i think your spec map needs work, your textures look quite flat, can barely tell you have a normal map. looks kinda like your spec was generated off the normals for some reason.
You specular definately needs work, it needs to bring out the metal in a proper way, its a little too bloated of sort atm, try using textures of metal and work it into a natural style metal.
MODEL
It looks too high for an RTS, but aside from that:
You're wasting a lot of polies on the sides of the main ship.
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bad good
would save you a good 300 or so polies per side I think.
You should also use this on the propellors. The properllors also need less sides than the big tubes they're in. In general, try to avoid cuts in lines if you're gonna keep them straight anyway (like on top, in the mouth etc)
DESIGN
The lower cannon is really flimsy, and would be in the way while landing. The engines make no sense because they look like jet turbines, but they have no way for air to pass through. Where's the cockpit and how do you see where you're going?
TEXTURES
You're mostly using a bunch of filters, giving very bland materials. Use photoref, paint in more, add details: decals, dirt, damage.
Looks like u used crazybump to save the nrm,spec out from diff. Crazybump is only good for some env stuff but not good for hard surface like your ship, if u used crazybump. Always have clean normal map eitherwise it will look very bumpy.
Learn to bake from a highpoly, and everything you do will start looking a lot better. When you're working with normalmaps and you generate them this way, all you're doing is shooting yourself in the foot. It doesn't look good, and will in fact make it so that no matter how good your diffuse is, it'll still look awful.
When you start from a highpoly, not only does it look much, much better, you've then also got something you can render AO from, which makes for a fantastic base to texture from (as an overlay, for masks etc.), and one that will fit your normals perfectly.
Also, I believe one or more of your channels are flipped. The lighting in that normalmap-only shit doesn't make sense at all.
Then, your lowpoly...
A lot of the loops in there don't contribute to the form at all, so those should go. Immediately, you've shaved a lot of tris off, and you're only getting started.
So far you haven't impacted the look of your model at all, just how well it performs. Now you can get creative with optimising parts that don't change the model drastically, taking away edges that (especially at the tiny on-screen size of an rts unit!) just aren't necessary.
Look at your model at the size it will be seen at, and ask yourself: what can safely go without making things look awful?
You've got a great concept here, but I'd say it could use a lot of work.
For modelling you could do a lot, you've got a lot of polygons that are pretty much worthless if you're going for low poly. The main structure also looks extremly bumpy on top.
The texturing work is really noise. Maybe look into how metal tends to wear.
Well, the texture really needs work in my opinion. For one, when you look at it even from a medium distance, everything starts meshing together and it's very hard to tell the surface of each part of the ship. It looks like it's made of a very heavy material, border lining rock or something. And when you say you see this being in an RTS, when you put the unit in that small birds eye perspective you won't be able to see any detail because of the texture.
I'd say get more contrast in colors and don't be afraid to get a bit bright with them.
Hey Necron good to see you here Good advice all around, can't wait to see this after some rework. You might consider really pushing the details of the high poly, adding things like seams and rivets and vents, etc etc, just body detailing. Then let the bake and resulting AO cast from that really determine your diffuse and specular texturing.
Chris, there is some great feedback here but remember it's not something that's extremely new. I really hope you can put some of this stuff to good use and I can't wait to see an update of this.
Snader, I would really appreciate your thoughts on what else I could do besides the jet turbines. Personally, I was going for a futuristic, anti-grav concept with the "turbines" there for the Dropship X99 to remain in the air to hover while it provides fire support, and it would be able to move side by side while attack. But I understand the criticism in them being on the ship, given this a highly futuristic design and it isn't very clear about it's functionality.
For the model, what things do you think I could do to better the design in terms of practicality or use?
It doesn't show how it would go side to side, at most it looks like it could rotate to trust forward, up, down, and to the back, by rotating along the cylinder connecting it to the ship.
The big problem with it, is when you look at a real Turbine engine it's pretty much a ventilator/fan inside a tunnel shape. Your design has only 2 blades, giving very little thrust, but it also has a solid block behind it instead of a tunnel.
I'd go for a more traditional look:
And then add on some glowy lights if necessary. This mockup comes in fairly light at 466 tris per engine, but could be less ofcourse. Another possible solution would be not to go with something resembling a yet, but instead looking like a rocket engine(either a regular one or the more futuristic looking Aerospike type). You would also do well to add some extra thrusters, either as separate units or integrated like you can see in the space shuttle nose.
On the overall design, I'd try to integrate things more. Not having the weapons stick out on such a distance from the ship, not having the lower dock-thing being so thin and plopped on, and getting the engines closer to the hull too. Personally I'm not a big fan of the bulkiness and the lack of a visible cockpit, though that's your own choice. Though you might want to add some cameras.
You're also lacking in doors, I can only find the cargo bay and no extra hatches and airlocks.
The feet you've added are very bunched up in the middle of the craft, it looks as if it could quite easily fall on it's side. Also the triangular layout of the feet would look more practical if the centre foot was a more substantial than the other two. Think more snowmobile and less reliant robin
The feet you've added are very bunched up in the middle of the craft, it looks as if it could quite easily fall on it's side. Also the triangular layout of the feet would look more practical if the centre foot was a more substantial than the other two. Think more snowmobile and less reliant robin
hey if you have seen topgear you'll know that a reliant robin allmost became a space ship
The one thing I notice right off the bat is that your high poly details are too minimal to be successfully transfered to a normal map. Exaggerate the forms, and stay away from sharp or 90 degree angles; they won't show up well at all. Also your high poly seems quite sloppy, most of the forms are "squishy" and have smoothing errors. Keep working at it...
i stand by my crit yes it was a little too succinct too be much use though...
with your updated model i have several points to make up for it ;-)
- this wouldnt be usefull for starcraft2 been playing it for a while and im pretty sure that the specs are way too high... even if your downsizing the textures I think you would be loosing most of the work youve put in leaving something undistinct... i would work at closer to the right specs...
in fact i would set up two cameras with a similar distance to the zoomed in zoomed in and out cameras in say SC2 add some lights and rotate the model to get an idea of exactly what needs to be put in and what is pointless...
5300 tris seams quite high and looking at the model your adding them in strange places, the guns the engine manifolds and the impleller cones are way too high you coulkd halve the polys spent here easily and never see it you also have some little wee grooves and chamfers on the engines, nose gun and undercarrige that do not add to the silohette and make the model unecessarily busy (bad for AA when veiwed at a distance)
look at the medivac dropship from SC2, looks like it has 12 spans in each engine and four on the guns, all details that are small are not modeled they are texctured and i would be surprised if the textures above 512*
texturing- look at how the sc2 dropships details are nice and chunky..with nice bold colour variations which will work well when small on screen. also the UVing will be set up so that any details that require straight pixel lines are straight...fuck a little stretching when your doing mechanical details without that much res...even when you have res its better and will give you sharper results
never light with a single light and no ambient...at least add a single half strength ambient value if you want something better add a slightly yellow sun at 1 a blueish ambient value at 0.5 and an up directional light at 0.75 with a dirty yellow colour (quick ground bounce light) this will help alot with your presentation.
2034 for that medivac 3240 for the massive battlecruiser ship... call of duty is fps vehicles are veiwed from close much much more detail is needed
texture sizes...from making thousands of of textures... you may be right that the model there is using a 1024* maybe but in game its never that size so they probably use a 512 and re-work alot of the pixels to make each count.....
you may have more than one light but it doesnt look like it... therefore my crit to add more ambient lighting of some variety stands as alot of the model is in complete shadow
alot of my crits were about how you are using the assets you have i have quite a bit of experience in this but you chosen to ignore these and instead focus on nit picking...i felt i needed to give a better crit after being flipant now i wish id not bothered...bye :-)
It looks so much better than the previous one, I think you should play with color a little bit, Green is the main color here, and yellow for a light is too close in color variations, I think you can start playing contrast a little bit, most illustrations has dominant color and secondary and complimentary color, with percentage around 70 % dominant color and 30 % complimentary, in this case if you choose Green as main color then try using yellow green or blue green as secondary color and use Red as complimentary color which is the color of the cool light on your ships. If you decide to change the whole color of the ships try to use contrast, as Blue compliment with orange, Yellow and purple-violet and so on and so on...
just roughly change your color in Photoshop using selection tool select the main color and play with hue and saturation just to get rough colors. you can save bunch different screenshots of colors differences and see which u like the most. and then when you pick one u love then you do the detail for it.
Anyway everything looks good, Just being picky on colors. Hope the best for ya man!
Edited : Or if you don't feel like playing with the UV, just take that screen shot and do paint over on ur screenshot
just quick examples of what I was saying about paint over, you can use either curves playing with Red Blue or Green, instead of RGB all together, or playing with Hue Saturation, or just do magic wand selection on some parts and change the colors
just giving you examples of how rough can you be, and then you can also play with how the metal looks, add more specular on some part using dodge and burn,add more design as u like
Hey Chris, I'm loving the orange on the turbines. That reads far better than the old pink ones and looks cooler to boot. The color variation adds a lot to the design and the overall look is much improved. Can't wait to see more progress man!
Awesome, solid critique, thanks gosijn for the color advice. I think I am going to add some more details like panels and such on that back side, and overall, too much flat color and not enough highlights perhaps? Out of all the paint overs you did, the green with orange lights was my fav, I am going to play around with the color and spec some more and i'll post back soon.
Yes other than playing with color now you can try doing value contrast, it looks good so now Chris but I am sure you can push it more playing with contrast of light and dark, Highlight and shadow a little bit, although a lot of games these days using real time shadow and light, you still might want to make your ambient occlusion value stronger. Anyway good luck. I need luck myself for my Thesis project :P
ALthough You've improved an your colors and texture there is much to be disired from this piece.
1. The guns at the front particular the gun on the outer side of the front. The hole the gun fits in seem to have no thickness on one side. This looks weird and is quite obvious. Also the holes for the gun are too sqarish. Either get rid of the holes and do them on your texture ar add a 2 loops to them.
2. As said your texture has improved but your high tech dropship does still look more like an abandoned vehicle at a junkyard. Your metal plates look all very dented. But it doesn't look like the ship has been through battle. All the wear and tear gives the impression of a ship which didn't get much maintenance.
One of the main problems with the texture is: You have some ugly stretching on it. Many pannels and line elements don't look straight. But they don't look properly curved either. they look just strechted. I guess you havents baked much of the details in your texture.
An other problem: You have obvious seams going on in your texture. For example where the attachment of the engines have contact with the main body.
Also I have to agree with shepeiro:
For the amount of polygons you've used the ship doesn't look very detailed. You have places with a heigher poly density although those areas won't be visable to the player (I guess this is more for an RTS type of game).
To the discussion of proper polycounts and texture sizes. It doesn't matter what specs the rally used in starcraft. The important point is: The amount of triangles / texture size you are using should correspond to the visual detail your model has. Which means: If you use 3000 triangles your ship should more or less look as detailed as 3000 triangles can look like. Just by looking at the main body of you model I would estimate maybe 1000 - 1500 tris. This is a serius issue.
The same thing with your texture. Your texture of 1024 just doesn't look like 1024 when applied to your model. I guess you could easily reduce your texture size to 256 without major reduction in quality. This is also a serious issue, Look at the Texture work from Allods online. It's amazing what you can put into a single 512 diffuse map. High texture reslutions don't automatically lead to better results if you don't use the resolution you have.
I suggest reduce your maps to 512 and try toget the very most out of it.
I'm very sorry if I come off too harsh here.. But I would go back and completely redo the textures.
Start by blocking out the different tones of the metals. Getting some minor variations. And when you're happy with the way the diffuse look, start making the specular from that.
The design of the ship looks okay to me, but the texture just looks really messy if you ask me. And the specular doesn't really do anything, except making all the edges look really shiny, and you'd want more from the specular than that. Try to make the specular tell the viewer what the material is. Chrome = Really Shiny, Paint = A lot less shiny. Just some rough examples.
Look at others' texture sheets and see how they made their textures for similar models.
Replies
Cool design though, keep going!
It looks too high for an RTS, but aside from that:
You're wasting a lot of polies on the sides of the main ship.
|||||| \|/\|/
|||||| | |
|||||| | |
|||||| | |
bad good
would save you a good 300 or so polies per side I think.
You should also use this on the propellors. The properllors also need less sides than the big tubes they're in. In general, try to avoid cuts in lines if you're gonna keep them straight anyway (like on top, in the mouth etc)
DESIGN
The lower cannon is really flimsy, and would be in the way while landing. The engines make no sense because they look like jet turbines, but they have no way for air to pass through. Where's the cockpit and how do you see where you're going?
TEXTURES
You're mostly using a bunch of filters, giving very bland materials. Use photoref, paint in more, add details: decals, dirt, damage.
Design has promise.
When you start from a highpoly, not only does it look much, much better, you've then also got something you can render AO from, which makes for a fantastic base to texture from (as an overlay, for masks etc.), and one that will fit your normals perfectly.
Also, I believe one or more of your channels are flipped. The lighting in that normalmap-only shit doesn't make sense at all.
Then, your lowpoly...
A lot of the loops in there don't contribute to the form at all, so those should go. Immediately, you've shaved a lot of tris off, and you're only getting started.
So far you haven't impacted the look of your model at all, just how well it performs. Now you can get creative with optimising parts that don't change the model drastically, taking away edges that (especially at the tiny on-screen size of an rts unit!) just aren't necessary.
Look at your model at the size it will be seen at, and ask yourself: what can safely go without making things look awful?
For modelling you could do a lot, you've got a lot of polygons that are pretty much worthless if you're going for low poly. The main structure also looks extremly bumpy on top.
The texturing work is really noise. Maybe look into how metal tends to wear.
I'd say get more contrast in colors and don't be afraid to get a bit bright with them.
It doesn't show how it would go side to side, at most it looks like it could rotate to trust forward, up, down, and to the back, by rotating along the cylinder connecting it to the ship.
The big problem with it, is when you look at a real Turbine engine it's pretty much a ventilator/fan inside a tunnel shape. Your design has only 2 blades, giving very little thrust, but it also has a solid block behind it instead of a tunnel.
I'd go for a more traditional look:
And then add on some glowy lights if necessary. This mockup comes in fairly light at 466 tris per engine, but could be less ofcourse. Another possible solution would be not to go with something resembling a yet, but instead looking like a rocket engine(either a regular one or the more futuristic looking Aerospike type). You would also do well to add some extra thrusters, either as separate units or integrated like you can see in the space shuttle nose.
On the overall design, I'd try to integrate things more. Not having the weapons stick out on such a distance from the ship, not having the lower dock-thing being so thin and plopped on, and getting the engines closer to the hull too. Personally I'm not a big fan of the bulkiness and the lack of a visible cockpit, though that's your own choice. Though you might want to add some cameras.
You're also lacking in doors, I can only find the cargo bay and no extra hatches and airlocks.
hey if you have seen topgear you'll know that a reliant robin allmost became a space ship
that's exactly what brought it to mind
I found this tutorial useful is getting the general idea of how to make some high-poly models to bake from: Modeling for Next-Gen Games Tutorial.
Awesome Torrrtilla, I will look at it.
with your updated model i have several points to make up for it ;-)
- this wouldnt be usefull for starcraft2 been playing it for a while and im pretty sure that the specs are way too high... even if your downsizing the textures I think you would be loosing most of the work youve put in leaving something undistinct... i would work at closer to the right specs...
in fact i would set up two cameras with a similar distance to the zoomed in zoomed in and out cameras in say SC2 add some lights and rotate the model to get an idea of exactly what needs to be put in and what is pointless...
5300 tris seams quite high and looking at the model your adding them in strange places, the guns the engine manifolds and the impleller cones are way too high you coulkd halve the polys spent here easily and never see it you also have some little wee grooves and chamfers on the engines, nose gun and undercarrige that do not add to the silohette and make the model unecessarily busy (bad for AA when veiwed at a distance)
look at the medivac dropship from SC2, looks like it has 12 spans in each engine and four on the guns, all details that are small are not modeled they are texctured and i would be surprised if the textures above 512*
texturing- look at how the sc2 dropships details are nice and chunky..with nice bold colour variations which will work well when small on screen. also the UVing will be set up so that any details that require straight pixel lines are straight...fuck a little stretching when your doing mechanical details without that much res...even when you have res its better and will give you sharper results
never light with a single light and no ambient...at least add a single half strength ambient value if you want something better add a slightly yellow sun at 1 a blueish ambient value at 0.5 and an up directional light at 0.75 with a dirty yellow colour (quick ground bounce light) this will help alot with your presentation.
texture sizes...from making thousands of of textures... you may be right that the model there is using a 1024* maybe but in game its never that size so they probably use a 512 and re-work alot of the pixels to make each count.....
you may have more than one light but it doesnt look like it... therefore my crit to add more ambient lighting of some variety stands as alot of the model is in complete shadow
alot of my crits were about how you are using the assets you have i have quite a bit of experience in this but you chosen to ignore these and instead focus on nit picking...i felt i needed to give a better crit after being flipant now i wish id not bothered...bye :-)
just roughly change your color in Photoshop using selection tool select the main color and play with hue and saturation just to get rough colors. you can save bunch different screenshots of colors differences and see which u like the most. and then when you pick one u love then you do the detail for it.
Anyway everything looks good, Just being picky on colors. Hope the best for ya man!
Edited : Or if you don't feel like playing with the UV, just take that screen shot and do paint over on ur screenshot
just giving you examples of how rough can you be, and then you can also play with how the metal looks, add more specular on some part using dodge and burn,add more design as u like
Yes other than playing with color now you can try doing value contrast, it looks good so now Chris but I am sure you can push it more playing with contrast of light and dark, Highlight and shadow a little bit, although a lot of games these days using real time shadow and light, you still might want to make your ambient occlusion value stronger. Anyway good luck. I need luck myself for my Thesis project :P
1. The guns at the front particular the gun on the outer side of the front. The hole the gun fits in seem to have no thickness on one side. This looks weird and is quite obvious. Also the holes for the gun are too sqarish. Either get rid of the holes and do them on your texture ar add a 2 loops to them.
2. As said your texture has improved but your high tech dropship does still look more like an abandoned vehicle at a junkyard. Your metal plates look all very dented. But it doesn't look like the ship has been through battle. All the wear and tear gives the impression of a ship which didn't get much maintenance.
One of the main problems with the texture is: You have some ugly stretching on it. Many pannels and line elements don't look straight. But they don't look properly curved either. they look just strechted. I guess you havents baked much of the details in your texture.
An other problem: You have obvious seams going on in your texture. For example where the attachment of the engines have contact with the main body.
Also I have to agree with shepeiro:
For the amount of polygons you've used the ship doesn't look very detailed. You have places with a heigher poly density although those areas won't be visable to the player (I guess this is more for an RTS type of game).
To the discussion of proper polycounts and texture sizes. It doesn't matter what specs the rally used in starcraft. The important point is: The amount of triangles / texture size you are using should correspond to the visual detail your model has. Which means: If you use 3000 triangles your ship should more or less look as detailed as 3000 triangles can look like. Just by looking at the main body of you model I would estimate maybe 1000 - 1500 tris. This is a serius issue.
The same thing with your texture. Your texture of 1024 just doesn't look like 1024 when applied to your model. I guess you could easily reduce your texture size to 256 without major reduction in quality. This is also a serious issue, Look at the Texture work from Allods online. It's amazing what you can put into a single 512 diffuse map. High texture reslutions don't automatically lead to better results if you don't use the resolution you have.
I suggest reduce your maps to 512 and try toget the very most out of it.
Start by blocking out the different tones of the metals. Getting some minor variations. And when you're happy with the way the diffuse look, start making the specular from that.
The design of the ship looks okay to me, but the texture just looks really messy if you ask me. And the specular doesn't really do anything, except making all the edges look really shiny, and you'd want more from the specular than that. Try to make the specular tell the viewer what the material is. Chrome = Really Shiny, Paint = A lot less shiny. Just some rough examples.
Look at others' texture sheets and see how they made their textures for similar models.
I really hope I could help.