I put some more time in, I got a quick and dirty test bake with some shitty auto-unwrapped UVs, lots of ray misses and interpenetration to sort out, later.
Obviously, nowhere near the final bake. :poly122:
I got my boy Xoliul shadin' da pixels, with qualified normals in max 2012.
It's missing certain assymetrical elements, and for whatever reason some of the elements shade darker than the rest. This will most likely all be fixed after I get a proper set of UVs on this puppy.
This will all be sorted out later this week, I got more finals.
Can't crit the bakes, the presentation is too messy. I suggest that you let the model and normal maps speak for themselves. Look at other people's presentation work.
Looks like it's holding up really well, would be cool to see a fps view and a shot with just the normal map and a high spec material, when it's done of course
Thanks people! :thumbup:
Anyway, Got my finals over with.
Not sure what to think about Max 2013 yet, but i'm not really happy with it so far. The Nitrous IBL (and shader support) was not what I had hoped for, and there are hardly any modeling additions. Not much else in there for game modelers, maybe viewport canvas, but what good is that if I don't have good viewport shaders with instant feedback.
New Nitrous 2013 Viewport Render:
I wonder what Luxology has been up to for the past decade? *checks out modo again*
So tempted to pull the trigger (lol) on modo.
I should have some time to get back to work on the low poly model this weekend though (haven't touched it since the last update)...
very awesome! You did a great job with the screws and gun modules making the gun feel as if it can be disassembled and reassembled like any other gun. How many guns have you created before this one?
Got some time to make the low poly better, try out some more test bakes, and test import into UDK. Still gotta finish UVin'g a good chunk of it, so some of it is auto-unwrapped. the stock and scope area for example.
Even with supporting geo and explicit normals from 3-point shader, the curvy shapes like the handle shade incorrectly. I don't thank splitting the UVs will help either.
UDK's tangent-basis/compression situatiom makes me angry. :poly122:
Im re-reading the Normals Sticky threads and doing More test bakes.
lower res, some temp UVs, and missing assyetrical elements:
Still getting the hang of low-poly modeling for Normal Baking, and finding the best way to lay out hard surface UVs. Not in a big hurry though.
Imported into Crysis 2:
I think I am going to want to put this into a Crysis 2 mod, so I'm going to need to add supporting geo on my low and rebake some more since their TBs don't sync to anything.
I was looking at their guns, and I noticed even they have big seams running down the symmetry line.
Any way to avoid this?
I got smoothing groups smoothing across the seams, and offset UV coordinates for when I bake.
I put some more time in and got all my seams in the right spots:
(Green lines are the seams)
These type of hard surface assets end up having a ton of UV Islands and are a pain in the ass to unwrap.
The concept artist put a lot of concave 90 degree features in the gun which only exacerbates the problem. I still gotta go back and fix the ray misses and re-pack the UVs to make them more efficient.
I've probably spent a good workweek on it at this point. Gotta get faster.
If I could recommend one thing, GET TEXTOOLS. :thumbup:
Bind "Iron UV shell" and go to town on your model. BIG TIMESAVER.
3point guys, how long would you spend on one gun? On the texture?
hey your Halo 4 Battle Rifle looks great. I am not much of a modeler in means I do not do it all the time but one good practice is to avoid more than 4 sides. Or more than 4 points/vertices/edges. Also to avoid having anything less then 4. I know that is a pretty well known thing when it comes to modeling, but even one can make a difference. this is all based on Quad modeling.
i feel the texture is alittle bland it needs something some normals/bump/some type of texture. right now the gun is just 1 texture with little to it. this could even help hide some imperfections. not to your edges that you want to sharpen you could do many things add edge loops closer to each. or bump the harden edges attributes much higher.
I'm no 3point guy, but I make sci fi guns for robits... and I usually spend about a week for a third person model. I also get a third the tris your using though, hehe.
Thanks for the feedback, I see you've joined a while ago but only started posting, welcome to Polycount.
For the High-poly, n-gons (greater than 4 sided polygons) are a situation tool that one can use if you plan for them, as passerby clarified earlier in this thread.
In the low poly, you should try and spend you poly budget on your silhouette rather than sticking to quads.
Also, the gun has no texture yet, just an Ambient Occlusion and Normals map.
I personally haven't done a first person model professionally, but I'd imagine I'd take another couple to few days for a first personal model tweaking my workflow from a third person mesh to a first person mesh. Probably no longer than two work weeks though for sure. If working from a strong concept.
That includes the texture I assume? That's cool. Weapon modeler would be an interesting job. A lot of pressure, though, people iron sighting your seams and all :poly142:
What do people do for LODs on these type of models anyway? Just remove polygons entirely? Wouldn't that effect the shading, especially on things that aren't straight forward like cylinders?
Still looks good
Still a few bugs but I guess it will take care of itself when you work more with the baking, don't be afraid to go back to your highpoly and changing things up, to give you a better bake.
Here is a few places that could use some softer edges I think.
About the texture seams, the normal should work well enough without noticing them to much, be more careful with the diffuse texture when painting at the seams, so you don't end up with that fancy butterfly effect.(Green line is the seam)
About lods I have no clue, I would think optimize as much as you can, removing some smaller bevels and details on the lod mesh and reuving the parts that get fucked up.
Got back to this model and put a little time into texturing it today, got the base layers in place.
I am a real noob at texturing, but it is already baked out (Final!) and looks pretty neat without textures.
This is what I got so far, with a shader doing most of the work through my Diffuse, Spec, Gloss, Normal and Glow maps.
Shaded with Xoliul 2
If anyone has any suggestion for where I should take this BR, I would really like to hear it. I've been messing around with photosource texturing and it all comes out looking super amatuer, I'll post more soon.
not sure if its been mentioned before and sorry to chime in if it has, but the dispersion of triangles seems rather odd. while its nice that youve got your rounded shapes filled out up front, you've gone a bit heavy with them in areas they are not needed.
Low poly modeling is not one of my strong points yet. I also got so many UV islands for this model to shade correctly, its getting in the way of texturing with all the seams. I'm hoping mudbox will be usefull in that regard. Thanks for the input.
Awesome work so far, mate. Really love the summary you made for the first post too. As far as the texture goes, the colors look good. Just beef up the spec with some metal overlays and scratches and this thing will pop. You can get the glowey bits on there too.
You want to avoid putting symmetry right in the players face. So for your scope, you had your symmetry line running right down the middle of it. It is best to hide your symmetry line on a detail that is in your high poly. So as you model your high, you can make details that can contain the low polys symmetry line and thus will hide the seam.
It is nice that you are spending the time to get the normals look correct, but don't lose speed, keep going. Get that texture on there!
You want to avoid putting symmetry right in the players face. So for your scope, you had your symmetry line running right down the middle of it. It is best to hide your symmetry line on a detail that is in your high poly. So as you model your high, you can make details that can contain the low polys symmetry line and thus will hide the seam.
It is nice that you are spending the time to get the normals look correct, but don't lose speed, keep going. Get that texture on there!
Good luck.
I didn't know just how much I needed to avoid the problem but I did actually make a lot of the bits in the FPV asymmetrical like the screen, the bolt assembly and the lenses. I definitely learned a lot about low poly modeling in the process.
Inspirational :P it makes me want to make one but i dont think i can make one even close to yours lol i may model the h2 or h3 style br though
Do it man! :thumbup:
This is my first Hard Surface Asset I am taking all the way, I'm not some pro at this by a long shot.
Read all the crits and best practices on the wiki's and threads and get started!
I've been messing around with photosource texturing and it all comes out looking super amatuer
Just be really subtle...the gun looks damned good already..just slight scratches on corners and whatnot, and maybe just the slightest amount of dirt, dust. A very subtle diffuse with a nice spec will do wonders for you.
Looking great man, makes me want to make a pimp gun
Yea, I've been looking at a lot of polycounter's texture sheets and watching and rewatching tutorials.
I'm picking up on the subtle nature of the diffuse maps and highly contrasted spec for metals.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what kind of photosource should go only in the spec or only in the Gloss.
Particularly the gloss being tricky, it doesn't seem to scale linearly in intensity and requires a lot of finesse and tweaking.
(I guess that's why its called specular exponent)
If anyone's got some suggested way to display the model in 3d online, like some WebGL app of Unity flash, I can upload it if you guys want. When I am finished with the model, I can SDK it as well.
This is my first Hard Surface Asset I am taking all the way, I'm not some pro at this by a long shot.
Read all the crits and best practices on the wiki's and threads and get started!
Yeah man i think i will! i mean i usually like hard surface stuff anyway and ive always wanted to model the BR so ya know what I WILL! lol thanks man! im gonna use your threads c&c's to my advantage i love this br though man congrats!
sexy bake! i'm jealous. What texture resolution are you at? I'm currently struggling a bit with baking normals with hard surface stuff. Glad you were able to figure things out, looks amazing. I'll have to re-read the polycount wiki, although I'm using Modo for baking and seems like a lot of the wiki is 3Ds Max related and using custom 3point or Xoliul shaders and stuff. I'm wondering if all the same concepts apply, such as separating UV islands that have hard edges on the low poly etc. Anyway Great job so far!
sexy bake! i'm jealous. What texture resolution are you at? I'm currently struggling a bit with baking normals with hard surface stuff. Glad you were able to figure things out, looks amazing. I'll have to re-read the polycount wiki, although I'm using Modo for baking and seems like a lot of the wiki is 3Ds Max related and using custom 3point or Xoliul shaders and stuff. I'm wondering if all the same concepts apply, such as separating UV islands that have hard edges on the low poly etc. Anyway Great job so far!
Yes all the same rules apply with hard edges and uv islands and smoothing groups.
Thats great for first gun project,looking real good.Did you enable qualified normals for this and is there only single sg?
Yeah don't bake in modo.Even in the 601 version there's no averaged cage.Ray distance method yields worst results.Use modo only for model and uv stuff.Try xnormal or simply bake in 3dsmax/maya.
Model is epic and all that but it's Bungie property right, I mean it's the Halo battle rifle. What is it then, just a portfolio piece? I mean it can't go into any game unless YOU work for the company
it's a piece of art bro, doesnt matter if 343i or Microsoft own the rights to it, it's fan art, he's not claiming the design is his or anything, he's just making an awesome gun
Oh didn't you hear? I am launching a Halo Competitor on the the PS3 in Q3 2012.
It will have "skirmish rifles", "designated shooter rifles", and even "plasma projectile launchers".
Not sure what to call it yet, something with rings...
Model is epic and all that but it's Bungie property right, I mean it's the Halo battle rifle. What is it then, just a portfolio piece? I mean it can't go into any game unless YOU work for the company
Dude are you serious? Have you never seen anyone do other games art (fan art) on this forum in the past?
Replies
Obviously, nowhere near the final bake. :poly122:
I got my boy Xoliul shadin' da pixels, with qualified normals in max 2012.
It's missing certain assymetrical elements, and for whatever reason some of the elements shade darker than the rest. This will most likely all be fixed after I get a proper set of UVs on this puppy.
This will all be sorted out later this week, I got more finals.
PS: MassFX is pretty nifty:
One MB per BR.
Of to shoot some aliens!!
Thanks people!
Anyway, Got my finals over with.
Not sure what to think about Max 2013 yet, but i'm not really happy with it so far. The Nitrous IBL (and shader support) was not what I had hoped for, and there are hardly any modeling additions. Not much else in there for game modelers, maybe viewport canvas, but what good is that if I don't have good viewport shaders with instant feedback.
I wonder what Luxology has been up to for the past decade? *checks out modo again*
So tempted to pull the trigger (lol) on modo.
I should have some time to get back to work on the low poly model this weekend though (haven't touched it since the last update)...
Thanks for the comment.
Even with supporting geo and explicit normals from 3-point shader, the curvy shapes like the handle shade incorrectly. I don't thank splitting the UVs will help either.
UDK's tangent-basis/compression situatiom makes me angry. :poly122:
lower res, some temp UVs, and missing assyetrical elements:
Still getting the hang of low-poly modeling for Normal Baking, and finding the best way to lay out hard surface UVs. Not in a big hurry though.
Imported into Crysis 2:
I think I am going to want to put this into a Crysis 2 mod, so I'm going to need to add supporting geo on my low and rebake some more since their TBs don't sync to anything.
I was looking at their guns, and I noticed even they have big seams running down the symmetry line.
Any way to avoid this?
I got smoothing groups smoothing across the seams, and offset UV coordinates for when I bake.
I put some more time in and got all my seams in the right spots:
(Green lines are the seams)
These type of hard surface assets end up having a ton of UV Islands and are a pain in the ass to unwrap.
The concept artist put a lot of concave 90 degree features in the gun which only exacerbates the problem. I still gotta go back and fix the ray misses and re-pack the UVs to make them more efficient.
I've probably spent a good workweek on it at this point. Gotta get faster.
If I could recommend one thing, GET TEXTOOLS.
Bind "Iron UV shell" and go to town on your model. BIG TIMESAVER.
3point guys, how long would you spend on one gun? On the texture?
Battle Rifle's looking sweet! :poly121:
hey your Halo 4 Battle Rifle looks great. I am not much of a modeler in means I do not do it all the time but one good practice is to avoid more than 4 sides. Or more than 4 points/vertices/edges. Also to avoid having anything less then 4. I know that is a pretty well known thing when it comes to modeling, but even one can make a difference. this is all based on Quad modeling.
i feel the texture is alittle bland it needs something some normals/bump/some type of texture. right now the gun is just 1 texture with little to it. this could even help hide some imperfections. not to your edges that you want to sharpen you could do many things add edge loops closer to each. or bump the harden edges attributes much higher.
I'm no 3point guy, but I make sci fi guns for robits... and I usually spend about a week for a third person model. I also get a third the tris your using though, hehe.
I just want to get every step perfect since this is a portfolio piece. Still experimenting, you know. It's my first gun after-all.
What about on a first person gun?
@Steven Buono:
Thanks for the feedback, I see you've joined a while ago but only started posting, welcome to Polycount.
For the High-poly, n-gons (greater than 4 sided polygons) are a situation tool that one can use if you plan for them, as passerby clarified earlier in this thread.
In the low poly, you should try and spend you poly budget on your silhouette rather than sticking to quads.
Also, the gun has no texture yet, just an Ambient Occlusion and Normals map.
I personally haven't done a first person model professionally, but I'd imagine I'd take another couple to few days for a first personal model tweaking my workflow from a third person mesh to a first person mesh. Probably no longer than two work weeks though for sure. If working from a strong concept.
What do people do for LODs on these type of models anyway? Just remove polygons entirely? Wouldn't that effect the shading, especially on things that aren't straight forward like cylinders?
Still a few bugs but I guess it will take care of itself when you work more with the baking, don't be afraid to go back to your highpoly and changing things up, to give you a better bake.
Here is a few places that could use some softer edges I think.
About the texture seams, the normal should work well enough without noticing them to much, be more careful with the diffuse texture when painting at the seams, so you don't end up with that fancy butterfly effect.(Green line is the seam)
About lods I have no clue, I would think optimize as much as you can, removing some smaller bevels and details on the lod mesh and reuving the parts that get fucked up.
Hope we get to see some textures from you soon
I am a real noob at texturing, but it is already baked out (Final!) and looks pretty neat without textures.
This is what I got so far, with a shader doing most of the work through my Diffuse, Spec, Gloss, Normal and Glow maps.
Shaded with Xoliul 2
If anyone has any suggestion for where I should take this BR, I would really like to hear it. I've been messing around with photosource texturing and it all comes out looking super amatuer, I'll post more soon.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13680846/tris.jpg
aside from that its lookin very nice. wouldve gone a tad bit harder on the edges under/around the sight but what youve got still works.
It is nice that you are spending the time to get the normals look correct, but don't lose speed, keep going. Get that texture on there!
Good luck.
The symmetry above the ammo counter is a bit bad looking, I would probably get rid of that little dip in the middle.
I didn't know just how much I needed to avoid the problem but I did actually make a lot of the bits in the FPV asymmetrical like the screen, the bolt assembly and the lenses. I definitely learned a lot about low poly modeling in the process.
Do it man! :thumbup:
This is my first Hard Surface Asset I am taking all the way, I'm not some pro at this by a long shot.
Read all the crits and best practices on the wiki's and threads and get started!
Just be really subtle...the gun looks damned good already..just slight scratches on corners and whatnot, and maybe just the slightest amount of dirt, dust. A very subtle diffuse with a nice spec will do wonders for you.
Looking great man, makes me want to make a pimp gun
I'm picking up on the subtle nature of the diffuse maps and highly contrasted spec for metals.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what kind of photosource should go only in the spec or only in the Gloss.
Particularly the gloss being tricky, it doesn't seem to scale linearly in intensity and requires a lot of finesse and tweaking.
(I guess that's why its called specular exponent)
That is the low poly, maybe you missed this post?
If anyone's got some suggested way to display the model in 3d online, like some WebGL app of Unity flash, I can upload it if you guys want. When I am finished with the model, I can SDK it as well.
Yes all the same rules apply with hard edges and uv islands and smoothing groups.
Yeah don't bake in modo.Even in the 601 version there's no averaged cage.Ray distance method yields worst results.Use modo only for model and uv stuff.Try xnormal or simply bake in 3dsmax/maya.
It will have "skirmish rifles", "designated shooter rifles", and even "plasma projectile launchers".
Not sure what to call it yet, something with rings...
Dude are you serious? Have you never seen anyone do other games art (fan art) on this forum in the past?
FFS
you know it's pretty iconic
wonder if Borderlands trademarked their weapons?
http://cahemdue.net/images/3d_BorderlandsShotgun2Coll.png
I get ya
I was thinking too literally sorry