[WIP] Disc Launcher

Rooster128

Hello Polycount, long time no see (entirely my fault, for sure). I wanted to post up a WIP of a gun I am working on, possibly for a game that might come to fruition. I don't have many WIP shots saved but I'll post what I have. I'll eventually get around to posting up the textures and a model progression.

The gun is inspired from the Tribes series of games, and this is supposed to be the bread and butter tool of the game- an explosive disc launcher.

Tools: Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Mudbox, Photoshop, xNormal


This is an early shot of the high poly model with a regular blinn thrown on.


A little more down the line after the low poly was created and some extra panels were painted in with Mudbox and Photoshop. A color scheme is starting to develop.


The gun inside UDK to test out the textures so far- namely the normal map. I made the mistake of exploding the model before triangulating it, and ended up triangulating the exploded model different than the model put altogether, so there were little hiccups in the normal map when seen in Maya. I tried brushing them out, and inside UDK it appears fine, so I'm going to leave it as it is.


A recent first person shot of the gun after adding more panels and grunge/brush work. While the text on the LCD panel is painted on right now to give an example, my wish is to have a seperate plane put just in front of the LCD display that has its own UVspace for me to work with, to give it a dynamic texture.

The gun is split into parts to easily make different LOD meshes, and also to animate. I'm planning on using the same model for third person as used in first person, only with significantly less parts showing. At the moment there is no specular map, I'm working on it.

Any critique would be appreciated. Any questions, feel free to ask. I know I haven't covered all my ground yet, so I understand if there are questions. Thanks for reading.

Rooster128

New shot inside UDK. Having a bit of trouble getting the normal map to really stick out and accentuate the weapon how it appeared in Maya. I have reversed the green channel, and tried giving the green channel an exponent, but it doesn't really seem to do much good.

chrisradsby

Pretty sweet work, but it kinda feels like the specular is the problem, when both normal and specular works together you'll get a much richer look to the whole model.

Rooster128

Thanks Chris! And yes, this could be it- I need to turn down the amount of shading I have baked into the specular I think. But even looking at the mesh in the 'detailed lighting' mode inside UDK, it just appears like the normal lines aren't being sold as deep as they would have been if I had rendered in Maya.

ranger_park

Looks really good! cant wait to see it when its finished. i also agree with chris about the specular. the udk render looks a lot better. keep it up!

Rooster128

Well, I've played around with the specular some. Ran some relief maps and cranked the values, and worked on the textures some. Brought it into UDK and gave the chrome parts a cube map, and I also made a glow map for the LCD screen and buttons on the side. This is what it looks like in UDK after all of that:



I think changing the specular some to work with the normal map worked. But to me it still feels flat. I think maybe my problem might be that I'm normalizing my normal map. (I do make sure to flip the green channel when I bring it into UDK too, just to clear that up). I feel that normalizing the map might be dampening the normal values... hurm...

Anywho I think I'm moving onto rigging and animation now, but any more feedback on the model would be appreciated. Thanks for the encouragement guys!

Amadreaus

Tribes is such an awesome series, it's really cool to see some fan art! I think the model is alright, I'd focus on tightening up the soft feel all around. To me, it's almost puffy in spots. I think that's partially due to the texturing, but in some places it almost looks like the faces are being pulled by soft edge normals.... not sure. Regardless, more hard surface sci fi awesomeness! Keep going!

DaveSilver

Damn, looking good man.

Also, you have such a distinct style that the moment I saw the gun I thought of you and your work. Good job "Rooster". It's good to see you are still working hard.

Message me if you know who I am.

Rooster128

Hey Dave! So glad to see you on here, I'll message you in a bit!

Another WIP shot of the gun inside UDK. Turned the diffuse down a bit, gave the specular more contrast around the plate edges, and made a disc and muzzle flash.



I think I know what you mean about the hard edge feel Amadreaus, but I'm not sure precisely.

Oh, I also LOD'd the weapon too. The poly counts are probably not ideal for a third person mesh, and most examples I've seen of meshes like these only have one or two LOD levels tops, but I made 4.

Base mesh is around 4.2k tris, 1st LOD is 1.8k, 2nd is 1.2k, and 3rd is 600. I was thinking the various levels would let me divide up the distance that only 2 LODs would cover a lot better, and let me get away with the 4.2k tris for the base mesh. I'll have to see how that works in practice once I get this bad boy in game.

Di$array

It appears you have a seam problem on the barrel or is it a hard edge? I'd also scuff the metal of the disc cartridge in the reload section to show its been used quite a bit through its life. Other than that keep working on it.

Rooster128

It's a seam on the barrel. I had planned for it actually- while I know you should hide seams, I thought the seam there would help sell the idea of a "horizon" in the reflection of the copper-like part, while making the UV layout more logical all the meanwhile. Is that the part you're talking about?

I'll look into dirtying up the reload section.

Rooster128

So it's been a while since I've updated- I've been up to a lot. I created a first person mesh of the disc launcher, cutting out all of the back and a large portion of the right side of the gun that you don't see. And pushing the detail since the mesh is right in front of you. The workflow I used for normal map creation and texture creation was pretty much the same as the workflow I used for the third person mesh. The screen has it's own seperate UVs and textures and will be scripted to show the ammo and weapon states (eventually).


An early shot of the high poly mesh of the gun coming together, from a suggested first person perspective.


Shot of the progress being made on the diffuse map. This is an unshaded screenshot, just showing up the lighting details in the diffuse map.

Here is a link of a pic of the weapon with it's animation rig imposed on top of it:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17002839/DISCWIP14.jpg

I'd post a video the link to the video I made of it, but it's pretty big and I think my dropbox bandwidth is almost used up. :S


The gun in-game, fully functional and animated. Using a heavily modified version of the link gun classes for the functionality, but it works.

I'm eventually going to go in and polish both the third person and first person weapon, but right now I need to move on with other guns. Any feedback would be welcome, I can also get more screens up.

How you doin' polycount?!