Awesome model you got there. I wish I could have one.
I read that you did some research on this to avoid stuff that doesn't make sense.
During the day I work with Aircrafts and in my free time I ride bikes. I happened to know a thing or two about those.
I thought I should help out a little. Here goes:
The handlebar is attached to the steering crown which still holds a couple of shocks. Shocks for... the non-existant front wheel that doesn't touch the ground? Picky, I know but it gets better.
The intakes in the top fairing go back and down into the frame(which it does on some bikes) and into the engine. These are made so that an Ottoman engine can breathe and mix fuel+air so a combustion can take place. A jet engine however... got a turbine?
Moving on to aerodynamics. The footrests. They're huge. I like em. Looks good. Except that they're almost as big as the elevators right behind them. This would render the elevators ineffective next to redundant. I suggest you look up fixed wing aircrafts on how the canards/elevators/rudders look/work.
But then again... this bike doesn't make sense at all.
gsokol> Your GF is right about them being far more lethal than lets say a car. But many accidents are due to the rider being careless and this is something you can control yourself. Lot's of solo accidents due to higher speed than allowed.
It cant be denied that it's loads of fun, a great feeling of freedom and a nice stress reliever to ride a motorcycle.
Computron: Not completely sure, edges are still looking faceted on some of these parts, I tried smoothing them, which didn't get rid of it, and I subdivided with smoothing on a little bit. I'm right at the poly limit in zbrush, so I can't really smooth anymore, so I just left it as is. It doesn't look like that in 3dsMax though...so when I start baking it shouldn't be an issue.
Ahrkey: Haha awesome! You have a lot of good points. Umm...um...well, ya see....nanobots...um...yeah. Hah. What I was thinking is that the handlebars rotation could be tracked by a sensor that tells the rudders how to be positioned to assist with cornering, the air induction would solely be used to cool electronics housed inside the frame, since the turbine gets all its air from forced induction, and...I got nothing on the rudders...thats a terrible design flaw :P Here is a top down view that shows that they stick out a little bit past the feet...but probably not enough to realistically work.
Kodde: Yeah, thats her argument as well. We both have had friends who were seriously injured from bike accidents, so I'm in a losing battle with her on that. No worries about OT.
The low poly is pretty dense overall, which is what I was planning for. As it sits right now, its around 45k tris with the engine and bike combined...15k for the jet and 30k for the bike. The dash alone is 10k tris. Definitely pretty high poly compared to other vehicles I've done in the past, but I read that the bikes in Moto GP 2006 had 45k triangle, normal mapped bikes, and would have 20 of those on screen at once...so based on that I'm ok with it.
The dash is significantly more dense than the rest of the bike so it will look nice and detailed in a first person "dash-cam" view.
I had been toying with the idea of having a seperate first person view mesh that retains the high detail of the dash area, but removes parts of the bike that aren't seen. Then I could lower the density of geo in the dash area for the third person view mesh. What do you guys think? I'm currently leaning towards passing on the idea, and just having a solid overall model.
I dropped the bike into UDK to to see how it looked as well. I mainly wanted to see how well the shape of the dash held up. Here's what I got:
Also, I looked at it as if it were being followed by a third person camera, and it made me think about how awesome a next-gen jet moto would be. So a few minutes goofing around in photoshop later:
This thing is super cool. Actually a jet bike wich doesn't look like a simple bike with a jet.... But a real jet bike. Awesome, I'm anxious to see the full textured result!
Messed with the low poly a little bit more...found a few hidden bits from the high poly hiding in the mesh. After removing those and optimizing a little bit I dropped 5k tris. Also added another couple loops to the gas tank to round out the silhouette...it was noticeably faceted in "first person" view.
I got this guy unwrapped, but had some 3dsMax issues for most of the day yesterday that prevented me from baking. I couldn't get all of the high poly pieces selected for projection in the RTT dialog box. I soon realized that the issue was from having so many separate objects. I had a lot of screws/floaters/etc...,so it kept crashing when. After combining a bunch of objects, that problem went away.
After that, I had a really weird issue where selecting objects for projection kept throwing up an unknown system exception in macro_baketextures.mcr...from this line: pmodInterface.autowrapCage(). Took me a little while to get around..I did a search on this and the only similar instance I found was somebody here on polycount had the issue in 2004, which had something to do with SP2 of WinXP...so that didn't help. I ended up exporting the low poly mesh and reimporting as an .obj...but making the model an editable poly object made the face normals go batshit...which I remembered being an issue I had when a guy from my last job passed me .obj files from lightwave. Copying the geometry (not the model itself, but shift dragging on all of the faces) from the newly imported mesh makes this magically go away. From there my issues went away and I could bake. (I realize nobody may care, but just wanted to throw that out there in case anybody else ever has the issue and searches for an answer.)
Anywhoo, did a test bake to see how it would look:
Heres the nm/ao from a few other angles as well:
Was just a test...Theres plenty of errors in the bake that I'll need to address. Gonna work on cleaning those up next, then on to texturing.
Farted around in UDK today..messing around with materials.
The stripes are definitely crooked here...I just did a quick test..I tried making a texture using the R,G,and B values for different stripe masks...
It looks pretty ugly right now..just did a quick test.
so theoretically I could just change the color of bikes by changing their color values for each stripe. I'm thinking that it might be kinda cool to make 1 or 2 variations of stripe designs too. Does anybody have any insight on the best way to set this up?
Right now I'm using a series of Lerp nodes...I feel like that might be kinda ugly as I'm not too keen on optimization/performance in UDK, is there a better way to do this? Also..I'm assuming I'll need to use vectorparameter nodes instead of constant3 nodes for material instances, right?
Anyways...Next I'll make some cleaner stripe masks...then do a second pass on textures. Right now textures are mainly just colors, so I'll add some scratches, specular highlights, etc...Also, I still have to look into how I wanna do Decals.
made a new stripe mask map. I used polypaint in Zbrush to get everything lined up nicely.
I made a few little adjustments to the texture...thinking I'm mostly done with the bike
I started messing around with decals. I'm thinking that I'll have geometry overlayed on the areas of the bike where I want decals, and I'll make a decal shit where I can change decals by doing a UV shift.
So I'm gonna finish making some decals...then I have to fix the glass and change the jet engine texture/material so I can change colors with that as well.
I'm thinking I'll give myself a few days to make some changes...but I want to stop working on this by friday...so if you have any critiques/comments, throw them out there!
SasoChicken: I read over your post a few times and I'm not completely sure what you mean. You are comparing these 2 bikes, right?
My best guess is that your saying that the thinner stripes are making the bike look too verticle/awkward, right? If thats the case...the stripes on the black one were kinda quickly done to test materials. I'll go back and make a nicer mask for this stripe design as well. Thanks for the critique man!
Haha, no idea. I'll likely pimp it off with a few different other color variations. I don't think the pink is gonna last .
I see what your saying about the colors now. I guess it never registered to me because I've been looking at the body for so long that I always knew that it was that tall.
Just a small update:
Made a decal set for the bikes. I put all the decals on one sheet, thinking that I could just do a UV shift to switch between decals..but I realized that in order to be able to change each decal separately, they would likely each have to be their own mesh...oh well.
Also fixed the jet material a little bit. Set it up to use masks for color as well, so the engine can match the bike's colors. I need to revisit the reflection mask for this as well.
I redid the first stripes design so everything lines up like it should, also made a third stripe mask:
Might not be immediately noticeable, but I spent a while tweaking the gloss, spec, and reflection maps to get it looking how I wanted. I also combined the body panel mask, gloss map, and reflection map into 1 texture, using 1 channel for each. Looks like this:
Ged: Your right, the pink is lame. This time around, I have a few more color options for ya :P
This was just a little test for me make sure my material instances worked and to see how the bikes would look with customized colors, stripe masks, and decals. I ended up creating a master material with the ability to change stripe masks, colors and reflection amount. I saw Virtuosic's master material tutorial a while back, so I got a good start by following that.
If anybody is interested, this is how I set up my master material for the body:
And here is the area for changing the body colors/stripe masks up close:
I'm not sure if this is the best way to set something like this up, or if there are too many instructions...I don't really have anything to base this on, so if anybody has any insight I'd like to hear it.
Sooo, I think that I'm going to maybe take a stab at making the exhaust trails for the bike for presentation purposes next...then I might call it done. Let me know what you guys think.
the pink one was bitchin' !
when i use to play halo i made my guy pink, so once the game starts all the 12 year olds start up with the gay chrips. Made it that much better to t-bag them after each kill : )
Looks like you don't have a Fresnel falloff for your cubemap or anything? It's letting things down a bit, you should really focus on getting some sexy reflections going on.
CandyStripes05
Haha, my MP character in Halo Reach is pink. Same thing happened to me a lot, haha. I'll make sure to keep a pink one around for ya
Ged
There is a cubemap on it now, but it doesn't look very good and isn't obvious. I'll work on that.
Xoliul
I have a rimlight on the bike itself, but it doesn't affect the reflections at all. When I get home from work I'm going to tinker with it. I'll make sure to get the reflections looking good before I finish this. Do you (or anybody else) have any suggestions for how to get the falloff on the reflection? I looked up a bunch of examples of reflections in UDK this morning, but wasn't able to find what I was looking for.
Fiddled with the reflections a bit, here is what I came up with:
These look ok?
Also, just wanted to throw this question out there...is it bad if you have to texture samples of the same texture in a material, compared to having one but having connections that go all over the place? I didn't know if it would be bad performance wise or if UDK doesn't care about it.
Reflections are a must for a piece like this. The reflections in your last picture seem to be heading in the right direction. Are you using a fresnel term for reflections and specularity?
Not feeling that grey frame beam that runs from the triple clamp, next to the tank and down to the rearset/footpeg. What material is it? Does it have a normal map? It seems to have some smooth artifacts by that detail near the pegs.
I have the reflection being affected by the fresnel, but I'm not quite sure it is set up the way it should be. I'll be doing some tweaking.
For the frame, I was trying to get something similar to a polished aluminum. I kinda realized later on that my gloss map was way too hot so when I clamped it down that nasty smoothing error showed up. I'll revisit this area and make that go away.
This is a gorgeous model! I really like the colors for the different iterations.
I think it would be kinda neat to see a beat up version of the Bike. I also think the reflectivity could be pumped a little bit to make it feel more plasticy.
I'm not sure if you answered this earlier, but I was wondering how you were able to get the diamond pattern on the engine done so well? Could you potentially explain how you did that?
Welp, the smoothing artifacts on that bolt on the frame was a dumb dumb on my part. I disconnected the normal map from the normal slot. I didn't notice for quite a while because the rim lighting was using the normal map so I got some lighting info on the bike and that kinda hid the fact.
Also realized why I was having trouble with my gloss map...I had values that were at or really, really close to 0. So when I was multiplying my gloss map, the whole map was getting brighter, but since I was right at 0, that stayed black. I just lighted it up a little bit and that fixed the issues I was having.
I looked more into the reflections. I think I ended up with a more believable result here:
I referenced the XoliulShader 2 helpto get a little more understanding of how fresnel falloff works.
Also, since its kinda hard to tell from a picture what the shader is doing:
Also, here is one with the reflection parameter set to zero...creates a matte paint look:
GragGunslinger:
Thanks! A beat up version does sound cool. I can't promise I'll get to it, but you got some ideas floating in my head about how to go about that.
As for the diamond pattern, its really just the result of a decent bake and a little bit of variance in the different maps to make it pop out a bit.
Here are what my textures look like for the bike:
The color map is largely just basic colors multiplied by the Ambient Occlusion map from my bake. I made sure there was some contrast for the specular and reflection maps though, just to help pop the details out a little bit. I hope this answers your question...if you have any more feel free to ask!
better but your reflections still look kinda soft and blurry and a bit complicated, maybe its the cubemap you are using and the power of the reflections not being strong enough, Im not sure. Personally I would go for a more standard photo studio type setup for reflections.
the engine is terribly complicated and mechancial but the rest of the bike looks like placeholder models. It's like it's bottom heavy detailed.
I have a motorcycle parked right beside my work station and I can tell you that all the detail is at the bottom/engine area. So saying that the rest of the model should be more detailed is just silly.
I have a motorcycle parked right beside my work station and I can tell you that all the detail is at the bottom/engine area. So saying that the rest of the model should be more detailed is just silly.
agreed, engine is detailed in parts while the fenders/tank etc are detailed with paint
Looks better gsokol.
I'd also try darkening the diffuse/albedo a bit to make the reflections pop a bit more.
When looking at your last still image I noticed that the painted stripe details have a "handpainted" look to them, as in not being exact. For something like motorcycle paint scheme I'd definitely invest the time in doing this with paths/curve based paint tool to get it machine-like and more exact.
Thanks for the advice. I was just using one of the default cubemaps in UDK. I switched to a sky one, but it didn't look right, so I eventually switched back to the one that was on there to begin with. Any idea what a cubemap for a studio setup should look like?
ParoXum:
Hey thanks for the advice! I tried darkening the diffuse and it definitely helped.
n88tr:
I see what you mean about most of the detail being in the engine. I was kinda going for a retrofitted crotch rocket feel, so I left the body to look like a traditional bike. I could have perhaps added in some more slight detail to tie it in better. As for when it isn't in use, my thinking was that it would be parked on some sort of base/stand. I decided not to do a kickstand since there is no way it could believable provide the same amount of support that tires/suspension could. Thanks for the critique!
Kodde:
Thanks! The stripes do need to be fixed. They look handpainted because I made the design using polypaint in zbrush (so I could line up the stripes on multiple pieces easily), but I dropped the ball once I brought the textures into photoshop. I'll sharpen these up.
So, after beating my head against a wall for a few days, I think I finally made some improvements to the body reflections. I was doing a couple things wrong:
- As you guys mentioned, my Diffuse was set too high. I cut it down by half.
- I had a highlight (used the dot product of the camera vector...not inverted) which gives a great highlight to the matte paint scheme. This was also brightening the glossy paint scheme....so I used an if node to remove this based on the value of my reflection parameter.
- My spec map...I just realized that my spec map was killing the bike body. I took it off by chance to see what would happen, and it looks like I need to have a nearly black value for the body so the gloss/reflections look good. After removing the spec, this is the result:
(note that the spec map is unplugged...so everything but the body is off.)
I think this is the look that I want.
Also, Kodde mentioned that my material for the frame didn't read at all, so I tried a suggestion my friend made...I kinda smudged up the frame in the gloss map. Didn't look quite right until I started playing with the specular values (after discovering the body was off) and found out that, even though I have the spec painted nearly white, the AO just brought it down too much.
Here is what the frame looks like with a spec value of 1:
I'll probably done it down a little bit, but this is the look I wanted to achieve.
Next up, I'll fix the spec map so everything reads correctly and I'll fix up the stripe masks so they look better.
I dont know if this helps maybe there is a cubemap converter or maybe its simpler to make your own real time cubemap in udk with render to texture etc? http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?p=674264
I'm not too happy with that area on the frame with the bolt. I have a little recess modeled in there so the bolt looks inset at a harsh angle...but I haven't had luck with the smoothing...A friend pointed out that the rider's foot would be hiding that area anyways...so I'm gonna probably rebake that.
Replies
I read that you did some research on this to avoid stuff that doesn't make sense.
During the day I work with Aircrafts and in my free time I ride bikes. I happened to know a thing or two about those.
I thought I should help out a little. Here goes:
The handlebar is attached to the steering crown which still holds a couple of shocks. Shocks for... the non-existant front wheel that doesn't touch the ground? Picky, I know but it gets better.
The intakes in the top fairing go back and down into the frame(which it does on some bikes) and into the engine. These are made so that an Ottoman engine can breathe and mix fuel+air so a combustion can take place. A jet engine however... got a turbine?
Moving on to aerodynamics. The footrests. They're huge. I like em. Looks good. Except that they're almost as big as the elevators right behind them. This would render the elevators ineffective next to redundant. I suggest you look up fixed wing aircrafts on how the canards/elevators/rudders look/work.
But then again... this bike doesn't make sense at all.
It cant be denied that it's loads of fun, a great feeling of freedom and a nice stress reliever to ride a motorcycle.
Sorry for OT.
Computron: Not completely sure, edges are still looking faceted on some of these parts, I tried smoothing them, which didn't get rid of it, and I subdivided with smoothing on a little bit. I'm right at the poly limit in zbrush, so I can't really smooth anymore, so I just left it as is. It doesn't look like that in 3dsMax though...so when I start baking it shouldn't be an issue.
Ahrkey: Haha awesome! You have a lot of good points. Umm...um...well, ya see....nanobots...um...yeah. Hah. What I was thinking is that the handlebars rotation could be tracked by a sensor that tells the rudders how to be positioned to assist with cornering, the air induction would solely be used to cool electronics housed inside the frame, since the turbine gets all its air from forced induction, and...I got nothing on the rudders...thats a terrible design flaw :P Here is a top down view that shows that they stick out a little bit past the feet...but probably not enough to realistically work.
Kodde: Yeah, thats her argument as well. We both have had friends who were seriously injured from bike accidents, so I'm in a losing battle with her on that. No worries about OT.
The low poly is pretty dense overall, which is what I was planning for. As it sits right now, its around 45k tris with the engine and bike combined...15k for the jet and 30k for the bike. The dash alone is 10k tris. Definitely pretty high poly compared to other vehicles I've done in the past, but I read that the bikes in Moto GP 2006 had 45k triangle, normal mapped bikes, and would have 20 of those on screen at once...so based on that I'm ok with it.
The dash is significantly more dense than the rest of the bike so it will look nice and detailed in a first person "dash-cam" view.
I had been toying with the idea of having a seperate first person view mesh that retains the high detail of the dash area, but removes parts of the bike that aren't seen. Then I could lower the density of geo in the dash area for the third person view mesh. What do you guys think? I'm currently leaning towards passing on the idea, and just having a solid overall model.
I dropped the bike into UDK to to see how it looked as well. I mainly wanted to see how well the shape of the dash held up. Here's what I got:
Also, I looked at it as if it were being followed by a third person camera, and it made me think about how awesome a next-gen jet moto would be. So a few minutes goofing around in photoshop later:
Hehe.
So..next I'm gonna start unwrapping the bike.
Messed with the low poly a little bit more...found a few hidden bits from the high poly hiding in the mesh. After removing those and optimizing a little bit I dropped 5k tris. Also added another couple loops to the gas tank to round out the silhouette...it was noticeably faceted in "first person" view.
I got this guy unwrapped, but had some 3dsMax issues for most of the day yesterday that prevented me from baking. I couldn't get all of the high poly pieces selected for projection in the RTT dialog box. I soon realized that the issue was from having so many separate objects. I had a lot of screws/floaters/etc...,so it kept crashing when. After combining a bunch of objects, that problem went away.
After that, I had a really weird issue where selecting objects for projection kept throwing up an unknown system exception in macro_baketextures.mcr...from this line: pmodInterface.autowrapCage(). Took me a little while to get around..I did a search on this and the only similar instance I found was somebody here on polycount had the issue in 2004, which had something to do with SP2 of WinXP...so that didn't help. I ended up exporting the low poly mesh and reimporting as an .obj...but making the model an editable poly object made the face normals go batshit...which I remembered being an issue I had when a guy from my last job passed me .obj files from lightwave. Copying the geometry (not the model itself, but shift dragging on all of the faces) from the newly imported mesh makes this magically go away. From there my issues went away and I could bake. (I realize nobody may care, but just wanted to throw that out there in case anybody else ever has the issue and searches for an answer.)
Anywhoo, did a test bake to see how it would look:
Heres the nm/ao from a few other angles as well:
Was just a test...Theres plenty of errors in the bake that I'll need to address. Gonna work on cleaning those up next, then on to texturing.
Can't wait to see this textured!
The stripes are definitely crooked here...I just did a quick test..I tried making a texture using the R,G,and B values for different stripe masks...
It looks pretty ugly right now..just did a quick test.
so theoretically I could just change the color of bikes by changing their color values for each stripe. I'm thinking that it might be kinda cool to make 1 or 2 variations of stripe designs too. Does anybody have any insight on the best way to set this up?
Right now I'm using a series of Lerp nodes...I feel like that might be kinda ugly as I'm not too keen on optimization/performance in UDK, is there a better way to do this? Also..I'm assuming I'll need to use vectorparameter nodes instead of constant3 nodes for material instances, right?
Anyways...Next I'll make some cleaner stripe masks...then do a second pass on textures. Right now textures are mainly just colors, so I'll add some scratches, specular highlights, etc...Also, I still have to look into how I wanna do Decals.
I made a few little adjustments to the texture...thinking I'm mostly done with the bike
I started messing around with decals. I'm thinking that I'll have geometry overlayed on the areas of the bike where I want decals, and I'll make a decal shit where I can change decals by doing a UV shift.
So I'm gonna finish making some decals...then I have to fix the glass and change the jet engine texture/material so I can change colors with that as well.
I'm thinking I'll give myself a few days to make some changes...but I want to stop working on this by friday...so if you have any critiques/comments, throw them out there!
Excellent, MORE!!!
SasoChicken: I read over your post a few times and I'm not completely sure what you mean. You are comparing these 2 bikes, right?
My best guess is that your saying that the thinner stripes are making the bike look too verticle/awkward, right? If thats the case...the stripes on the black one were kinda quickly done to test materials. I'll go back and make a nicer mask for this stripe design as well. Thanks for the critique man!
green/black design = sleeker = model/version that is faster and has more agility, could have add on accessories like different fins, turbo etx
pink = bulkier = model/version that can take more damage, a bit slower, could have add on accessories like guns or some sort of roll cage etc
so basically i am saying that i can see a purpose for both variations of paint
PS: Am I the only one seeing a bit of MM2's Airman here? Pic related.
I couldn't help myself:
Haha, no idea. I'll likely pimp it off with a few different other color variations. I don't think the pink is gonna last
I see what your saying about the colors now. I guess it never registered to me because I've been looking at the body for so long that I always knew that it was that tall.
Just a small update:
Made a decal set for the bikes. I put all the decals on one sheet, thinking that I could just do a UV shift to switch between decals..but I realized that in order to be able to change each decal separately, they would likely each have to be their own mesh...oh well.
Also fixed the jet material a little bit. Set it up to use masks for color as well, so the engine can match the bike's colors. I need to revisit the reflection mask for this as well.
I redid the first stripes design so everything lines up like it should, also made a third stripe mask:
Might not be immediately noticeable, but I spent a while tweaking the gloss, spec, and reflection maps to get it looking how I wanted. I also combined the body panel mask, gloss map, and reflection map into 1 texture, using 1 channel for each. Looks like this:
Ged: Your right, the pink is lame. This time around, I have a few more color options for ya :P
This was just a little test for me make sure my material instances worked and to see how the bikes would look with customized colors, stripe masks, and decals. I ended up creating a master material with the ability to change stripe masks, colors and reflection amount. I saw Virtuosic's master material tutorial a while back, so I got a good start by following that.
If anybody is interested, this is how I set up my master material for the body:
And here is the area for changing the body colors/stripe masks up close:
I'm not sure if this is the best way to set something like this up, or if there are too many instructions...I don't really have anything to base this on, so if anybody has any insight I'd like to hear it.
Sooo, I think that I'm going to maybe take a stab at making the exhaust trails for the bike for presentation purposes next...then I might call it done. Let me know what you guys think.
when i use to play halo i made my guy pink, so once the game starts all the 12 year olds start up with the gay chrips. Made it that much better to t-bag them after each kill : )
CandyStripes05
Haha, my MP character in Halo Reach is pink. Same thing happened to me a lot, haha. I'll make sure to keep a pink one around for ya
Ged
There is a cubemap on it now, but it doesn't look very good and isn't obvious. I'll work on that.
Xoliul
I have a rimlight on the bike itself, but it doesn't affect the reflections at all. When I get home from work I'm going to tinker with it. I'll make sure to get the reflections looking good before I finish this. Do you (or anybody else) have any suggestions for how to get the falloff on the reflection? I looked up a bunch of examples of reflections in UDK this morning, but wasn't able to find what I was looking for.
JoshC
Aye Aye, Captain!
These look ok?
Also, just wanted to throw this question out there...is it bad if you have to texture samples of the same texture in a material, compared to having one but having connections that go all over the place? I didn't know if it would be bad performance wise or if UDK doesn't care about it.
Reflections are a must for a piece like this. The reflections in your last picture seem to be heading in the right direction. Are you using a fresnel term for reflections and specularity?
Not feeling that grey frame beam that runs from the triple clamp, next to the tank and down to the rearset/footpeg. What material is it? Does it have a normal map? It seems to have some smooth artifacts by that detail near the pegs.
I have the reflection being affected by the fresnel, but I'm not quite sure it is set up the way it should be. I'll be doing some tweaking.
For the frame, I was trying to get something similar to a polished aluminum. I kinda realized later on that my gloss map was way too hot so when I clamped it down that nasty smoothing error showed up. I'll revisit this area and make that go away.
I think it would be kinda neat to see a beat up version of the Bike. I also think the reflectivity could be pumped a little bit to make it feel more plasticy.
I'm not sure if you answered this earlier, but I was wondering how you were able to get the diamond pattern on the engine done so well? Could you potentially explain how you did that?
Also realized why I was having trouble with my gloss map...I had values that were at or really, really close to 0. So when I was multiplying my gloss map, the whole map was getting brighter, but since I was right at 0, that stayed black. I just lighted it up a little bit and that fixed the issues I was having.
I looked more into the reflections. I think I ended up with a more believable result here:
I referenced the XoliulShader 2 helpto get a little more understanding of how fresnel falloff works.
Also, since its kinda hard to tell from a picture what the shader is doing:
Also, here is one with the reflection parameter set to zero...creates a matte paint look:
GragGunslinger:
Thanks! A beat up version does sound cool. I can't promise I'll get to it, but you got some ideas floating in my head about how to go about that.
As for the diamond pattern, its really just the result of a decent bake and a little bit of variance in the different maps to make it pop out a bit.
Here are what my textures look like for the bike:
The color map is largely just basic colors multiplied by the Ambient Occlusion map from my bake. I made sure there was some contrast for the specular and reflection maps though, just to help pop the details out a little bit. I hope this answers your question...if you have any more feel free to ask!
example
maybe look into how these studio setups are done.
and how does it stand when not in use? I see no kickstands or does it have magical magnetic powers to hover when not in use?
I have a motorcycle parked right beside my work station and I can tell you that all the detail is at the bottom/engine area. So saying that the rest of the model should be more detailed is just silly.
E/ Love how this is turning out man.
agreed, engine is detailed in parts while the fenders/tank etc are detailed with paint
bikes looks as detailed on top as any other bike really.
...the matte paint looks pimp ! but you need some more crisp reflections on the glossy paint : )
I'd also try darkening the diffuse/albedo a bit to make the reflections pop a bit more.
When looking at your last still image I noticed that the painted stripe details have a "handpainted" look to them, as in not being exact. For something like motorcycle paint scheme I'd definitely invest the time in doing this with paths/curve based paint tool to get it machine-like and more exact.
Ged:
Thanks for the advice. I was just using one of the default cubemaps in UDK. I switched to a sky one, but it didn't look right, so I eventually switched back to the one that was on there to begin with. Any idea what a cubemap for a studio setup should look like?
ParoXum:
Hey thanks for the advice! I tried darkening the diffuse and it definitely helped.
n88tr:
I see what you mean about most of the detail being in the engine. I was kinda going for a retrofitted crotch rocket feel, so I left the body to look like a traditional bike. I could have perhaps added in some more slight detail to tie it in better. As for when it isn't in use, my thinking was that it would be parked on some sort of base/stand. I decided not to do a kickstand since there is no way it could believable provide the same amount of support that tires/suspension could. Thanks for the critique!
Kodde:
Thanks! The stripes do need to be fixed. They look handpainted because I made the design using polypaint in zbrush (so I could line up the stripes on multiple pieces easily), but I dropped the ball once I brought the textures into photoshop. I'll sharpen these up.
So, after beating my head against a wall for a few days, I think I finally made some improvements to the body reflections. I was doing a couple things wrong:
- As you guys mentioned, my Diffuse was set too high. I cut it down by half.
- I had a highlight (used the dot product of the camera vector...not inverted) which gives a great highlight to the matte paint scheme. This was also brightening the glossy paint scheme....so I used an if node to remove this based on the value of my reflection parameter.
- My spec map...I just realized that my spec map was killing the bike body. I took it off by chance to see what would happen, and it looks like I need to have a nearly black value for the body so the gloss/reflections look good. After removing the spec, this is the result:
(note that the spec map is unplugged...so everything but the body is off.)
I think this is the look that I want.
Also, Kodde mentioned that my material for the frame didn't read at all, so I tried a suggestion my friend made...I kinda smudged up the frame in the gloss map. Didn't look quite right until I started playing with the specular values (after discovering the body was off) and found out that, even though I have the spec painted nearly white, the AO just brought it down too much.
Here is what the frame looks like with a spec value of 1:
I'll probably done it down a little bit, but this is the look I wanted to achieve.
Next up, I'll fix the spec map so everything reads correctly and I'll fix up the stripe masks so they look better.
Fixed the spec map now.
I also touched up the stripe masks a little bit.
I'm not too happy with that area on the frame with the bolt. I have a little recess modeled in there so the bolt looks inset at a harsh angle...but I haven't had luck with the smoothing...A friend pointed out that the rider's foot would be hiding that area anyways...so I'm gonna probably rebake that.
Also made glowy bits for the thrusters.
Did a little bit more work to the thrust effects. Looks pretty cool in motion.
So I'm starting to think about presentation.
I tried the base cylinder type thing and I wasn't very happy with it..trying to do the studio style bg now.