Tremulant's Work Thread

tremulant

Hello Gents! This will be a thread to keep all of my work over this coming year in once place. Glad to be back on Polycount after a long sabbatical. Looking forward to your juiciest crits:)

First up is a shield I'm working on from a Bethesda Skyrim Concept. Will be putting it in Engine once I get the Creation Kit. Taking it into Zbrush now, for some wear, and wood grain. I included a shot of the conept plus, my process of working out the complicated bits. Anyone else do this? I found it helpful. Any different approaches you guys may have taken?

UPDATE- Most Recent shot here--


Concept by Bethesda -

tremulant

Brought it into zbrush. Added wood details, sharpened some edges up and added some detail to the back strap.

ayoub44

look Great Start . can't wait to see it textured

... i have a little question , how you sclupt every part from your object alone ?
and how did you make those edge flat they look awesome

tremulant

Thanks man! Well, you just export from your program of choice and make sure the objects are separate that you want to be on different subtool layers in Zbrush. When you import it just automatically puts them on separate layers. As to how I make the flat edges...I use a a combination of standard, to make a blob, flatten, and Hpolish to go back and tighten everything up. Obviously you just have to make sure that you really try and differentiate between the different planes in order to get a sharp look. The biggest help in having precise edges though, is to make them pretty clear in your modeling app before you export.
Hope that helps!

tremulant

Hey Guys,

Need your opinion. Do you guys prefer the detailing on the metal?

I am pretty blocked on what might look good. Any ideas? I was thinking about just adding a little bit of wear on the center circle and a little more throughout and calling it done. It feels like it needs some more interesting details to me though...(It's for skyrim, so I wanted to keep that style detailing.

Orangeknight

Well this is a shield so of course you need scratches and wear and tear. Swords are hitting this and it needs to show.

tremulant

Added damage, decided to nix the detailing. Finishing up the low poly in TopoGun now. Any thoughts?

http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/8439/shieldcomposite.png

tremulant

Can anyone help me out with why this is happening? Figured I'd go ahead and test the low poly out and bake out some test normals with a very rough unwrap job. The results are kinda scary.

Low Poly Wire



Marmoset



3ds Quick Max Normal Test




Is there more of a problem with the triangles in the center of the shield? Is some of this caused by the way the unwrap is done? Why am I getting this result in Marmoset?
Why aren't the other parts of the model like the wood, eyes, and rivets even baking into this one? Maybe a cage problem? Lastly if you notice, the front diagonal metal crossing bars are getting baked into the back. I'm thinking this is a cage problem too.

I'm going back now and reworking the low poly to add more geometry to the center parts.

Thanks for your help dudes!

Ferg

invert the green channel on your normal map

respawnrt

Hey dude i think your low poly is overkill.This is how i would aproach it, and leave the bake do the talking

Endzeit

Hey would you mind to show the wire of your highpoly?
The sculpt is looking awesome

tremulant

Hey dudez thanks for the feedback.


Ferg, I tried flipping the Y channel to no avail. I think I had way more problems than I could have imagined!

Respawnrt, Thank you so much for the paint over! I'm just getting a feel for how many polys I need to make a good bake, and you are right I probably could cut out some more. I cut a decent amount from the middle, as you have shown on your paint-over, and was successful to a degree, but there was only so much I could do without screwing up my unwrap. I think I need to keep on moving on it and I will do a better job with each asset that I make in the upcoming posts. I also love your creamy explosion job on the paintover

Endzeit: I will post a wire in a bit

Quack!

Are your smoothing groups set by your uv islands?

What does your normal map look like?

Are you baking in max with a cage?

As respawn said you are using a ton of geo that won't be seen by the player. Always have confidence In your normal map.

tremulant

Here's an update on the normal bake. I unwrapped it again and also cut out some of the excess polys from before- Added a few more though in other areas.

Comments and other request below---

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Quack: My groups aren't set by islands. I posted the normal map below with some places that I am spotting errors circled for my own use. I baked it using Xnormal. I notice that I am going to need to make the cages myself in 3ds max. I am having to kind of do the bake blindly since the highpoly is too high to bring into 3ds max. I am thinking about brining in a decimated version to match it up better though.
Lastly, I have already unwrapped at this point, so I don't know if I want to backtrack so much as I am really far off schedule as it is. I am thinking I will just try to do a better job of this on the next asset I make in here.


Normal maps



Low Poly without maps - Smoothing errors circled







Highpoly Unsmoothed Wire-

Quack!

Wow that looks much better. You should separate your smoothing groups by uv islands always. Also always use a cage. Nice progress.

tremulant

Thanks man Thanks for the tip on the uv islands, I will get right on it.

Quick question for you, or anyone else who wants to chime in. If you look at my normal map you can see that the wood grain is much more deep and pronounced in one side, and almost nonexistent in the other. Any Idea why this is happening?

Quack!

If you rebake with new smoothing groups that may help your errors. Also are you triangulating you mesh manually? If you bake in one program and display in another there's a chance they will triangulate your low poly model differently and cause errorss when you go to display your model.

I bet that if you use the cage instead of the ray distance it will fix your soft normals problem.

[edit] Just realized that your uv groups were just flat planes. The areas you are getting crazy smoothing is because the transition between the two parts is too hard. You need to smooth that out. You can add more geo by chamferring the edges a bit. This will increase your vert/tri count a bit, but is worth it. OR you can break your uv map at the hard angles that are giving you errors. Many times angles of 80-90 degrees can cause issues and need to be broken. Good luck!

tremulant

Here are some updates--It's getting a a bit better. I painted out some of the problems, since nothing was major. I still don't get why one side of the normal map's wood details are displaying at a lower opacity on the normal map. It looks like they are 50 percent as prominent as the other side. Strangely though when moving a light around in Marmoset they both appear pretty much equal.

Here is a marmoset update with the normals cage. Also a just-for-fun render with some BLOOM! Hehe.

tremulant

Texture update, haven't gotten a lot of time to delve in yet, but I have the basic maps applied

tremulant

Still tweaking the spec map and details, gonna break up some of the scratches in the center and fix some highlight shadow issues. Good night dudes:)