UDK kickass props and weapons

zelldweller

A friend of mine said that it was about time that I stopped doing what I was doing, because it was not challenging enough for me now and plainly because it was not going to be good enough to impress anyone to hire me, and that instead I should grab the most harcore prop concepts I could find and give, and do my best to make some realtime props out of them. So after a while searching around the internet I found this concept:



And started doing the third axe, and after I think 8-9 hours or so, it looks like this:



I've got all the lements in place, I still need to do some work on the bone part of the blade, and polish everything up, I'll probably start working on the low poly by tomorrow

Rockley Bonner

Wikid sculpt dude! Cant wait to see this finished

adam

You know we have a contest going on to make badass Axes, Maces or Hammers... right?

zelldweller

Yep, it's just that I've never designed or modeled any props or anything as complex as this. Anyway I think there's still plenty of time to do something for the contest...

adam

Great :thumbup:

zelldweller

First Version of tHe low poly witH tHe normal maps baked

Alberto Rdrgz

setup light tracer and bake out an AO for this!

Blaisoid

i think the blade has too much of a clay feel to it. other than that it looks cool.

JR

Blaisoid wrote: »

i think the blade has too much of a clay feel to it. other than that it looks cool.

Agreed. Some parts of your weapon looks like they are melting. It's all done in Zbrush? I know it's ready by now, but I think in a model like this it's worth to do a defined high poly base in a program like Max or Maya.

The normal mapped version looks a bit strange to me, but unfortunately I don't understand normal maps enough yet to say what or help you to improve

zelldweller

Well, I know whats wrong with normal maps... I need to do better with smoothing groups, the normal map is being averaged in places it shouln't, like in the edge of the blade, It had the same smoothing group in both sides when I baked it, that's why its painting it black, and softened, and the same in some other places
Gosh I did this like soooo damn late in the night and I was so tired, I coudn't fix it before going to bed.

Here's a turnaround on the finished sculpt I recorded yesterday, I would like to hear your critics on it, rather than the first one, its much smoother and for me, its done, I couldn't think of any ways of making it better

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVz5aJDiv2M&context=C41dc5b4ADvjVQa1PpcFN0kcPGYSSUZqvV8Sas5T44kOuaFAgv6r0="]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVz5aJDiv2M&context=C41dc5b4ADvjVQa1PpcFN0kcPGYSSUZqvV8Sas5T44kOuaFAgv6r0=[/ame]

zelldweller

After proper setup of the smoothing groups and normals, the model is looking waaaaaaaaaaay better Check it out!

Snader

Still looks like clay, though.

achillesian

bake looks great now, snader is right though, some parts are looking lumpy, if metal isn't going to be straight, it needs to look like its been pounded or hammered, not melty

AlecMoody

what shader is that? It looks like one of max's built in fx shaders.

zelldweller

AlecMoody wrote: »

what shader is that? It looks like one of max's built in fx shaders.

Its Xioul shader, setting up normal, specular and diffuse.

zelldweller

Resculpted the lumpy part to a cleaner shape, and started working on the material... Hopefully it'll be finished this night or tomorrow morning... I sould still add some noise to the normals in some parts, and a bit more dirt. Everything still looks like plastic, I need to make a gloss map to fix it i think

Dataday

You are using zbrush? Part of the problem is that you havent perfected sculpting cleanly, meaning, perfect the art of making cleaner lines, sharp edges and fine details. As others have pointed out, you are just making a clunky clay looking object, not a weapon made of steel and other hard surface material.

Are you making use of Masks in zbrush? Do so!

PixelMasher

yea maybe try running one of the trim brushes down the edge of that to make it had a nice hard crips edge.

DJ_Aaron

Trim dynamic / H-polish Brush ! Great for creating hard edges :P

zelldweller

God, well, yeah, I use al that stuff... , trim dynamic, hard polish, clipping brushes etc, but it's clear that I need some more practice in making things cleaner. I've got much better with this one than what i was doing before though...

zelldweller

I've been working on my textures again this morning, trying to get rid of the plastic look...



I'm not working more time on the sculpt, but I'll try to be cleaner for the next ones and leave everything "harder" and more regular...

toxic_h2o

yeah it might be good to make sure you have a solid base mesh before taking it into zbrush next time.
Hard surface stuff in zbrush can be tricky.

JR

Are you using reference, man? At this moment, metal is not metal looking yet. Have you already read this wonderful article?

http://www.manufato.com/?p=902

zelldweller

Thanks for the link, I'm reading it

JR

You're welcome. There´s some more great ones here:

http://wiki.polycount.com/TexturingTutorials

zelldweller

I was not aware of this thing of using inverse colours to get a white specular on non-metallic materials, hehe, thanks for the info... I'll give it a try as soon as I can.

Another update:

zelldweller

OK then,
I've uploaded a video of the finished result to youtube here:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyB5dk7_at0"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyB5dk7_at0[/ame]

And I'm already working on the next one, the axe with the skulls... I'll try to sculpt it cleaner this time to make everyone happy

zelldweller

Well, after a day of work I am nearly done with most of the sculpt for my second attempt making complicated props:
I managed to do almost everything in zbrush. I needed to use 3ds max because I was stuck in making the tubes by the central skull.

I should also have used it for the saw bordered shape in the lower blades, and the tubes surrounding too... It took me too much time making them in zbrush, and it didn't turned out as clean as I wanted, and in exactly the same shape.

The next time I'll make complicated hard shapes straight in 3ds max...

JR

It´s pretty cool man. But I believe you would get better results making the blades and arrows over blades in Max. They would have edges more defined and metalic looking. Then you could use zbrush to add some imperfections and cracks.

zelldweller

jramauri wrote: »

It´s pretty cool man. But I believe you would get better results making the blades and arrows over blades in Max. They would have edges more defined and metalic looking. Then you could use zbrush to add some imperfections and cracks.

I don´t know, maybe it's true, and on top of that, maybe it's quicker. I have to give it a try with the next one I do from start, and see what happens...
Making everything from scratch in zbrush doesn't seem to be the best idea.

Xelan101

I second Jramauri's idea. Having had most of my experience in Zbrush over the last year or so I still haven't come anywhere near perfecting a way to do hard surface stuff in Zbrush, it takes a whole lot of practice and there's lots of tutorials out there now solely focused on doing it.

But personally I'd say it's a whole lot easier to build a base mesh with Max get all the shapes and hard edges you want and then use Zbrush for organic detail. If you look at a lot of the threads right now for the Darksiders Contest you'll find that most of them at least build some sort of base mesh in Max before moving on to the sculpt.

zelldweller

I could finish the blade polishing some more and I think it looks quite harder :P
I remade the spikes at the top using a new base mesh that I made 3ds max and it seems the way to go from now on for the more complicated shapes...



I'll try to finish the low poly and bakes today, so I can start texturing tomorrow

JR

It´s looking much better now. Great improvement since your first model. Previous blades on this model and first one were looking like clay. This last one is looking like metal. Keep it up!

zelldweller

I had some trouble baking stuff, because I was trying to reduce the polycount so much, and also because triangulation was not as well as it should at first...
But at last I made this:



I'll have a quiet cup of coffee and try to look at it in a while with fresh eyes, to see better what else could I improve. Any critics will be welcome

Blaisoid

metal parts look really cool.

i don't get what's going on with eye sockets. they look pretty shallow as if there were squinted eyes inside them but if its eyes then they're not defined well.

zelldweller

Blaisoid wrote: »

metal parts look really cool.

i don't get what's going on with eye sockets. they look pretty shallow as if there were squinted eyes inside them but if its eyes then they're not defined well.

Ops, it was just that they were shining because the specular there should have been black and it was not. It was more like being hollow eyes, they where black in the concept and I was leaving them not black but like full of dirt

Thanks for pointing out.

I think I'm done with this axe, I have one week only if I want to try something for the darksiders contest. I put myself half up to date this morning watching Bobo's livestream, and I'm just gonna watch the other one about concept.