My 1st Model - Advice Please!

andrea.priore

Hi everybody,I'm newcomer in this forum I always follow your posts and I'm very happy to share new information with you.

My name is Andrea, I work in Video-games industry as 2d concept artist and traditional animator. and now I decided to come into 3d world.I would like to take the chance to ask you for some advices: this is the first time I use a 3d software, I learned everything by myself by using tutorials and documentation.

For my first project I made the whole workflow of a mechanical character, starting from modeling and UV map in MAYA.*After the Modeling and Uv I first made a bake of ambient occlusion ( in Maya) as reference to handpainting the textures on the diffuse map without shaders by using 3D COAT and PHOTOSHOP.






I know that there are too many polygons...for the next project i must optimize my character!!!
this is a working progress about the project, i'm working on the specular map and soon I'm going to work on rigging and animations.

Any comments is welcome....Thanks so so much!:)

Computron

Hey andrea.priore, Welcome to Polycount. I really like this character. I can see you worked real hard on it. That's a hell of a lot better than what most people have for their first model, including me.

I wouldn't say that's too many polys, that's pretty good work actually! There are a few areas that could use some optimizing, like the back of the head. You want to try and spend your polygon budget on things that will improve the silhouette, and try to normal map any rounded/flat areas. Did you make a normals map? Can you post the flats? (Texture sheets are flats)

You might want to take a look at our wiki, located here: http://wiki.polycount.com/
You would be interested in the optimizing section and if you want to go for more realistic robotic/mechanical models, eventually try High poly sud-b modeling with normals maps.

Feel free to ask any questions!

andrea.priore

Hi everybody!

Thanks a lot Computron for the quick reply and thanks so much for the wiki, is an amazing source of informations.

Your advices are most important for me!

Here i've paste my diffuse map and the ambient occlusion map baked with maya:





For my first model i thought to not use the normal map because i would pass rapidly to the rigging process and animations to explore every parts of the character's creation.

Any comments are welcome!

thanks

ANdrea

Computron

There are a few gaps here and there in your UVs where you could place the smaller Islands so they have more padding, right now it's a little uneven. Great job with mirroring and sharing UV space.

Do you have any plans for this model, or are you going to stay in Maya and use this for your portfolio?

andrea.priore

Thanks again Computron! you're right for the UV

My friend are working on Uniy to create a simple hack'n'slash...very very simple!!
Probably we will make only a couple of characters for a demo...just to get familiar with the software.


After the rigging process i want to animate the character in maya and import the animations loop in unity.

I'm using Maya for every parts of the character's creation (except for texture) because i want to learn the basics of this software... have you some advices for softwares i can use especially for integration with Unity? example motion builder?

I know that is a loooong way

thanks a lot and sorry for my bad english!

Computron

I only use max and don't really concern myself with animation at this point so I can't help with that.

You know, I just realized that this post is in the technical section of the forums and usually people post in the "Pimping and Previewing" section when they want to get some critique. Its fine to post here if you have some specific technical questions, but perhaps you will get more posts and insight from other members if you post there.

Maybe a Mod can move this post?

HAWK12HT

Hi, welcom to poly count. I must say for your first model its gr8 work. I work in Max so cant really give tips on Maya. However you can keep poly count low on cylinder like shapes, and use those saved polys in other areas like arms and torso for details.

andrea.priore

Hi!

thanks Computron, you're right about the section of this post!
I hope that some Mod reads this post.

Thank HAWK12HT, your advice is very helpful!

Now i'm rigging this model...when i finish the rig process i will add a new post on this discussion!

Thanks a lot!

Andrea