Montmartre, Paris.

hollywood-north

Hey lovers!

I'm working on this piece right now. I kinda took a break for a few months but got inspired again and want to go hard and make super rad stuff.

This scene is modeled in Softimage and will be put into UDK later. It's not very modular but I was never really going for that with this scene, maybe my next one

Anyways I will be (attempting) to log my progress in this thread so I can get help from all you wonderful people.







Some pieces are high in the scene while others are low. Little men standing around so I wouldn't mess up the scaling.

There's not much to give advice on or critique but any help will be much appreciated. Thank you ^_^

hollywood-north

Okay small update 'cuz I need some help here

I did a quick normal map test of a simple asset since getting normals really good is usually a weakness for me.

So here's the low poly (66 tris) in Xnormal viewer.



I'm getting weird dark jaggies on the 90 degree edges of the low poly with the normal on.



And here's the normal map rendered with Softimage ultimapper property. Ignore the awful UV's. It is just a test to see if I could get normals working decently.



I'll read up a bunch of normal articles in the mean time but any help is much appreciated! Thank you

wester

In the uv's...anytime you have a 90 degree angle or stronger it gets its own uv shell, and own smoothing group.

On your window frame there should be what looks like 4 uv islands in the unwrap, each island getting it's own smoothing group.

Let me know if that fixes it.

wester

Hopefully this explains it better than i did.

urgaffel

What about doing it this way?

Free_Fall

or this way

' Ignore the awful UV's. It is just a test to see if I could get normals working decently.'

JamesWild

Oh the dark smudgy jaggies? SSAO, as clearly stated in the bottom left corner. Turn it off.

SSAO can be great when done properly but it rarely if ever is.

zakhar2

urgaffel wrote: »

What about doing it this way?

Youre still gonna need splits at the 90 degree edges.

urgaffel

Why?

wester

If you don't separate the 90 degree angles, it creates that gradient in the normal map that doesn't render the surface correctly as you can see by hollywood-north's window seal.

I can't tell you technically why, but separating the uv shells like i had explained will ensure you have a clean normal map bake with no artifacting/no normal map gradients.

JamesWild

Myself I'd throw the whole low poly under one smoothing group and UV it as a relaxed planar from the front. There'll be distortion yeah but it should be within an acceptable tolerance and the vertices you save by not splitting UVs could be spent somewhere else. If you split the UVs along the corners like that you're giving the GPU twice as many vertices to consider.

*turns and runs*

urgaffel

Ah, I see what you mean. It's been too long since I did any high to low poly baking, I've forgotten all the tricks

hollywood-north

Worked perfectly! Thanks a tonne Wester!

wester

No problem