Prop Exercise

Sheers

Hey everyone! I made this prop for practice. I still need to texture it, but I thought I would share it now. Advice, comments, and opinions are welcome.

Thanks to Joshflighter for telling me about this place!

Joshflighter

Can't wait to see some textures on this.
keep at it!

Lucas Annunziata

Welcome Sheers! A few things that might help out with a critique on a prop such as this:

1)a wireframe shot and polygon count, to see if there are any areas to be optimized.
2)a texture flat, to see if the space is used efficiently
3)What is it/what are your plans for it? I understand it is a prop, but functionality will help to determine what kind of texture jobby you apply to this.

Overall, its a damn good start. It looks like you baked most of the detail down from a hi-poly model? You're getting some nice highlights on the corner. If I had to guess its some time of cooling unit? a Server? One thing that is sticking out to me is the AO around the rings is pretty heavy, yet where that face meets the base pieces sticking out, there appears to be no AO at all.

Keep at it!

The Lone Penguin

Pretty much what darbee said, also it looks like on the side you were using floating geo to make some indents but the AO still baked around the floating piece (at least this is how it looks given the way the AO baked). Make sure you remember to clean that up otherwise it looks a little funky.

Sheers

Okay, thanks for the responses! I will clean it up.

Darbee, it's just a little unit.

heres a wireframe



and heres the sheet.

The Lone Penguin

Can definitely maximize your UV space more. You have two pieces that will probably never be seen taking up a large amount of UV space. Even if you do see the top part, the shell of something you see should probably be bigger than one you won't. You also have some pretty simple high poly geo in there. There's nothing wrong with floaters really, but it wouldn't hurt learning how to make those shapes part of the mesh if they're going to indent into it.

Sheers

Question: How would you do lights in a texture? Is there a special map you have to make? Or is it only done with Lights in Max?

XRevan23

You can make a glow/emmisive map, in max I think its called Self-Illumination

Sheers

Thanks Revan!

I did some texture work this week. Here's what I have conjured up so far. I need some help on where to go from here texture wise. I don't know where else I can add paint or something to make it more interesting. Or is it even fine like this? Help a man out!

XRevan23

I think your heading in the right direction but the textures need a little more loving right now, this is a hard surface metal tutorial I found pretty helpful, its a bit old but the foundation is their

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=373024

mostly the edges, adding some grudge and scratches, also probable need a spec map to help out to make it look metallic and highlight things

Sheers

Alright, I decided to call it done on this one. I learned a lot from this exercise, and thanks to all those who helped me out!

Here's the final one.