Oniram : "back" button added, was wondering if its unnecessary, i guess its not h
As for parts mixing - there are 2 reasong i chose those
1. i wanna give the gun a custom feels, individual made by the soldier
2. Art wise, the mount i used is much more interesting and details as for shape and materials compare to the original aimpoint mount, if it was production model i would use the original, it would save alot of polys haha
So for the ow poly, currently its about 16K, very detailed and everything is petty round
i decided to make 2 versions, one using this 16k one cause i hate ruin good art
second will be more reasonable, ill cut everything except what u see from the first person view including the other side, ill prob get to 5-6K
A. Detail prioritization is off in a few areas, the back of the scope which should have a LOT of sides, has less sides/roundness than the foregrips for example
B. Seems to be lots of little intersecting mesh chunks all over, I would merge some of this stuff together to better use uv space and make a less complex bake(less to explode etc). Areas like the mag, the scope, the rear strap loop.
I try to minimize separate mesh chunks to areas that will animate, areas that can be removed, or areas that will make baking a pain(complex overlaps and such).
I'm not sure how WIP this is though and maybe you're planing on merging a lot of that stuff together, but I see it pretty often people will try to save some tris and intersect a bunch of stuff, it gets kind of ugly.
Oniram : "back" button added, was wondering if its unnecessary, i guess its not h
cool. but that was MiAlx. not me. :P personally i dont really think back buttons are necessary anyway on sites.. browsers come with those already. lol.
A. Detail prioritization is off in a few areas, the back of the scope which should have a LOT of sides, has less sides/roundness than the foregrips for example
B. Seems to be lots of little intersecting mesh chunks all over, I would merge some of this stuff together to better use uv space and make a less complex bake(less to explode etc). Areas like the mag, the scope, the rear strap loop.
thanx for pointing that out, im gonna g over it again and see what can be less/more
I try to minimize separate mesh chunks to areas that will animate, areas that can be removed, or areas that will make baking a pain(complex overlaps and such).
planning to use to maps, one for rifle and one for detachable parts
I'm not sure how WIP this is though and maybe you're planing on merging a lot of that stuff together, but I see it pretty often people will try to save some tris and intersect a bunch of stuff, it gets kind of ugly.
i think its a good way to save and u make sure the bake is perfect, not planning on e one bake, its gonna have to be few with PS fixes but i promise it will be smooth like 20yo stripper's ass
no less than this
i think its a good way to save and u make sure the bake is perfect, not planning on e one bake, its gonna have to be few with PS fixes but i promise it will be smooth like 20yo stripper's ass
no less than this
You can save some tris, but at the expense of overall quality, and texture resolution, which is much more important than saving tris in most cases.
Remember that every area that is simply intersected instead of merged, is an area that's going to give you ugly aliasing. So the more you can merge, the more you can get the smooth, seamless highpoly look.
Also, I would highly recommend not relying on multiple bakes, I mean thats fine for personal work or whatever, but when you're doing production work and get change requests from your boss/client, its a huge huge mess. Setting up a clean bake that doesn't require photoshop editing, or multiple bakes is much more efficient.
If you do a bunch of bakes, a bunch of photoshop editing, only to have the client tell you your uv density is off any the whole uv map needs to be reworked, you've gotta redo all of that work, its a massive time sink, esp. when you can just avoid it in the first place by planing your geometry well, keyframe exploding to do a single bake, etc.
You can save some tris, but at the expense of overall quality, and texture resolution, which is much more important than saving tris in most cases.
Remember that every area that is simply intersected instead of merged, is an area that's going to give you ugly aliasing. So the more you can merge, the more you can get the smooth, seamless highpoly look.
Also, I would highly recommend not relying on multiple bakes, I mean thats fine for personal work or whatever, but when you're doing production work and get change requests from your boss/client, its a huge huge mess. Setting up a clean bake that doesn't require photoshop editing, or multiple bakes is much more efficient.
If you do a bunch of bakes, a bunch of photoshop editing, only to have the client tell you your uv density is off any the whole uv map needs to be reworked, you've gotta redo all of that work, its a massive time sink, esp. when you can just avoid it in the first place by planing your geometry well, keyframe exploding to do a single bake, etc.
youre right here, but it all depends on what more important, by overlapping textures and not merging parts i save ALOT both on texture and polycount
sometime u get to work with very strict polycount/texture size that require u to do what ever u can to save space and poly and still give the best looking asset u can, i dont think i could do that without running more than 1 bake, both for normal and AO (btw, how do u make the AO map work right with exploded setup? parts wont lay the right shade on each other part)
what i still can do is make sure everything i do wont have to be changed, i use some methods to predict something like pixel density, heres an example
i use grungy/noise map while UVing with the viewport set in the primery angle
that way i can see sharp every part is (closer gets bigger ofcourse)
this is a 2K maps x2 1 for attachments and one for the gun+sights
with this result i can even pull it off with 1k texture consider the size would be 1/2 in a game
this is a first bake testrun, no editing. btw, how do i fix those cuts like on the grip?
(parts that looks stretched/not uv will be overlapped when im done)
I think you've got this misconception that modeling solid, seamless meshes without loads of intersections somehow saves you a lot of tris. In reality, thats not so much the case. Here are a couple areas:
A: This whole area is a mess, you've got what, 4 or 5 chunks intersecting here? If you merge this together and got rid of some of the excessive edge loops that you get from so many intersections, you would actually save tris. In the bake here its aliased and lowpoly looking.
B: Again, if you just merge this trigger guard area into the main mesh, you would save tris, save texture space, and have a seamless result with no aliasing.
There are areas all over your mesh that are like this.
I understand that polygon restrictions are what they are, and you've got to do what you need to do to meet them, but there are a lot of areas here where you could merge and not really have any meaningful gain in overall count, possibly reduce count and definitely have a better all around bake.
RE: Multiple bakes. Yeah, I do one bake 99% of the time, and weird crazy stuff is generally because of the geometry and can be fixed directly in the model. Check out the "waviness" stickied thread for more on that stuff. For AO I do a high exploded, and lowpoly unexploded ao, its really quick and you just use both, no painful editing and its easily redone, other artists can work with it as well or rebake if they need to without redoing massive amounts of post-editing.
When you don't have a lot of intersections, you've got less to worry about as far as cleaning up bakes, when you just think of a lowpoly as the shell you project detail onto, and not try to be "realistic" with how you model the parts in the low, it makes a lot of sense. Here are some examples of a mesh without many intersections:
I think you've got this misconception that modeling solid, seamless meshes without loads of intersections somehow saves you a lot of tris. In reality, thats not so much the case. Here are a couple areas:
A: This whole area is a mess, you've got what, 4 or 5 chunks intersecting here? If you merge this together and got rid of some of the excessive edge loops that you get from so many intersections, you would actually save tris. In the bake here its aliased and lowpoly looking.
B: Again, if you just merge this trigger guard area into the main mesh, you would save tris, save texture space, and have a seamless result with no aliasing.
There are areas all over your mesh that are like this.
I understand that polygon restrictions are what they are, and you've got to do what you need to do to meet them, but there are a lot of areas here where you could merge and not really have any meaningful gain in overall count, possibly reduce count and definitely have a better all around bake.
RE: Multiple bakes. Yeah, I do one bake 99% of the time, and weird crazy stuff is generally because of the geometry and can be fixed directly in the model. Check out the "waviness" stickied thread for more on that stuff. For AO I do a high exploded, and lowpoly unexploded ao, its really quick and you just use both, no painful editing and its easily redone, other artists can work with it as well or rebake if they need to without redoing massive amounts of post-editing.
When you don't have a lot of intersections, you've got less to worry about as far as cleaning up bakes, when you just think of a lowpoly as the shell you project detail onto, and not try to be "realistic" with how you model the parts in the low, it makes a lot of sense. Here are some examples of a mesh without many intersections:
u can see it on the grip, where the thumb should be
=\
prob smoothing groups related
Looks without a doubt like the smoothing group messed up that part of the bake. Is that little section of the grip with it's own smoothing group on a seperate UV island from the rest of the grip? If the smoothing group is causing the issue that should fix the problem.
Looks without a doubt like the smoothing group messed up that part of the bake. Is that little section of the grip with it's own smoothing group on a seperate UV island from the rest of the grip? If the smoothing group is causing the issue that should fix the problem.
Yeah I would agree, looks like a hard edge/smoothing group without detaching the uvs for that area.... Hard to tell with the noise baked in there though.
I'm curious, why not just have that smooth there? Thats a really odd place to have hard edges, and even odder to separate on the uv, creating weird seams that you need to fix later.
cant sg 2 and 3 be combined (sorry. not 1 and 2).. id imagine both are planar in the UVs, so why not just put them together as one in both sg and uv islands.
If you think about it, the only time you need to cut it is if you have a 90 degree edge. Even if you combine the UVs from SG 2 and 3 and leave the UVs for 1 separate, you can still have the entire model have 1 SG except the back if there's mesh there since that is a 90 degree edge. The bake will grab more information that way and not have those cuts so that your high poly edges will read better.
EDIT: Said the wrong SGs. Changed them now though. And my post before I meant 2 and 3 can be combined or 1, 2 and 3 can be combined.
whoops. i made a mistake in my post too sorry. yeah combining sg 2 and 3 will do the trick. typcially i find it helps to keep everything in 1 smoothing group, though if you're bringing the model into an engine it may have issues. but 1 sg is so much easier to work with because you can make your UVs however you want.
Only if you have 90 degree edges and you didn't split the UVs into different islands. It's acceptable to look like that if your mesh does not have 90 degree edges. Try it and see!
if you render the normals with the "marshmallow look" (i like that. lol) then it will project with that kind of shading, resulting in gradients in your normal map. im fine with that, others arent.
with 3point shader its fine to have that look. thats what quality normals are for. in an engine you can get similar results depending. you can export qualified normals into UDK to get a look similar to 3point quality normals.
Replies
Oniram : "back" button added, was wondering if its unnecessary, i guess its not h
As for parts mixing - there are 2 reasong i chose those
1. i wanna give the gun a custom feels, individual made by the soldier
2. Art wise, the mount i used is much more interesting and details as for shape and materials compare to the original aimpoint mount, if it was production model i would use the original, it would save alot of polys haha
So for the ow poly, currently its about 16K, very detailed and everything is petty round
i decided to make 2 versions, one using this 16k one cause i hate ruin good art
second will be more reasonable, ill cut everything except what u see from the first person view including the other side, ill prob get to 5-6K
A. Detail prioritization is off in a few areas, the back of the scope which should have a LOT of sides, has less sides/roundness than the foregrips for example
B. Seems to be lots of little intersecting mesh chunks all over, I would merge some of this stuff together to better use uv space and make a less complex bake(less to explode etc). Areas like the mag, the scope, the rear strap loop.
I try to minimize separate mesh chunks to areas that will animate, areas that can be removed, or areas that will make baking a pain(complex overlaps and such).
I'm not sure how WIP this is though and maybe you're planing on merging a lot of that stuff together, but I see it pretty often people will try to save some tris and intersect a bunch of stuff, it gets kind of ugly.
cool. but that was MiAlx. not me. :P personally i dont really think back buttons are necessary anyway on sites.. browsers come with those already. lol.
The red is just an idea on how to add some more triangles fairly easy.
Thanx
damnit its 3am, see if i can have some good progress on UV and play some rage before i drop on my keyboard =|
adding now
Also, ill prob run into more parts i should go higher/lower so it will prob change more later on
hope ill have it done in 2 days
I'm curious, what does the other side of the gun look like? lol. Message me on Skype or msn man!
need some work, lots of sharp edges from 2007 (lol i actually checked and i did that M4 in 2007, everything except for the body is new now though)
You can save some tris, but at the expense of overall quality, and texture resolution, which is much more important than saving tris in most cases.
Remember that every area that is simply intersected instead of merged, is an area that's going to give you ugly aliasing. So the more you can merge, the more you can get the smooth, seamless highpoly look.
Also, I would highly recommend not relying on multiple bakes, I mean thats fine for personal work or whatever, but when you're doing production work and get change requests from your boss/client, its a huge huge mess. Setting up a clean bake that doesn't require photoshop editing, or multiple bakes is much more efficient.
If you do a bunch of bakes, a bunch of photoshop editing, only to have the client tell you your uv density is off any the whole uv map needs to be reworked, you've gotta redo all of that work, its a massive time sink, esp. when you can just avoid it in the first place by planing your geometry well, keyframe exploding to do a single bake, etc.
youre right here, but it all depends on what more important, by overlapping textures and not merging parts i save ALOT both on texture and polycount
sometime u get to work with very strict polycount/texture size that require u to do what ever u can to save space and poly and still give the best looking asset u can, i dont think i could do that without running more than 1 bake, both for normal and AO (btw, how do u make the AO map work right with exploded setup? parts wont lay the right shade on each other part)
what i still can do is make sure everything i do wont have to be changed, i use some methods to predict something like pixel density, heres an example
i use grungy/noise map while UVing with the viewport set in the primery angle
that way i can see sharp every part is (closer gets bigger ofcourse)
this is a 2K maps x2 1 for attachments and one for the gun+sights
with this result i can even pull it off with 1k texture consider the size would be 1/2 in a game
this is a first bake testrun, no editing. btw, how do i fix those cuts like on the grip?
(parts that looks stretched/not uv will be overlapped when im done)
The 17K version
Will make lower version next
You're a god damn sub-d master!
A: This whole area is a mess, you've got what, 4 or 5 chunks intersecting here? If you merge this together and got rid of some of the excessive edge loops that you get from so many intersections, you would actually save tris. In the bake here its aliased and lowpoly looking.
B: Again, if you just merge this trigger guard area into the main mesh, you would save tris, save texture space, and have a seamless result with no aliasing.
There are areas all over your mesh that are like this.
I understand that polygon restrictions are what they are, and you've got to do what you need to do to meet them, but there are a lot of areas here where you could merge and not really have any meaningful gain in overall count, possibly reduce count and definitely have a better all around bake.
RE: Multiple bakes. Yeah, I do one bake 99% of the time, and weird crazy stuff is generally because of the geometry and can be fixed directly in the model. Check out the "waviness" stickied thread for more on that stuff. For AO I do a high exploded, and lowpoly unexploded ao, its really quick and you just use both, no painful editing and its easily redone, other artists can work with it as well or rebake if they need to without redoing massive amounts of post-editing.
When you don't have a lot of intersections, you've got less to worry about as far as cleaning up bakes, when you just think of a lowpoly as the shell you project detail onto, and not try to be "realistic" with how you model the parts in the low, it makes a lot of sense. Here are some examples of a mesh without many intersections:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/499159/3PointStudios_Brink_Maya_ar02_03.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/499159/3PointStudios_Brink_Maya_ar02_04.jpg
This thing was really simple to bake.
I thought u meant about the screwes i did, yea your right here and im gonna do that on the lower pc version since i dont have much of a choice haha
Btw whats the pc on that rifle ^?
I didnt =\
EQ u know how to fix the cuts when bakin in 3dsmax?
Thanx alot for yhe feedback guys, much appreciated
I think the gun is about 5500, and 2500 or so for the iron sights.
Can you post some larger shots of the problem? I'm not sure i really understand whats going on there.
u can see it on the grip, where the thumb should be
=\
prob smoothing groups related
need better render. lots of edges got killed by the light here =\
Looks without a doubt like the smoothing group messed up that part of the bake. Is that little section of the grip with it's own smoothing group on a seperate UV island from the rest of the grip? If the smoothing group is causing the issue that should fix the problem.
Yeah I would agree, looks like a hard edge/smoothing group without detaching the uvs for that area.... Hard to tell with the noise baked in there though.
Thanx
not sure what exactly the rules here so i just made it look somehow ok
bake/texture wise ill make sure it wont show
what throws me off most, is the jagged part of the grip, where the fingers are supposed to rest
hey any chance u can post the other side of that?
how do u explain that
it drives me crazy
every SG got its own island on the UV
this is annoying..
im confused
EDIT: Said the wrong SGs. Changed them now though. And my post before I meant 2 and 3 can be combined or 1, 2 and 3 can be combined.
with 3point shader its fine to have that look. thats what quality normals are for.
http://www.3dmotive.com/exportingqualifiednormals/
i could make it 5300 if i take off the strap ring, 2 screws and the magazine plastic piece, but i like those :P
now adding the scopes..
for the bump i can juse use noise on PS but this time i just rendered the high poly with the noise bump on the bake, trying stuff, turned out good
that way i can make the noise even on all the plastic parts even if the UV size id different
and dark shaders