Fire Hydrant
Hey guys over this past week I have decided to take a break from my dinosaur and try and make a full next gen game asset so that I could be ready when the time comes to make my dinosaur sculpt into a game asset.
This fire hydrant took me about a week to make from start to finish, but I still have to do some diffuse work.
The base mesh took me about 2 hours to make and then I took it into Zbrush for an hour to go the extra mile with the detail.
The software I used for this project was Blender for modeling, retopology, and uv mapping; Zbrush for the extra detailing; XNormal for baking out the normal and AO maps; and Marmoset for putting the render together.
The final polycount was somewhere around 2,800 polygons.
Here is the sculpt in Zbrush.
Here is the game asset rendered in Marmoset.
This fire hydrant took me about a week to make from start to finish, but I still have to do some diffuse work.
The base mesh took me about 2 hours to make and then I took it into Zbrush for an hour to go the extra mile with the detail.
The software I used for this project was Blender for modeling, retopology, and uv mapping; Zbrush for the extra detailing; XNormal for baking out the normal and AO maps; and Marmoset for putting the render together.
The final polycount was somewhere around 2,800 polygons.
Here is the sculpt in Zbrush.
Here is the game asset rendered in Marmoset.
Replies
lol yeah I just started on the diffuse and I still need to do some work on it.
The sculpt itself looks a bit sloppy to be honest. Some areas lack sharpness (like the oval-esque shapes that are dug in around it could use some tightening up, still seem a bit rough). Also, some of the damage doesn't seem too appropriate. For instance, all those -same brush-size cuts that are going int he same direction. Why?
Anyway, I'm sure we could help more if we saw the textures.
@Shiniku I am aware that the sculpt was a bit sloppy. I really just wanted to get done with sculpting and just focus on getting done to baking and uv mapping since I haven't worked in those areas much.
Here is the normal map.
Edit: I just inverted my green channel and that doesn't seem to be the problem.
I found out what the problem was. Marmoset was inverting my normals so I flipped my green channel in gimp and it appeared to do the trick.
Apply some noise on it and you are set. If you are following the reference you will see that the paint on the fire hydrant have a bit of a noise, your material the first one was fine, but it needs to be a bit diminished so it wouldnt look like red crystal jar filled with ketchup.
Assuming you are using Zbrush, so here it is. Apply noise to the existing material, you need not to put the skintone material but a matcap gray material would do just fine. That and/or matcap metal or matcap satin01 would also work. But the noise is essential. Do not apply cuts to the mesh until you have initially made the basic fire hydrant.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7401935/250px-Downtown_Charlottesville_fire_hydrant.jpg
LOL, I totally see it.
really nice
I like all your dents though, it adds a lot of character to it
I think Zbrush is NOT the best option for making this kind of object.I'd model the whole object in 3Dsmax or revelant then import to the Zbrush for just small dents and scratches(optional).Your zbrush work is overdone,shapes are deformed too much.In some areas It gives the clay feeling instead of metal.My opinion you should scrap this because your low poly ended up really messy.Maybe you can try to model low-poly from scratch in a modeling app by importing the hi-poly mesh.
That's pretty much what I did.
The only thing you could possibly want to sculpt is flaking paint, but you are probably better off doing that with just doing that with crazy bump or something.
what the fuck. it's melting.
firstly, your sculpt is very organic and feels like you went overboard with high frequency details and just scraped away at every possible edge. check references for how these objects take damage. overall the scuplt isn't that bad but it definately suffers from "just one more scratch!" syndrome.
the uv layout is messy, massive waste and non-straight angles everywhere means doing any kind of clean texturing is going to be difficult, you'll have jaggy pixels all over the place. as an example, imagine adding some text to the main body and think about how tough it'd be to get it looking straight.
the low poly, 2800 triangles for an object that's going to be TINY ingame is obscene.
your low poly also is very blobby and doesn't feel at all like a hard surface real-world object.
also look at where you are spending triangles. i see edge loops in places that are completely unneccesary, yet for the largest cylinder you have cheapened out and not given enough edges to keep the LP looking like the HP.
give it another shot, it's a good start and you have the potential to make a nice piece. it's just overall it looks like you rushed it and didn't think about a few things.
Yes I honestly did rush it just so I could get to baking and uv mapping. I apologize for that and I'm more of an organic artist so that may have came through in my sculpt somewhat.
I find with hard surface models it's easier to create your low poly from scratch. You just can't get the same symmetry from doing a by-hand retopo. You're in luck since this object is basically a lot of beveled cylinders.
It doesn't all need to be one mesh either! You could have the cylindrical parts that stick out as separate meshes. The advantage of that is that you could actually bake them separately which make relieve some headaches when you bake.
Also, remember to chamfer your 90 degree edges otherwise you will have no end of normal issues.
Finally, be careful of your triangle density. You have lots of edge loops here and they're not all that necessary.
And yeah, edges on a fire hydrant should be very minimally dented/damaged/worn. The reason why you don't need to go overboard with the sculpting and the high frequency details is that your diffuse should take care of those normals. At the most you should only need to sculpt dents/scratches in ZBrush.