M82a1 Sniper rifle
polycounter lvl 9
I decided to model another weapon, on the opposite end of the spectrum then my last weapon. Here is my main reference, I have many others.
Things I still need to add:
-A scope: I plan to use this one.
-The bipod
-The pins on the gun
-The carrying handle
-And the latches used if you had a strap to carry it
Two questions:
The detail on the side of the grip, I assume the best/easiest way to do that would be photoshop?
And welds, I would like to put some weld seams on the gun. Anyone know of a way (preferably in max) to do it?
And as always, I am open to any C&C you might have
Things I still need to add:
-A scope: I plan to use this one.
-The bipod
-The pins on the gun
-The carrying handle
-And the latches used if you had a strap to carry it
Two questions:
The detail on the side of the grip, I assume the best/easiest way to do that would be photoshop?
And welds, I would like to put some weld seams on the gun. Anyone know of a way (preferably in max) to do it?
And as always, I am open to any C&C you might have
Replies
http://www.ryankingslien.com/?p=206
But let me know what you think, C&C always welcome.
Let me know what you think!
So I have come up with a few different ideas:
- Model them and deal with the high tri count (I would rather not have a high tri count, but this option will probably look the best)
- Model it flat and bake a bevel into it and black it out (Would prob look ok from FP, but not so much anywhere else)
- Model it flat and alpha map the holes (I am not to sure how good this will look)
How would you do it?
it will look way better this way than other ways
So I am looking for some pointers to where you all think I can cut some out. Thank you for taking a look.
1)Cap off your cylinders...anywhere you have a vert in the center of a circular shape, delete it then split the face accordingly
2)The base of the bipod doesn't have to be connected with geometry.
3) The glass part of the scope...the subtle outward curve is nice, but I think it would be fine to let the normal map take care of that.
4) In the last image, the cylinder going down the left side seems to have an extra edge loop in it.
5) The ring connector piece towards the front seems to have extra geo in there, where it looks like a spider web. You might be able to cut some of that out.
Overall, this is looking pretty nice man. Push the optimization a bit more and keep at it!
tesher07 - The reason I did the scope like that was to add a subtle curve to it, but darbeeno is right. I should have just (which I did) capped the ends and quad it up. So I went back and did that to all my cylinder ends. In my ignorance I didn't realize that doing it that way actually lowered the polycount slightly.
So I now I have %75 of the unwrap done, optimizing more as I go. If anyone sees anything else that I can improve just let me know.
So essentially I have a bunch (at least a lot more then I feel I should have) UV islands which is going to make edge wear very difficult to simulate. Any help would be great thanks
I tried using symmetry as much as possible and stacking UVs where I could. (although my tests didn't come out well doing this)
Thank you for looking.
You've got a lot of odd, thin strips and a bunch of little identical looking bits - particularly those little 3-quad bits in the middle. They look superficially different - could you combine them anyways?
you might have too much padding between each UV island too - that seems a tad generous and inconsistent.
You can use the auto-pack with a the desired padding amount and see if that gets you a better or worse pack than this - on average with a model like this I can get about 60-80% of the automatic pack, while maintaining a logical layout (ie related parts next to each other, etc) which results in a lot higher texel density.
Ghostscape - Yeah I have them stacked right now and I was planning to offset them once I started baking. The rather long strips are on the main body of the gun, the under side of the lip. If I attach them to the body of the gun don't I have to have them on the same smoothing group? Then that would cause shading errors? (Smoothing over a 90 degree) The three quads you are refering to are part of the sight rail, and I was hesitant about stacking them because on the test I did with stacking like that I had horrible seams, along with the normal map showing up funny. How do you get max to keep logical parts next to each other when auto packing them? Every time I use auto pack it orders them according to UV island size.
Thanks for the responses! They really help
Thank you for taking a look.
Its really hard to tell where the UV island splits are, but looking at that, I would say... Everywhere. Also, I may be wrong on this I really can't tell, but that doesn't look like every surface is 1:1 pixel density in relation to each other.
The reason I put everything on a straight angle is because it is easier for me to paint in details on a straight line as apposed to an angled one. I tried to keep it in as few parts as possible but the smoothing messed up, mainly around the 90 degree angles which caused smoothing errors.
I will go back and try to pack some of the smaller details inside the hoops.
For the most part everything is 1:1, I used textools normalize function. The only thing that isn't is the inside of the gun, where the bolt is,(which I scaled down because it won't be seen much, if at all) and the parts that are right in front of the player camera (I scaled up a bit well because they are right in front of the camera) is it wrong to do this?
Now I would honestly go back in and do this by hand once you are happy with the uv splits, but an important thing to mention is that... This is a first person weapon, right? If thats the case, you simply don't need anywhere near as much padding around islands. Mipping still happens with first person weapons, but as the object is so large on the screen you can get away with a LOT more, with closer islands. Might be best testing with a few islands what exactly is the best result that works with your target texture map resolution.
I have to say that your model is very nice, clean and very accurate in the details, but your UV have problems...First of all there is too much not used space, due probably to the auto-pack function of 3dsmax.
Plus as i read, i agree with the importance of 1:1 scale...in a FPS weapon it's good to give more texture density to parts that will be directly in front of the player.
I post here the UV i made for my Barrett m82, just to show the use of space i've done.
It's not immediately easy to recognize the parts, but u can compare the space assigned to the major pieces. For example on the top left of my texture there is the main body, which i decided to break into 2 uv pieces (immediately under there is the second piece, middle-left) to maximize the texture resolution of it).
I hope it can be useful
motenai - That is a much better unwrap then what I currently have. I actually didn't use the autopack feature to pack my UVs, I did them by hand. My inexperience is making them turn out not so great. How much padding did you bake in?
Ok so I guess my question now is how do you tell how much space to put between your islands for padding when packing the UVs, and how did motenai get it so uniform? Is that something you get from experience, or is there a function I am missing?
I really appreciate all the responses I am getting! UVs and texturing, in my opinion, are my weakest links so I really want to get this right.
For the space to leave in between the UV isles, i think it's more a question of experience, but u can do some tests by doing a render to texture at the desired final resolution and see in photoshop how many pixels u have between the isles, then adjust them...there isn't any automated way that i know to do it.
I think that a good UV tecnique would be to map different section of the rifle separately... i usually keep all the main elements detached (barrel, main body, scope, handle, and so on...) and i uvmap them as single objects, trying to give to all the chunks a decent final volume, easy to pack together with all the others...
By doing this usually i obtain more or less square or rectangle groups of uv chunks, that after are easier to fit together... this is especially useful with hard surface models. In the end when i compose my final UV with all the elements of the rifle attached in one object, i try to keep the square ratio as much as possible (without caring of the texture borders) and then i rescale (up or down) then whole thing to make it fit inside the borders...i hope these info are useful, good luck
Ask your self. What is this low poly for? In-view, World, or 'I don't care, I just wanted a low poly you would never use in a game'?
The low poly you have right now is not optimized for in-view or world. I'm just asking so I could better understand the low.
motenai - Yes it was very useful, knowing others workflow is very beneficial to me.
A few crashes and corrupt saves later I am back. I went back and repacked everything trying to take in account everyone's helpful comments. Is this any better?
As much as I have looked through the wiki here I always seem to find something new, so I feel I should point this out to others that might have the same problem I am having with UVs WIKI. tl;dr the wiki shows a way to visually represent padding while packing the UVs.
Andreas - Glad you like it, I can render some shots of it a bit later, after I get my bake straightened out.
Well max doesn't like me, kept crashing on me/resetting my mat IDs so this took me longer then I would have liked. But I finally got the bake straightened out. There are a few areas that I plan to go back and rebake to get them nice and smooth but this is basically the final result. The lighting set up isn't final, that is just default lighting atm. (Using XoliulShader 2, although I have been having serious issues with it so I might be swtiching
What do you think?
- Forgive the crappy cropping I was in a hurry ;/
Next up texturing.
Crits and thoughts welcome
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/US_M82A1_Barrett.JPG
Thanks for taking a look.
Well, I am calling this my final. I appreciate all the help I got along the way with my UVs, I can only get better from here right? Any last C&C would be great to take on to my next project. Thanks again.
-mirrored texture on the ammo magazine, not good for a first person shooter (well actually not good for any kind of game)
-some areas are too low poly, like the handle section or the spring behind the side slider...if this weapon is for first person view, you have to make sure to not have visible edges... in comparison the circular sections of the scope are extremely dense of poligons (from the wireframe they look to be 48 or 64 sections)...try to balance these things.
-The textures are too fake right now...it looks like u used flat colors with a generic overlay to give general details, plus some random dirt here and there... try to characterize different parts of the rifle in a realistic way, imagining how they would get consumed, discolored, damaged, and so on...imagine how this rifle would become dirt...things like these
motenai - Yeah this is the first time I heavily experimented with mirroring. I definitely learned a lot from this project. About the low poly areas that you are referring to, aren't these areas that will be seen little (if at all)? So would it still matter as much? Yes, textures are definitely not my strongest point. I think a lot of it may have to do with my spec map and getting my materials to read better. I tried mimicking the damage that was on the guns I was looking at,(ref link posted above) what part of the wear doesn't look right to you? Perhaps the grunge I have on there isn't strong enough to pick up in certain areas.