Fountain Modeling

Ozimul

Hello, Polycount! I'm currently working on making a high-poly model of this drinking fountain:

I'm a student in a modeling class, and we're making props as if they're to be used in games.

Here's a render with it with the Turbosmooth modifier applied. Do you guys have any tips?
Thanks!

fuzzio

You have got a good start here, I have taken the image and noted down the parts which may need to be tweaked. Hope it helps.

sybrix

This is a great start. Fuzzio pointed out some good things. I think you need to look more closely at the bottom basin though. The spigot looks taller, the hood over the spigot is also a lot thinner in the ref. The metal "hump" part where it connects to the basin is more bulbous with softer curves tan what you have. The basin isn't completely flat but looks like there's a slight slope towards where the drain would be. Also the base of the whole fountain sticks out more in the reference too.

Ozimul

Thanks for the advice! Guess I didn't notice some of these things since I was tweaking what I had so much... ^^ ;;

Ozimul

All right. I've made a few improvements to the fountain over the past few days.


How's it looking? Any other advice? : )

greevar

Yes, the base flares outward when it is a completely straight tube from top to bottom.

Ozimul

How do I unfold something like what I have in the upper-left? I'm working at unwrapping the UVs of the low-poly model.

Anyhow, any help on the curving bit (on the faucet) would be appreciated. Here it is for reference:

Thanks again!

Ozimul

Never mind the faucet. I was making it overly complicated.


How's this for a UVW map? Any advice on better packing??

Jessica Dinh

you see where some circles are connected to strips? that is unnecessary - you can break them off and put them somewhere better, like all the small pieces in a corner together or something. right now they are making awkward shapes that are hard to pack.

Ozimul

I just repacked this - I think it's better than last night, but any additional advice would be appreciated!!

MALicivs

.

Jessica Dinh

It is a little bit better haha, but I still see tons of empty space all over the place!! I bet you can find a better way to pack so that there aren't big, gaping empty places when you're done. What I like to do when I pack is first normalize all the pieces, then put all the big pieces in the map, scale everything up until the big pieces take all/most of the room, then slowly start scaling things down to make some room for to shove the little pieces into the map. That way you don't end up with empty space.

If you do have a little xtra room at the end, don't be afraid to take some of the pieces that still have room to move around and scale them up just a bit (a bit though! watch your relative scales as you do this!) Try to make the most out of your uv space and the texture will look that much better

burtonyang

You should post your low poly wireframe, I get the feeling that something is wrong from looking at your unwrap because of the shapes and random segments that I see.

Ozimul

Hello again, Polycount!
I'm having some trouble with inverted faces.

Everything had to be re-unwrapped for baking our High Poly models down to textures for our lows. (Yes there's still empty space I could make better use of, but some of these parts are so ridiculously small... *grumble* )


Anyhow, according to "Select Inverted Faces", these are all messed up.


(here they are in the viewport for reference)

Now, I'm not sure how to make it stop saying the faces are inverted. Do I flip them somehow in the UV window? I tried flipping the normals and...

Yeah, it just made a mess. Help me out? Thanks again, and sorry if this post seems particularly picture-heavy.

Ozimul

burtonyang wrote: »

You should post your low poly wireframe, I get the feeling that something is wrong from looking at your unwrap because of the shapes and random segments that I see.

Here's the current low-poly wireframe.

Jessica Dinh

Why did you have to re-unwrap everything? As far as I know, you only unwrap the low-poly once xD Or did you just mean you had to offset the overlapping UV's outside of the 1x1 space? Anyway, as far as the inverted faces go, you do not flip the faces in the viewport. Flip them in the UV window by selecting them and clicking "Mirror Horizontal" (in 2011 this button is at the top, in 2012 maybe it's somewhere else)

Sometimes faces get inverted for no particular reason, and other times you can fix it. I see one area where you might have caused the inverted face. On the body of the fountain, there is a big flat rectangle piece extruding from it. Where the verts from this piece are connecting to the edge of the body, you are sortof 'simulating' an ngon. Maybe 'mirror horizontal' will fix this, maybe not. Here is a workaround in case it doesn't work:



UV pack does look better though! :] Although I see a circle piece in the center-rightish side of your map where the verts were not connected across.

Could you post a pic of your model with the checker material applied?

Jet_Pilot

why don't you make that panel its own separate element. it would be easier to render out the normals for it and it will be cheaper poly wise?

OR

Just remove the panel from the low poly and bake it down in the normal map.

Ozimul

Of course! Here are some checkers!

(Thanks for clearing up the stuff with the UVs, by the way.)

Ozimul

I know it's been a while since I updated here, but hello again, Polycount forums!


I just thought I would show my fountain with textures and such on it in UDK, now that i've gotten it in there...


Here's the spec. map (at least, I believe this counts as a spec. map. Let me know if I'm doing something wrong, I would really appreciate it!)


... and the Diffuse for comparison.

Thanks for all the help you've given me for this project!

Pivot

The green is really saturated. Also, the fountain is supposed to be made out of metal, but the way you have the diffuse and specular isn't making it look that way. This material tutorial will help you figure out how to get it lookin' like metal.

The basic gist of it would be to make the metal parts have the same hue on the diffuse and specular. The diffuse would have a darker green on it, and the specular would have a lighter green. The way you have it set up right now with the green diffuse and dark-pinkish specular makes it look more like plastic.



Also you use the exact same part of a texture on a lot of the top-left objects. It has this light splotch on it that makes the reused part kind of obvious.

Ozimul

Augh... I mixed up the methods for metals and non-metals! Dumb mistake. And I'll fix up those darned splotches...
Thanks for that! : )