My First Piece on Polycount
This is my first time posting on polycount and would love to get feed back on my trash can. I have been learning to model and texture for a little while but still very much a noob. I plan on doing something bigger then this trash can, but I need to get past the noob mistakes first.
Any crits would be great, don't worry you won't hurt my feelings:)
Any crits would be great, don't worry you won't hurt my feelings:)
Replies
Low poly model:
You have used far too many polygons for something like a bin. the model itself is nice and clean but too dense. Avoid modeling bevels and small bumps into low poly models. that's what the normal map is for. also you could do with using fewer segments on the cylinder.
Unwrap:
You should straighten the cylinder, this will take less space. Texture space is expensive, you dont want to be wasting any of it if you can.
Bake:
Nothing wrong here, the bakes clean.
I would however suggest that you bake out a ambient occlusion pass and use it to help with your texturing.
Texture:
this is your weakest part. You need to observe your subject and try to replicate how it looks in real life.
To point out some obvious problems. your texture is scaled incorrectly. the size of the metalic details look way too large. you cant just slap a metal texture onto something you need to consider it in terms of the scale of the object. (look at the size of the scratches!!)
When doing a texture you need to study how the environment effects your model. is it dirty, is it bleached by the sun, is it rusty. once you know the effects get reference. Work out where dirt would naturally collect, where rust will form. observe how these things effect both the colour and reflectivity of the surface. Dry dirt can be light and not very reflective, where as wet dirt is dark and glossy.
Which brings me onto spec maps, you havent made one and you should, if your doing a reflective object you need to control the reflections.
hope that helps.
Obviously it's going to be hard to fit a circle and a rectangle into a square tex and use the space good. So for that object it might be best just to use 2 textures. One for lid and one for the can. You could save 1/4 of the tex space even though you'd add a draw call.
But in a game it's possible you'd want a moveable can and/or lid.
You could even only have the texture go half way around the can then mirror or tile. As it's hard to see more than half way around the can you'd probably never notice.
Also makes me wonder if it has a bottom, or insides.
The finished low poly could be 14 sides max and look pretty good, maybe even only 12 sides.
And there are no handles. With such a simple object handles would really add a lot of needed shape. (and could fill in blank tex space)
I would suggest painting the base by hand.
Check out this vid:
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/photoshop/how-to-hand-paint-convincing-metal-textures/
How he lays the base down there. Really useful.
I wouldn't have said that hand painting was good idea when your just getting started. Using observation and choosing good base textures can get you very far without getting bogged down in hand painting.
Not that im downing on hand-painting, just trying to keep it simple.
@baddcog I thought about adding a symmetry to the can, but this seems like such a small prop. Maybe my next run around with it, I will try and mirror the uv's.
@Licky Webster thanks for the link, although I agree with fletch that hand painting might be too much for me, I still think I can benefit from watching the vid, at very least to get a work flow down and learn tips and tricks along the way.
Thanks again everyone for the input. I am sadly working a lot and only have a limited time to work on stuff. The new render is a revision with a different texture, although its nothing great. But the real difference is the geo, the first one was around 1,200 tris, and the new one is about 550. As pointed out before, my weakness is my texturing. When I first started modeling I thought that texturing was the easy part, I find out now it might be for me the hardest part of next gen game art.
You dont seem to have any spec on the metal, which makes it look like rock no matter what. Get some spec on there, Brighter spec for the scratches and less for the grimy parts.
Check out some metal in real life and observe that way the light reflects off it, adding a slight colour to your spec map can also bring out the metal sheen. Also a subtle cube/reflect/enviro map can make metal really pop.
This link may help you in that endeavour! http://www.manufato.com/?p=902
@mgoblue412 What I am going to do to fix that is layover my normals on to my diffuse as a guide to where the indents are. Does anybody know if this is somewhat standard in a texture workflow?
cheers