Model Help

TicoTaco

Hey everyone, I am working on a model, and have hit a wall. I was wondering how you guys would go about modeling the teeth of a saw blade, or the whole saw blade in general. I am looking for a low poly approach to this, and have completely hit a wall with this saw blade.

Here's the blade I am trying to create.

Fingus

Depends on how lowpoly you wanna go. The lowest you can go technically is just a plane with an alpha on it, but that wouldn't be much of modeling would it now?

The way I would go about it would be to make one tooth and then duplicate it radially and then merge all the copies. If you use Maya then using Duplicate Special with the Instance option turned on will allow you to make all the copies and have them update across all the copies as you work on one of them. Very useful for lining up the verts and seeing how the end result will be.

Bart

If you want to model the whole thing make just a section of it like 1/10 and then set the pivot in the middle of the circle and copy over 10 times while rotating.

TicoTaco

I was going to model the teeth separate, but then there is that band that connects the teeth together, then there is the main (lighter metal) cylinder. I was thinking I would have to model the whole teeth/band together.

So, model one of the band's teeth, duplicate it 180 degrees, model the band, then connect it all to the main cylinder?

Bart

Ye you could do it this way but as I said it would be easier if you medel one section (Teeth+Blade) and copy it by rotating and then weld all pieces

gilesruscoe

Should have asked this in "how you model dem shapes" thread, but meh, heres how i'd do it...



Make a cylinder with double amount of faces to the amount of blades you require.

Select every other face around the edge

Extrude outward

Rotate extruded faces into direction of the teeth

Select inside verts, push them out and rotate a little to make the inner side of the teeth

Add bevels/mesh smooth

New edge loop in middle of mesh, bridge it through to make the hole, bevel that too... (should have done before the previous step but i forgot )

If you want that little edge just before the base of the teeth, just add an extra edge loop around the cylinder.

Edit: Just realised you wanted a low poly approach... i guess the only way would be to A, same technique as this, but with a flat circle not a cylinder, or B, Alpha plane. With so many teeth it clocks up polys quickly

TicoTaco

gilesruscoe wrote: »

Should have asked this in "how you model dem shapes" thread, but meh, heres how i'd do it...



Make a cylinder with double amount of faces to the amount of blades you require.

Select every other face around the edge

Extrude outward

Rotate extruded faces into direction of the teeth

Select inside verts, push them out and rotate a little to make the inner side of the teeth

Add bevels/mesh smooth

New edge loop in middle of mesh, bridge it through to make the hole, bevel that too... (should have done before the previous step but i forgot )

Well, goddamn, thankyou ! Thanks for the reply also Bart, I am going to try both ways, and see what I come up with.

TicoTaco

Also, if anyone was wondering what I need a saw blade for, I am trying to recreate this weapon from Dead Island.

Baddcog

giles' got a pretty good method there. Going to be hard to do it much lower poly.

One way to decrease a lot of polys is to bake the texture down from that model. Then add a 2 tri face to each side (that's the same exact size of the blade) and apply the baked tex with alpha to the planes. Then delete all the faces on the flat surfaces. (ie only leave the teeth sides)

This can cut a lot of polys, but also requires you to be very exact so the alpha teeth line up with the modelled teeth sides.
It also doesn't allow the teeth to tapar for sharp tips if needed. (probably not)

TicoTaco

Hey, Bart, I am getting this when I try and rotate the inner vertices , any suggestions on how to fix this?

Bart

The polygons are streching becouse they aren't capped/connected into triangles or quads.

You should do it this way. Don't forget to have Angle Snap Toggle ON

TicoTaco

Bart wrote: »

The polygons are streching becouse they aren't capped/connected into triangles or quads.

You should do it this way. Don't forget to have Angle Snap Toggle ON

I like you Bart. This seems like the simplest, low poly way, thankyou! very much.

Bart

No probs Glad I could help

greevar

You can cut the poly count down a bit by deleting the faces in the center of the blade and replacing them with quads.

Baddcog

Well, by getting ride of that middle vert you only save 1 tri right?

TicoTaco

Would you guys say this is a good basic block out?
I don't know much about tri count, and what is really considered low poly for a game engine, I think it's about 5k isn't it?

Anyways, I think I will turn this into a progress thread... with a crappy thread title, ohwell.
C&C I really wanna finish this model, and I would love peoples critique throughout the process, instead of finishing it, then having to go back and alter it with loads of critic.



Reference image again.

Fingus

We would need to see your wireframe in order to comment on your topology, but it looks good so far. Proportions seem correct and you don't have any visible shading errors. The likeness isn't 100% though, but I'm not sure how accurate you're aiming to be.

TicoTaco

Oh right, wireframe! Sorry about that. Here are two one of the whole scene, and a close up of the blade.

I was hoping to not be 100% spot on to what they did. I was going to go for pretty much the same concept (motorized saw blade on a bat). I think I am going to do a different type of grip on the bat ( maybe a wrapped cloth ), and a different metal texture, maybe with a logo, however I think everything else I will be aiming to recreate based on the image, minus spot on proportions.

Thanks for the comment! Hoping for some more critic

Edit: Are the wires alright? Topology wise, I always think I have the worst topology, and complete scarp models in frustration.

Fingus

You don't need the edges marked with red. I assume you forgot to delete them before you duplicated the teeth.

You can collapse the edge rings marked in blue if you want to save polycount.

TicoTaco

Thankyou for the reply, I retopo'd this thing, and adjusted the edge on the saw tooth for a nice edge flow.



Bat may be a little too low poly. but I made a backup of the higher-poly bat. Think this should be good to move on to the other peices/detailing this up a bit more?

Edit: Forgot to put smooth back on for this screengrab, don't mind that.

Baddcog

Well, tricount (polycount) for engines varies widely and is changing all the time.

It used to be that a low poly character was 500-1200 tris, so a weapon would be maybe 200-250 (quite a bit less than a character). But now mobile devices are close to that.

And a low poly character is probably around 2500 with a normal map. A high would be 5000 with normal.

Of course these numbers are subjective to engine/project/etc...

I think TF2 characters are no more than 5000, and weaps no more than 2500. But it's approaching 4 years old... They also didn't use normal maps much.

I still think 2500 is pretty good for a weapon, you can get quite a bit of detail with that. And typically weapons aren't even seen fully, or they move a lot...

TicoTaco

I wasn't planning on using this in a mod or anything, I'm just trying to get into the right polygon range for current games, so I don't over do it.

I was probably at most going to put it into UDK to see how it looked. I was hoping to end around around >5k tri-count, with 1024x1024 texture sheest for Diffuse, Spec, Normal maps