Splash Damage art test, too
polycounter lvl 9
So I also decided to try my hand at the new art test. I have a few tweaks I still want to make but I think I am near the completion of HP.
-The tweaks I plan to make is to the crates in the middle, just to give more definition to the indentations.
-I also need to play with the triangle like details, they just don't seem right to me. ( I also just realized that I forgot to mirror the top one over)
-And it seems I either need to play with my render settings or okay with the size of my small details, as they aren't showing up.
Any other critiques just let me know
-The tweaks I plan to make is to the crates in the middle, just to give more definition to the indentations.
-I also need to play with the triangle like details, they just don't seem right to me. ( I also just realized that I forgot to mirror the top one over)
-And it seems I either need to play with my render settings or okay with the size of my small details, as they aren't showing up.
Any other critiques just let me know
Replies
question.. are the triangles modeled into the mesh? it appears as if they are floating.. which may (depending on placement) cause some issues with projecting). also you may want to loosen up the chamfer on the middle boxes.. as the top and bottom creases are looking a bit too tight.
@Oniram - How is this render for presentation, any better? The triangles are floating, I am hoping to not have problems out of them, but we will see.
@Ryswick - Thanks for pointing that out. But I have noticed a lot of inconsistencies with the concept, mainly dealing with the pillars. The inset designs on them aren't the same on all of them and the way they connect isn't the same with. If you look closer at the top pillars some are missing the silver piece at the top, others connect straight and the back one bevels. So I decided to take a bit of liberty with it and make them all the same.
Let me know what you think as I would like to keep moving and start on the LP soon.
You need to have an "outline" loop of polys around your floater that lays parallel to your base surface.
Around curved surfaces, your floater's "outline" needs to match the contour of the surface as well, again it has to be parallel to the surface.
For floaters, the goal is too look seamless from a certain view ie: the view the raytracer is going to look at. If you accomplish this, you're in good shape.
Thanks, by the way, for your response.
I'm not sure what you're saying, the top floater looks seamless and would bake seamless, or 99% close enough to seamless.
The middle one is flat and not curved to match the surface, and you can see the outline.
The bottom is without the outline geometry. I wanted to show the differences between the three methods.
Anyways here is an update. Ignoring the fact that not everything has symmetry on it and been copied around/put in the correct orientation, I figured I would show my LP.
And I don't understand why, but for the LP that has wires showing I can't seem to get the wires to show up everywhere. I tried two methods, the MR Mat, and the copy mesh with wire mat and push modifier. Both give me similar results. Any help would be great.
Crits always welcome
Set the floaters to not cast shadows?
i had something about this put in the wiki along with the not casting shadows option
http://wiki.polycount.com/AmbientOcclusionMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29
so i just tested out that cast shadows option.. it didnt really do anything for ambient occlusion.. both mental ray and scanline
Any other advice/crits let me know
Nope, you'r right. As stated by EQ, without "borders" on you floaters that's the effect you will get.
As always crits welcome
(Yeah the sizes of the screen grabs are huge...playing with the script on Xoluil's website to see what I can do with it.)
i am not sure if u are already doing this but this baking with non-triangulated mesh is a common mistake most people make.
so it almost looks like you have a blend of default vertex normal (the way it looks like without normal map) and highpoly normals.
in general, if the bake is accurate it negates the vertex normal completely or as close as possible within the texture resolution.
may be it is just your lighting. is this a max scanline render ?
if so try render with one directional light instead to make it less confusing.
I am now trying to figure out how to add the details on the crate, the semi-unique insets that are the the crates. I have the crates overlapping to save texture space. I was going to use decals to do it...my test didn't come out well though..any suggestions would be great.
I am pretty sure I have the normal issues (dealing with the triangles) taken care of now.
A. You've got smoothing errors in a lot of places
B. You've got nasty seams all over the place, likely due to poorly set up bakes(you need to use an averaged projection, ie: cage in max, not "offset" method).
C. Your lowpoly is just... generally a mess. You've got a very large amount of intersecting meshes, which wastes uv space and just generally looks bad. Optimizing your mesh to be more of a "solid chunk" will result in better uv space and much better bakes, even if it requires more geometry.
I'm not sure why you think this, but it isn't really true. The best thing to do with max bakes is to use the proper tangent bias in max. IE: using 3ps shader's quality mode, or the hotfixes in 2011 which fix the tangent bias. With a properly synced up tangent bias you shouldn't need to triangulate or anything either in max(this has been tested and works fine with 3ps shader for instance).
Baking in maya is great, if you're also displaying in maya, as maya has very accurate display of normals because the tangent bias is properly synced between the baker and viewport display. Maya bakes even work well with quads or ngons, provided you lock your mesh normals before triangulating/exporting to a game engine.
Baking in maya to get good results in max is about the last thing I would suggest, its just all sorts of backwards, as maya and max use a different tangent bias.
Every time you have an intersection, you're forcing there to be an ugly, hard-edged pixelated seam. Every time you merge two meshes together into one chunk, you have the opportunity to have a nice, clean and seamless result.
This goes a very long way towards having an end result that actually looks like a highpoly mesh, instead of a oldschool lowpoly mesh that someone just happened to apply a normal map to.
Also, if 35% of your mesh ends up unseen because it is jammed into another chunk, that is a whole lot of texture space you're wasting, that could be used to give the entire asset that much more detail with the same resolution.
Intersections are not inherently evil or bad, and in some cases can save a good deal of tris, but you need to understand how they affect the model.
Clearly not everything is applicable here, just the lowpoly stuff.
Ironically posted in response to the older SD test asset.
#1
First, the red/green/blue ares represent chunks where I would model all of the detail "solid" without intersection. The purple areas are generally fine to intersect, but you may even want to consider modeling some of these solid, again as it will look better(seamless) in the end result
The red lines show intersecting areas that are quite poor as far as intersections, some meshes you've got another bit clipped in just to represent a very small height change, this is very messy.
#2
Here on the final bake we see a few basic issues.
A. Because of the intersecting areas shown in the first paintover, you have a load of nasty seams. I didn't bother highlighting every seam here, as i'm sure you get the picture.
B. You also have a *different* type of seam artifact here, not entirely related to intersecting meshes. Even on areas which are "solid", you have a lot of seams, this comes down to:
1. Having hard edges on your mesh without also having uv splits, for every hard edge/smoothing group you use, your uvs also must be split into seperate uv chunks, otherwise you will get seam artifacts
2. Having hard edges on your mesh and also in your projection mesh(IE: not using an averaged cage, I can expand on this if you dont know what it means)
3. Likely a combination of both 1&2.
C. You've got some pretty noticeable smoothing errors, which can come down to a few different causes
1. Baking in one app and displaying in another
2. Baking in an app that has a broken pipeline like max, where the baker and viewport are not synced
3. Not using enough/proper placement of hard edges to account for issues 1 and/or 2.
But I am having some issues that I can't seem to fix. The smoothing/triangulation issues I am having on the base. I don't know what to do to try to fix it, any help would be greatly appreciated.
-I have tried playing with the triangulation, but I only seem to get different shading issues
-I have tried adding more geo but that doesn't seem to get rid of any of my problems
-I have even tried making it over again, but I still seem get the same issues in the same spot.
And in addition to this when I mirror this piece as well as other pieces I seem to get a black "seam" where my symmetry line is. Thanks in advance!