Looking real nice atm. I feel his neck is a bit too heavy/thick which is making his head look less significant. The head should be the key, dominating part of the dragon imo.
started retopo/making game ready version. challenging trying to keep certain elements of the silouhette whilst maintaining the poly count i'm after (aiming for 18k triangles for the whole mesh).
i'm most likely going to make the spines as floating geometry... seems like without doing that UVWing is going to be really difficult. unless anyone has any pointers?
Looking cool so far, nice progress. I fucking love dragons, so I can't wait to see how this turns out.
Digging the shapes you have for the upper head, not so sure about the jaw though, I know you've already started the low poly but I wonder if removing some of those spikes at the back of the jaw would look better, they look a tad randomly placed at the moment. It would be nice to see a hard angular shape at the back of the jaw. But that's just me.
i have no problem removing some of the spikes, because you're right it does just make it look a little noisy.
edit: what do you think about having maybe one or two larger spikes instead of the many small ones, and perhapse use them for the reins that the character would need to hold onto?
something along the lines of what GW did with their dragons recently:
if i did something like that for the lower jaw?
another edit:
something like this (using low poly for example here), shouldn't be a massive deal to resculpt the lower jaw to fit.
Looks cool, man. A lot of details
It looks a bit misshapen at some places though like the toes and those fins on i'ts nose. Perhaps you could have a thorough look through the whole sculpt to see what places need defining more. I think the front legs/arms are a bit too short compared to the back ones as well but that might be just me.
Keep it up! Your best piece yet.
wow, awesome work so far! those spikes on your latest image look good, but the dragon looks really good w/out them, too.
On the hi-poly: the texture on the arms and legs is pretty good, but do you think the knee spikes are necessary? They are kind of distracting, and don't really match the design, imo. The armor on the thighs seems a bit out of place, also. same with the forearm texture.
Keep up the good work! I'm really excited to see where this will go!
Random question - what texture sizes are you going to be using on the in-game model? and how are you going to keep the scales and finer details from turning to noise?
well, i checked out some of the dragon files from skyrim, and
Parthurnax
has a 1024*2048 texture, and he's pretty detailed! it's making me think i should stick to a 2048 for the whole thing lol.
i'm a little confused as to what each map does though... he only has two files, a diffuse+alpha, and a normal+alpha. i'm 99% sure the normalmap alpha is the specular, but the diffuse alpha i'm really unsure about, it couldn't be opacity as it's too dark in a lot of areas, but i wasn't aware of skyrim using any form of SSS either... so i really don't know! can anyone shed some light on this?
I'm assuming that the diffuse alpha is used as a mask for a number of magic effects but the main thing that comes to mind would be the soul absorbing sequence. Notice how the wings go first and they appear to be the darkest areas on that map.
well, i checked out some of the dragon files from skyrim, and
Parthurnax
has a 1024*2048 texture, and he's pretty detailed! it's making me think i should stick to a 2048 for the whole thing lol.
i'm a little confused as to what each map does though... he only has two files, a diffuse+alpha, and a normal+alpha. i'm 99% sure the normalmap alpha is the specular, but the diffuse alpha i'm really unsure about, it couldn't be opacity as it's too dark in a lot of areas, but i wasn't aware of skyrim using any form of SSS either... so i really don't know! can anyone shed some light on this?
Damn, alot of wasted space on that UV Layout.... : \
Looks like that Wing or whatever could have been symmetric as well. About 50% is wasted right now. If that wing was cut, could gain prob 75% resolution.
i'm actually surprised a lot of the weapons aren't simply atlas'd. but yeah i'll try to be a little more economical with my own uvw map... which is killing me right now >_>
Well, I'd think atlasing a bunch of weapons or armor would only be beneficial if you knew what or how many items are on screen at a given moment, because there'd be a good chance that you had a bunch of weapons each from a separate set or atlas so you'd end up loading a bunch of maps but only using a fraction of them. Perhaps they decided that saving the texture memory was worth the extra draw calls.
Hey your stuff looks awesome, its a shame I am super busy right now with Uni work to get into this. I just have a question about the "atlas'd" term, do you mean there are several textures that would have just specific textures on that a weapon would call upon.. so for example a texture of just handles, blades, etc? instead of having weapons with their own unique texture?
sorry to slightly side track your thread for a sec haha.
Textures fantastic, but yeah soooo much wasted space. I would split this down into maybe two textures instead, which should allow you much more freedom. But the pcking is the only thing thats letting it down right now. Such an amazing model/texture.
i'm not sure... i think if i counted up all the hours, maybe 24 hours (over 3 day period) on the high poly, 4 hours on the low poly/retopo, and 8 on the unwrap, so far.
but that's spread out over many days due to having life to deal with at the same time :P
i wantes to use max to bake but it was taking foreeeever so i switched to xnormal.
i had to reinstall xNormal because it wasn't taking my projection cage, which was a pain.
i had to tweak the ray distances as well, as it was picking up the wings on the hind legs. and at some point during the process of trying to find the right export settings, max crashed and my only backup was scaled wrong for some random reason, so i had to rescale the lowpoly mesh and line it up with the high poly...
edit mesh and edit poly, tried both. i think it was just the version of xNormal i was using was bugged in that regard, because after i installed the newest version it worked fine.
don't get your hopes up on the texture guys, it's my weakest area
i'll post the normal bake shortly, i'm still tweaking some things here and there, and getting all those spines into the map... UGH.
the 1024*2048 texture was the stock one, not sure what the high res one is as i haven't looked yet.
i used a project modifier in max, exported that as a mesh, and imported it into xnormal. it wasn't working in 3.17.5, but i installed 3.17.8 and it works fine now.
Hmm... Maybe its my eyes, but theres a tad of smoothing error on it in quite a few places, plus some stretching. But it may work out to your advantage? Look at the back of his neck, you can create a uv island split over each of those large scale/plates and not only would it fix smoothing, it would also allow you to re-gig the uv layout some more so that you can fit more in? The wings, atm, are the parts that stick out most of all to me, for being so low res/stretchd?
I take it you MUST stick to the original low poly model/uv map or something?
EDIT: No, you made your own low as well, so that uv map won't count from the original game... Hmmm... Just seems like you could get in 2x the detail with a little UV map magic, and I still strongly stand by split the mesh into two surfaces inside the same model, you can fit more in.
i'll post the normal bake shortly, i'm still tweaking some things here and there, and getting all those spines into the map... UGH.
the 1024*2048 texture was the stock one, not sure what the high res one is as i haven't looked yet.
i used a project modifier in max, exported that as a mesh, and imported it into xnormal. it wasn't working in 3.17.5, but i installed 3.17.8 and it works fine now.
with the sbm exporter you don't need a separate cage but it needs to be edit mesh to work, however it worked for you so maybe for the next time ^^
i've masked off most of the scales by using a combination of height and cavity maps, so i can (if i choose to) make them follow any colour scheme i like really, but here's roughly where i am for now, with regards to colours that i like.
Replies
i could release it as an SDK to animators though if there was enough interest?
started retopo/making game ready version. challenging trying to keep certain elements of the silouhette whilst maintaining the poly count i'm after (aiming for 18k triangles for the whole mesh).
i'm most likely going to make the spines as floating geometry... seems like without doing that UVWing is going to be really difficult. unless anyone has any pointers?
Looking cool so far, nice progress. I fucking love dragons, so I can't wait to see how this turns out.
Digging the shapes you have for the upper head, not so sure about the jaw though, I know you've already started the low poly but I wonder if removing some of those spikes at the back of the jaw would look better, they look a tad randomly placed at the moment. It would be nice to see a hard angular shape at the back of the jaw. But that's just me.
Cool stuff, keep it up!!
edit: what do you think about having maybe one or two larger spikes instead of the many small ones, and perhapse use them for the reins that the character would need to hold onto?
something along the lines of what GW did with their dragons recently:
if i did something like that for the lower jaw?
another edit:
something like this (using low poly for example here), shouldn't be a massive deal to resculpt the lower jaw to fit.
It looks a bit misshapen at some places though like the toes and those fins on i'ts nose. Perhaps you could have a thorough look through the whole sculpt to see what places need defining more. I think the front legs/arms are a bit too short compared to the back ones as well but that might be just me.
Keep it up! Your best piece yet.
On the hi-poly: the texture on the arms and legs is pretty good, but do you think the knee spikes are necessary? They are kind of distracting, and don't really match the design, imo. The armor on the thighs seems a bit out of place, also. same with the forearm texture.
Keep up the good work! I'm really excited to see where this will go!
Random question - what texture sizes are you going to be using on the in-game model? and how are you going to keep the scales and finer details from turning to noise?
almost done with the retopo/lowpoly. currently sitting at 12k tri's but i still have some more to do. so it's well under budget at the moment.
edit: i think the forarms may be too short...
I would split it over a couple of textures though, theres just no way even a single 4096x4096 would give this thing justice...
i'm a little confused as to what each map does though... he only has two files, a diffuse+alpha, and a normal+alpha. i'm 99% sure the normalmap alpha is the specular, but the diffuse alpha i'm really unsure about, it couldn't be opacity as it's too dark in a lot of areas, but i wasn't aware of skyrim using any form of SSS either... so i really don't know! can anyone shed some light on this?
here are the textures, the originals are .dds files, so i've split out the alpha channels so you can see more clearly which is which...
diffuse
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/parthurnax.png
diffuse alpha
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/parthurnax_alpha.png
normal
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/parthurnax_n.png
normal alpha
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/parthurnax_n_alpha.png
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Edit: Your dragon kicks ass.
Damn, alot of wasted space on that UV Layout.... : \
Looks like that Wing or whatever could have been symmetric as well. About 50% is wasted right now. If that wing was cut, could gain prob 75% resolution.
sorry to slightly side track your thread for a sec haha.
Monitoring.
but that's spread out over many days due to having life to deal with at the same time :P
UGH!
Can't wait to see this textured.
don't get your hopes up on the texture guys, it's my weakest area
It's a learning adventure!
Can you post the normal bake?
Is the 1kx2k texture the stock size or the one that comes with the high res. texture pack that was released a few weeks ago?
In regards to the cage issue, did you try using a custom cage mesh or xNormal's own cage feature?
the 1024*2048 texture was the stock one, not sure what the high res one is as i haven't looked yet.
i used a project modifier in max, exported that as a mesh, and imported it into xnormal. it wasn't working in 3.17.5, but i installed 3.17.8 and it works fine now.
I take it you MUST stick to the original low poly model/uv map or something?
EDIT: No, you made your own low as well, so that uv map won't count from the original game... Hmmm... Just seems like you could get in 2x the detail with a little UV map magic, and I still strongly stand by split the mesh into two surfaces inside the same model, you can fit more in.
with the sbm exporter you don't need a separate cage but it needs to be edit mesh to work, however it worked for you so maybe for the next time ^^
i've masked off most of the scales by using a combination of height and cavity maps, so i can (if i choose to) make them follow any colour scheme i like really, but here's roughly where i am for now, with regards to colours that i like.