Liam's super shed! :D

menjah

Hey all you lovely people at polycount
I just started learning modeling this year and this is supposed to be part of a demo reel project. For this scene, I'm going for a fairly small area with a house, a bit of land to run around on, and a shed full of old tools. I'm really enjoying learning materials and tinkering with UDK, but I'm having a bit of trouble lately with direction and general things-not-looking-right syndrome. Also workflow, like how much should I be completing in any given day, and how to organize everything between UDK and Maya. I'm assuming my inexperience is causing many of these problems, and maybe you guys can help me out! Any tips, crits, and suggestions are more than welcome.

Here's my reference for the shed:


And here's some shots of my work so far:

David Wakelin

So far the assets look nice.

Only thing I would reccomend is to improve the handle of the lanterns geometry - it looks too rigid, even a metal strap wouldnt be so straight, they tend to be more arch like.

The hammer that is full textured (nearby the lamp ) seems to have something wrong with the iddle of the metal mesh, like its been crushed of some kind or disorted.

The texture of the hammer could be perhaps more dirty? it looks too clean; the rest of the assets are lovely - I'm actually jealous how they resemble their material well with dirty grime and rust on.

- What is your texturing workflow/stepbystep? If you dont mind please As I'm learning too!!

menjah

@David:

Thanks for the reply man Yeah now that you say that about the lantern handle, it does look too perfect when everything else is so banged up. I'll update that. As for the hammer, I haven't actually textured it yet. I just made a quick white material with a normal map so I could see if everything was working in UDK.
As for my workflow, I use all kinds of layer styles when working with diffuse maps, and I recently found out that using the clone brush on a layer with a style really helps break everything up. I'm currently modeling simple stuff and running it through zbrush to make normal maps, just to break up the flat edges. I can post some of my maps if it would help

David Wakelin

That would be very much appreciated. I would consider myself OK at modelling but texturing is a disaster for me.

menjah

Here you go

David Wakelin

How did you generate your specular if you dont mind me asking?

menjah

Desaturate, play with levels and curves in image adjustments, and then paint in scratches and such for where it should be shinier. you can use an image of scratches with color dodge if it helps.

David Wakelin

Kool Cheers

Will have a try

ReviloRezlab

Great assets so far Menjah, I have a small critique: looking at the reference you are going from the anvil you have seems to have a bit too much damage. Maybe reduce the normals a bit. Depending on the material of the Anvil such as Wrought Iron,Bronze or Steel will determine how damage occurs. I'm really liking how you're breaking up the silhouette of the handles on the hammers/mallets. Looking forward to your progression.

menjah

@ReviloRezlab: Greetings Oliver, it's nice to see you on this fine forum. Thanks, I'll see what I can do. I haven't made any changes to the anvil today, but I'll keep that in mine while I tweak and noodle :P

Update!


Aaand I was also having trouble with normal maps. They look just fine in Maya, but they wind up looking really weird in UDK. Anyone know what's up? I tried softening and hardening edges, but all that seems to do is make seams even more visible.

Screenshot:

raul

What are you exporting to udk? If you are using fbx set your smoothing angles to 180, or use one smoothing group. Not sure how maya works. Then make sure that you flip the green channel after you bake. And if none of that work, simply detach the face group of faces on the top, and export it to unreal. That should fix it a bit more.

jordan.kocon

Seconding what Raul saying, almost definitely it's that you haven't inverted your green channel. You can do that inside UDK, but I recommend inverting it in Photoshop, you get a cleaner result.

menjah

Thanks for the replies you guys! Flipping the green did the trick, but does it consistently need its green channel flipped or only sometimes?

Also I'm learning how to use 3dsmax, It has some annoying UI layout differences but it seems to have a better workflow somehow. Lots of useful modeling tools. I may try it out for a few new things.

Again, thanks for the input. I'll update later today with whatever I finish.

*edit
It appears I have not flipped the green channel for any of my normal maps, and it went almost unnoticed for most of them. time to flip them all haha

MagnificentMicrowave

In UDK the green channel always faces down so either switch your baking app's Y direction or flip the green on every normal map you bake.
You should bake your maps with xNormal instead of Maya. The latter tends to make pretty lousy maps if viewed in anything else than its own viewport.

waf

menjah wrote: »

Flipping the green did the trick, but does it consistently need its green channel flipped or only sometimes?

That all depends on where you bake, I think 3dsmax, Blender, Xnormal doesn't need flips, but Maya does.

Most baking programs have options to flip green on export, and if they don't you can set up an action in photoshop to flip green in case you've already exported lots of maps that aren't flipped.

menjah

@MagnificentMicrowave
Okay man thanks for the tip. I currently don't have access to xnormals, I could download it but I spend most of my time at school and have no admin rights to their computers. So alas, I'm stuck with the maya transfer maps :C

@waf
Okay, I'll check and see if there isn't an automatic channel flipper in Maya. I currently haven't made that many assets yet, and so it was no big deal for me to go back and fix all of them. I'm working pretty slowly it seems, I hope to be able to get faster as this thing progresses.

Update!

menjah

@SasoChicken:
Hey man, thanks for the complement! I hope to go for realistic, even if my textures are rather large.

I made this last night and today, but I don't think I'm going to use it. The polycount is too high and it doesn't smooth well. Does anyone have any tutorials or reference for hard surface modeling? I have a lot of trouble with edge flow and wind up spending hours trying to fix bad bevels / loops. I could really use some help

looprix

the textures look good nice attention to detail

DennisGlowacki

baking in Maya works perfect as long as you do everything correctly Normal maps are fickle.

1. Got to have uv seams on any hard edge with enough padding and a hard edge on any uv seams (sounds the same but kinda different lol) I use a script that auto sets the edge softness and then if there are any big planar faces that look terrible I assign hard edges and then add the extra uv seams. If you are interested I can try and find the mel script and send it to you.

2. Gotta import the normal map in udk with tc_normalmap ON IMPORT not after, found that out the hard way.

Here is an example of what happens if you don't set TC_normalmap on import (the normal map becomes weaker and has even worse results if you have any bigger planar surfaces)


3. Maya normal maps have to have the green channel flipped. (you got that covered )

4. Make sure maya is set to geometry normals and not surface normals in the advanced bake options which is default but should make sure. This is so it uses a cage to bake and not ray based. Then make sure your cage is covering everything before you bake. You can modify it manually if changing the offset doesn't do it.


5. make sure your asset is triangulated before you bake or when you import to udk and it triangulates for you it can very well break/change the geometry normals you baked on.

6. Make sure Smoothing groups and 'Tangent and binormals' is checked on fbx export options in maya.

7. Make sure explicit normals and import tangents is checked on import to udk.

if all done correctly you should see in udk exactly what you see inside maya viewport.