Nausicaa Rifle

Mambo4

Hello, polycount !

First an intro: I have been making casual 2D games for way too long, and have comitted to developing a portfolio that will get me hired at a "real" game studio. Last time I worked on a 3D realtime game was in the PS2 days, so much of the texturing and shading techniques are new to me. Having decided that full on current gen character art is a huge chunk to bite off, I have decided to start with props, while I learn the ins and outs of 3d realtime models.

since my hero is Hayao Miyazaki, I am using Nausicaa as my inspiration, starting with the main character's rifle:





here is the result of the first 4 hours ( hi poly)




I'll keep posting updates as I go. Any critiques and feed back welcome, I need to improve!

DEElekgolo

Lookin pretty good so far.

Mambo4

day 2 : 2 hours of shader fussing, 4 hours of modeling.



the breach is complete but there are some surfce/lighting artifacts
from where I cut the profile of the breach hole out...
lots of extra verts there, bad quad flow leading to visible faceting on the polys, and serious uglieness when smoothed.



...any pointers on how to tame those? Must I manually surround these with edge loops? Seems tedious, maybe a better solution exists..


also, I noticed that Maya's Transfer Maps can transfer the diffuse maps when baking to low-poly geometry -is this common to do for game prop textures?

ErichWK

I'm confused, is this your hipoly or your lowpoly?

KyleJensen

If you're still at the modeling stage, I wouldn't even bother messing with shaders. Save that for when you have your textures going.

Mambo4

this is intended to be the hi-poly source for baking normals etc into a low poly model.

ErichWK

Hmm...then why are you texturing it?

Mambo4

why texture: for preview purposes, and I was going to experiment with Maya's Transfer Maps utility to create the diffuse map as well as normals. But it sounds like this is premature...

MikeF

as an experimental technique i'm all for it.
Might not be practical for most, but i've done something similar in maya for quickly getting some base color schemes down. Prolly wont do it again, but it was good to try at least

Pope Adam

boring

Lucas Annunziata

I certainly hope that you will be including the over the shoulder strap in this, as it will make it a bit more interesting.

Mambo4

@darbeenbo : thanks for the suggestion.
Any other helpful suggestions to avoid being boring?

throttlekitty

Mambo4 wrote: »

...any pointers on how to tame those? Must I manually surround these with edge loops? Seems tedious, maybe a better solution exists..


also, I noticed that Maya's Transfer Maps can transfer the diffuse maps when baking to low-poly geometry -is this common to do for game prop textures?

Are you using Smooth Mesh Preview to make your high poly? Tons of edges set up like that aren't easy to tame if you are or aren't. With smoothing and proper edge flow, the shape would be much easier to manage.

As for transferring textures from high to low in Maya, I've only ever done that to transfer simple patterns if I want to mimic warped shapes not present in my low poly. But no, probably not common.

Mambo4

-went back to default shader for now
-cleaned up the edges on the breech



It looks better, but I see a few small flaws.
Do you think the breach mesh is good enough to move on from?

I'm going to start the grip next
(unless everyone sees obvious crucial flaws in the above)

ErichWK

I can't really tell what it looks like with the wireframe on..but so far looks kinda sloppy.

Mambo4

here's the afternoon update ...12hours total



So It looks kinda slopppy. any particular areas that I should target for cleanup?

jimmypopali

It's a great update, I'd take reference (if you have the movie) from where she ignites the gun powder on the eye at the start.
I think they were saying it's boring because it's a simple gun. I think you just need to add your own details in.

Mambo4

update...20 hours

more geometry detail on the gun, about ready to move into mudbox for weathering details.







would it be useful to model the wood grain for normal mapping, or is there a more efficient approach?

chrisradsby

Model the wood grain? What the heck? usually the wood on weapons are usually polished and varnish. Why would you need to model the wood grain? O_o

or am I totally wrong here?

Racer445

the wood parts on rifles are varnished and treated sort of like a fancy piece of furniture in your house. the rings don't effect the specular and they don't bump out.

Mambo4

thanks for your responses on the wood grain...I guess I was thinking of wooden planks and houses I've seen with some 'woody' details in the normals..

KyleJensen

When you're adding decorative elements to the surface of the model, make sure you bevel the pieces in some fashion or else they're not going to be very pronounced when you bake it.

Mambo4

@shadowforce: that's a great tip! thank you much.

Had trouble exporting mudbox error-free, due to NURBS, N+gons and reversed normals.
I spent a couple of hours correcting these in Maya. I'll be keeping those in mind next model. Now it imports cleanly.

My question now is, is this sort of thing best sculpted in mudbox by going piece by piece, or would open the whole model in mudbox and go to town ?

Mambo4

18 hours of rifle modeling
plus another 6-8 getting it to import correctly into mudbox.





any tips on good details to add? I am stuck thinking of random scratches and dents...and wondering what will/wont show up well in the normal map
----

I feel like I spent too much time iterating from Maya to Mudbox to diagnose problems with my mesh.
I modeled using booleans,extrusions and other operations that tend to lead to bad polys.
The problem that cropped up the most was 2 faces sharing more than 1 edge (which I assumed was cause by an n-Gon)
All the triangulation and Mesh > Cleanups did not seem to eliminate these.
Some times I had to give up and recreate the piece from scratch, being more careful with the underlying geometry.

In any case it was a bit tedious and left me wondering :
what workflow, tools or scripts do you use to ease the Maya to Mudbox transition?
Or does everybody just 'know' what not to do eventually?

also, I notice that my maya models are coming in really small compared to the default examples in Mudbox.
Is this bad? how should this be addressed?

Pixelz

put in the time to learn !!! thumbs up !!:thumbup:

clockchrome

Btw, is that safe to have a convex ring on the inside of the muzzle end?

Mambo4

spent the morning adjusting the muzzle so everything was flush (much back and forth in Maya and Mudbox) and then jumped to xnormal for Normals and Ambient occlusion maps, which went pretty smoohtly.



I think My UVs are a bit imprecise, espcially where metal meets wood. the bands suffer a lot compared to the grip. I am finding that the finest details aren't translating too well -getting pixely- also at these edges. My guess is it's the narrow ammount of area in the UV map at those edges. Would this be the kind of thing you allow more room for in the UV map?

throttlekitty

Yes, more room. It also looks like you haven't unwrapped the sides of the grip at all, maybe i'm not seeing it right.

You may want to give the Averaged Normals thread a read. As previously suggested, soften up the edges/angles of your floating geometry details, they're barely visible in your normal map. Don't be afraid to add a few more edges here and there, the rings for the strap are distracting with the black space.

Mambo4

added/beveled some polys to get a better normal bake.



I think it's looking better, but I have a few areas to fix:



based on the averaged normals thread I think I'll adjust the hi poly version to give less 90 degree edges at the butt and barrel.

as for that sections of the breach I think it just needs cleaner UVs...

Mambo4

update...still some issues in the normals and AO maps.



things seems to be breaking whenever the polys come to a capped cylinder.
also I'm pushing 1.2K polys on this one...seems like a lot.

Mambo4

Many problems resolved by re-working the UVs.
now I have something that looks decent in Unity:




I started several threads to diagnose various problems:

some confusion about the look of Maya vs xNormal bakes as viewed in Maya vs Unity

Bad UVs lead made things look Better in Maya, worse in Unity. Also discsussed here

Also a discussion of UV best practices inspired by this old thread


I have learn a ton of useful stuff so far.

Now to finalize the bolt and strap.

Mambo4

I need suggestions on how best to proceed with the strap.
It seems to make sense to model it with a flat shape, since it's basically a ribbon.
But how should I go about baking a normal map for this?
How do I ue a flat peice of geo for a cage over somehting just slightly 3-D?



what would you do?

Mambo4

update. Strap and Bolt modeled and mapped.
It's been a long slog but I have all the aprts working well now -diffuse,normal and specular, working in Unity.

But it looks to...meh. Any ideas to improve?
I have a mind to put a pin in it and move on...

tehrobster2

What size maps are you using ? And I think you might want to go back and re uv one more time. Because you are wasteing a lot of uv space, that could be used to increase the quality of your texture. As for your texture it self, What kind of texture are you going for the blue part ? Wood? And for metal texture needs some more work as well, did you paint your metal or did you use a photo source?

dogzer

Are you aware that this is super awesome?

Mambo4

tehrobster2 wrote: »

What size maps are you using ? And I think you might want to go back and re uv one more time. Because you are wasteing a lot of uv space, that could be used to increase the quality of your texture.

I'd hate to go back and redo the UVs again, since it took a while to get nice, uniform unfolding, and also means recreating all the maps. Also, this thread
speaks to the idea of not going too overboard wiht optimizing your UV space.

But I hear where you are coming from. let's say I did revise the UVs: I suppose the approach would simply be to scale everything up about 105-110% and try to fit it all tightly?

As for your texture it self, What kind of texture are you going for the blue part ? Wood? And for metal texture needs some more work as well, did you paint your metal or did you use a photo source?

The anime art is a flat dark blue, but Miyakzaki's paintings depict the rifle as wood colored...i tried to split the difference and go for blue dyed wood, but I can see how it may confuse. ...

I was originally working at 2048x2048 but I scaled down to a more realistic size. here is the set of 512x512 maps:

diffuse


specular


normal


unity view

Mambo4

dogzer wrote: »

Are you aware that this is super awesome?

Glad you like it! I still feel like a noob when it comes to current gen mapping. My only hope was that the thread be informative.