on those cylinders..
Right, in every area that you see any significant waviness in these models it should:
A. Be a relatively unimportant area/Never ever be seen in FPV.
B. Actually look good from many angles in third person, but this is moot anyway because the game uses separate LOD models.
Simply put, you would absolutely never notice this waviness while playing the game, only when looking at the model in the asset viewer.
Any waviness that would have actually shown up in FPV was dealt with by simply using enough geometry to match up the the high, this also plays along with generally using enough geometry to have a quality model that doesn't look overly lowpoly in game.
As all FPV models should be, these assets where concepted, modeled and baked with the main goal of looking awesome in FPV, when optimizations needed to be made it was always on areas that you will rarely/never see from FPV.
On some of those viewmodel pics on page 4 do you guys think it better to simply paint out the bending/wavyness of the normals to the stock ends of the guns or to erase them completely with the 128 128, 255 color?
Neither, this should never be necessary, if you've used your geometry well on your lowpoly, and the important areas look good, you would only ever do this if you have some sort of severe OCD.
Per, the whole waviness thing depends on the situation/model then? Obviously for the angles these guns will be seen from this is better, but I'm trying to think if there are some cases where it's better to straighten them? Or I'm thinking that would just happen when you use more sides on those cylinders..
The best thing is always going to be use more sides, as not only will it bake better the model will look better. Its always a balancing game of where do you put the detail, and knowing how to account for any bake related artifacts with your lowpoly model(not wierd tweaks or post editing) is essential.
Whether its uv seams, projection seams, smoothing errors, waviness, resolution issues, all of these things are best dealt with using good old fashion planing, logic, lowpoly modeling and uv editing, nothing else. =P
The only situation where you'd to go do extremes and do manual photoshop tweaks is if you have a extremely low triangle budget or something, but if you do:
A. The asset is probably small, unimportant, or both and it will never be noticed.
B. Minor waviness is likely the least of your concerns, as it is very difficult to get a clean bake with a very low tri count.
pepp0r: We have first-person view models (which are about 10k tris) and then 3rd-person world models with different UVs (re-baked the textures across to those from the first-person models) which are under 1k tris. No LOD'ing other than that.
It's great to be able to link faces to guns in Brink. I absolutely love that game, and both 3PS and Splash Damage did an excellent job! As for the models themselves, dem bakes are mind blowing!
I guess wavyness is a beast one can't defeat 100% of the time.
??
If you read the big thread I wrote up on the waviness issue, you'll learn:
A. Why it happens
B. How you can prevent it
C. When you would/would not want to worry about it.
I mean, if you just need to be obsessive compulsive and remove every single wavy line from your asset, even the ones no one will ever notice ingame...
In that specific asset, you could just use 16 sided cylinders instead of 12 if that area was going to actually be in view. There isnt some big communist plot to sneak waviness into your assets.
If anyone ever intentionally has a wavy texture from now on, it will be automatically assumed that they have a crappy normal map.
There goes my idea for a acid fuelled, hippy esc, disco-rama game.
Thanks a bunch guys
lol, damn loose tongues. No, but seriously we've talked about it but really, let's at least wait until the industry will stop using completely broken tangents everywhere.
One of our projects now uses a major game engine that renders broken tangents and the polycounts are an estimated 2 to 3 times higher than if we could use "Quality Mode" normals. That's ridiculous. We're still working to educate more companies on this, with no motivation other than it lets us produce better looking art for them using less polygons.
Not to mention the inflated vert count from all those extra smoothing and UV splits and then the slight loss in texel density from all the padding. When you factor in the extra production time it takes to UV and paint for mismatched bakes its kind of a no-brainer to fix these pipelines.
lol, damn loose tongues. No, but seriously we've talked about it but really, let's at least wait until the industry will stop using completely broken tangents everywhere.
I dont think i understand what a real time bake previewer is. How would it differ from something like marmoset that auto reloads textures?
One of our projects now uses a major game engine that renders broken tangents and the polycounts are an estimated 2 to 3 times higher than if we could use "Quality Mode" normals. That's ridiculous. We're still working to educate more companies on this, with no motivation other than it lets us produce better looking art for them using less polygons.
That sucks, but im not surprised really
I mean, why would anyone want a better looking and more efficient game with a super smooth pipeline?
Having the ability to render up to 3x the current vert. count of a project, for the same cost, doesn't sound appealing at all.
Do you think I'm...making an effort to call you out or something? That'd be hilarious, since EQ's threads are largely why I can even bake passable normal maps.
Sorry if that came off a bit hostile. I'm a little too used to writing up huge explanations, like the waviness thing, only to have a bunch of people come in and say "oh but shouldn't you just paint it out instead?", it gets a little tiresome man.
Been raping this thread with my eyes for the last couple days!
Love the models and the game as well keep up the great work 3PS guys! one day would like to be at your level of awesomeness :P
Me too! Been breaking and entering this thread under cover of darkness and savagely penetrating these digital images of firearms against their will while their parents watch. They're gonna lock me in polyprison forever. The CARB-9 is underage! All these guns sure have been baked, alright--with my semen! There's Splash Damage for sure... from emptying my aching rapist balls of all their cum!
Earthquake, Per, you guys taking on any intern openings--for blowjobs??? So much WIN!!!! I'm on the Brink of another orgasm here folks!
Me too! Been breaking and entering this thread under cover of darkness and savagely penetrating these digital images of firearms against their will while their parents watch. They're gonna lock me in polyprison forever. The CARB-9 is underage! All these guns sure have been baked, alright--with my semen! There's Splash Damage for sure... from emptying my aching rapist balls of all their cum!
Earthquake, Per, you guys taking on any intern openings--for blowjobs??? So much WIN!!!! I'm on the Brink of another orgasm here folks!
lbigbirdl: Think you could stand to be a bit more elaborate/constructive while talking to the devs of said game? I know neither 3ps or MoP/Vahl/Spacemonkey/etc. programmed Brink, but nevertheless that's just downright scummy of you.
Many apologies. It was the nice work which drew me to THIS post in the first place. I'm sure it has been discussed before but forums are quite deep and I was concerned with these specific models. I've been rendering AO out of 3DMax for years and it never handles crevices like that out of the box. For example, I have a quick crop attached of a high res model rendered out of max with AO. I appreciate you mentioning that it's a several step process but you could have avoided the condescension. Either way, the guns are well done.
"best to deal with it somewhere else or use the search function. We've said plenty on it in the past."
"Polycount. 'Nuff said."
Maybe you don't realize you're coming off as arrogant. Or maybe you do. All I wanted to ask was how the AO got baked like it did as I have an example that clearly looks different. If you search for AO, btw, you get 500 results. And I don't catch every conversation people have on here. I can move it to another thread but it was directly related to what I saw these models doing well.
it's a pimp thread, not a tutorial/how to, so you can't expect the poster to be willing to do large write ups about modelling techniques and change the subject of the thread. There is lots of information on everyday things like texture baking as well as numerous threads made by others in the tech forums.
it's a pimp thread, not a tutorial/how to, so you can't expect the poster to be willing to do large write ups about modelling techniques and change the subject of the thread.
Seriously, I'm going to drop it after this b/c a simple question turned into shit but #1, if it is just a pimp thread then I guess the entire page before about normal waviness, which exists in other threads on Polycount is also a no-no and #2, that would mean that we could never ask a person about their process if we liked their results. I always thought Polycount was about learning from each other and talking about processes, not telling people to go elsewhere. There's no reason to get involved gilesruscoe let alone make statements which don't even make sense.
I did tell him I liked his work and I NEVER had or implied any expectations on a large write up. In the future I'd prefer no response at all if they don't want to help.
Perna, I really am not trying to be difficult. I meant to be collaborative.
Perty pimp stuff, dunno if you guys can answer this, but you mentioned all the guns were done on 2048x1024 maps. Did the accessories share these maps? Have their own smaller maps? Or were they grouped together by weapon type or something to that effect?
Also, did you guys handpaint everything or were any photo overlays/masks involved? Just curious about your texturing process in general for the art style.
If perna didn't want to help I suspect he would have just not said anything -.- but all the information you were asking for was already detailed in the wiki, by EQ who is of course part of 3pt. He and Perna are also extrememly active members as far as giving advice. They've both taken turns playing hopscotch for advice in tons of threads. I find it unlikely that either of them would give advice contrary to what they currently follow themselves which is all readily available all over polycount.
But I'm not fighting anyones battles for them, just my 2c. :P I'll stfu now.
Replies
these are some of the guns I made (high, low, bakes and resistance variant high)
also did lots of environment mats, a few gun mats, some attachments, items, etc...
some were already posted though since ben did some of the mats there.
Resistance Versions :
love the staples
Seriously though, mind blowing work guys. A couple folks on the art team here were buying Brink just to pour over the amazing art. I think I'm gonna save my pennies and do the same sooonish.
Fantastic job!
A. Be a relatively unimportant area/Never ever be seen in FPV.
B. Actually look good from many angles in third person, but this is moot anyway because the game uses separate LOD models.
Simply put, you would absolutely never notice this waviness while playing the game, only when looking at the model in the asset viewer.
Any waviness that would have actually shown up in FPV was dealt with by simply using enough geometry to match up the the high, this also plays along with generally using enough geometry to have a quality model that doesn't look overly lowpoly in game.
As all FPV models should be, these assets where concepted, modeled and baked with the main goal of looking awesome in FPV, when optimizations needed to be made it was always on areas that you will rarely/never see from FPV.
Neither, this should never be necessary, if you've used your geometry well on your lowpoly, and the important areas look good, you would only ever do this if you have some sort of severe OCD.
Huge thread on waviness/projection etc: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154&page=4
The best thing is always going to be use more sides, as not only will it bake better the model will look better. Its always a balancing game of where do you put the detail, and knowing how to account for any bake related artifacts with your lowpoly model(not wierd tweaks or post editing) is essential.
Whether its uv seams, projection seams, smoothing errors, waviness, resolution issues, all of these things are best dealt with using good old fashion planing, logic, lowpoly modeling and uv editing, nothing else. =P
The only situation where you'd to go do extremes and do manual photoshop tweaks is if you have a extremely low triangle budget or something, but if you do:
A. The asset is probably small, unimportant, or both and it will never be noticed.
B. Minor waviness is likely the least of your concerns, as it is very difficult to get a clean bake with a very low tri count.
Can u guys post some wire shots maybe?
??
If you read the big thread I wrote up on the waviness issue, you'll learn:
A. Why it happens
B. How you can prevent it
C. When you would/would not want to worry about it.
I mean, if you just need to be obsessive compulsive and remove every single wavy line from your asset, even the ones no one will ever notice ingame...
In that specific asset, you could just use 16 sided cylinders instead of 12 if that area was going to actually be in view. There isnt some big communist plot to sneak waviness into your assets.
There goes my idea for a acid fuelled, hippy esc, disco-rama game.
Thanks a bunch guys
Not to mention the inflated vert count from all those extra smoothing and UV splits and then the slight loss in texel density from all the padding. When you factor in the extra production time it takes to UV and paint for mismatched bakes its kind of a no-brainer to fix these pipelines.
That sucks, but im not surprised really
I mean, why would anyone want a better looking and more efficient game with a super smooth pipeline?
Having the ability to render up to 3x the current vert. count of a project, for the same cost, doesn't sound appealing at all.
Thanks for the explanation
Sorry if that came off a bit hostile. I'm a little too used to writing up huge explanations, like the waviness thing, only to have a bunch of people come in and say "oh but shouldn't you just paint it out instead?", it gets a little tiresome man.
/Cranky old man
been baking my hard surface normal maps on Maya for several years now so this high quality doesnt surprise me. good work!
Love the models and the game as well keep up the great work 3PS guys! one day would like to be at your level of awesomeness :P
Me too! Been breaking and entering this thread under cover of darkness and savagely penetrating these digital images of firearms against their will while their parents watch. They're gonna lock me in polyprison forever. The CARB-9 is underage! All these guns sure have been baked, alright--with my semen! There's Splash Damage for sure... from emptying my aching rapist balls of all their cum!
Earthquake, Per, you guys taking on any intern openings--for blowjobs??? So much WIN!!!! I'm on the Brink of another orgasm here folks!
I just came a littlebit :poly136:
"Polycount. 'Nuff said."
Maybe you don't realize you're coming off as arrogant. Or maybe you do. All I wanted to ask was how the AO got baked like it did as I have an example that clearly looks different. If you search for AO, btw, you get 500 results. And I don't catch every conversation people have on here. I can move it to another thread but it was directly related to what I saw these models doing well.
Nice work, great thread, keep it up.
Seriously, I'm going to drop it after this b/c a simple question turned into shit but #1, if it is just a pimp thread then I guess the entire page before about normal waviness, which exists in other threads on Polycount is also a no-no and #2, that would mean that we could never ask a person about their process if we liked their results. I always thought Polycount was about learning from each other and talking about processes, not telling people to go elsewhere. There's no reason to get involved gilesruscoe let alone make statements which don't even make sense.
I did tell him I liked his work and I NEVER had or implied any expectations on a large write up. In the future I'd prefer no response at all if they don't want to help.
Perna, I really am not trying to be difficult. I meant to be collaborative.
Also, did you guys handpaint everything or were any photo overlays/masks involved? Just curious about your texturing process in general for the art style.
If perna didn't want to help I suspect he would have just not said anything -.- but all the information you were asking for was already detailed in the wiki, by EQ who is of course part of 3pt. He and Perna are also extrememly active members as far as giving advice. They've both taken turns playing hopscotch for advice in tons of threads. I find it unlikely that either of them would give advice contrary to what they currently follow themselves which is all readily available all over polycount.
But I'm not fighting anyones battles for them, just my 2c. :P I'll stfu now.