SciFi Shotgun (WIP)
hey,
I am working on my first hi-poly gun, hopefully it will be good enough to put on my portfolio.
I am working from this concept by PencilLad and I hope to have it as a full working prop.
right now I only have about half of the high poly done but any comments would be welcome.
I am working on my first hi-poly gun, hopefully it will be good enough to put on my portfolio.
I am working from this concept by PencilLad and I hope to have it as a full working prop.
right now I only have about half of the high poly done but any comments would be welcome.
Replies
The horizontal oval shaped insets on your model look a little too lumpy compared to the ref. Maybe you just need to add a loop or 2 near the corners where it extrudes in to tighten it a tad.
Also, on your handgrip, same thing. Its a little soft.
A lot of your bevels on hard edges are really tight. Sometimes its good to exaggerate the bevels a little bit on those, since it never comes through as strong in the bake.
Looking forward to seeing your progress. Keep it up.
I know you want to move onto texturing, but you've got a ton of edges on that thing that dont appear to be doing anything useful. You could trim that tri-count WAY down very easily.
Finishing it as it stands will maybe show that you can make art, but will demonstrate at worst technical ineptitude or at best a complete lack of optimization.
It seems that your cage is bad or non existent, that's why your borders look weird and your normals gets stretched and weird. don't rush it, take your time, polish it, and you will have a good piece in your hands
Not really sure(pardon the ignorance) I built the hi-poly and low poly in Maya and I am doing the bake in Maya using the transfer maps feature.
here you have an example, you can straighten the normals with PS or any good image editing tool.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50516
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryTexturing%5Cb%29
If it has it would be smart to learn to use it.
If not then learn xNormal.
Like Cap says, you could work it out in photoshop, but it's worth learning how to do it right, so that you dont have to do it for every project, or for every rebake you have to do.
Model looks good btw, actualy saved it to my inspiration folder
Also check out this image and link to Ben Mathis' website.
Normal Map Workflow
some thoughts on a different note here:
as shotguns are supposed to be close combat weapons with high level of mobility they are usually built lightframed. Yours look much more like a heavy weapon/assault rifle that requires heavy weight to reduce recoil when firing longer bursts.
on the other hand, you've placed a drum mag here, so maybe it would need a bulk and weight to enable a kickass firepower when discharging a full round burst.
just something to think about
c22dunbar - The design isn't mine, I am working from a concept.
Really? This is a massive waste of time. This is an area that will be occluded in FPV, and too small to notice in third person view, there really is no benefit to spending a bunch of time tweaking minor waviness that will never be noticed in realistic situations.
More on waviness and why it happens, what you can do to fix, and how important/unimportant it really is: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154
If your end result is to display the mesh in Maya, or to export to an engine that is sync'd up to Maya's tangient basis, then yes, Maya will always be the best place to bake. No exceptions, Xnormal/Max/Blender/Etc will never be better. Maya bakes near perfect normals when viewed in Maya's viewport or an engine synced with Maya.
Generally speaking, you always want to bake in the app that its going in or that your pipeline is tailored to, unfortunately Xnormal isn't really sync'd to anything, so for mechanical stuff you will never get accurate bakes with it, or as accurate as a proper pipeline would provide.
Some examples:
Baking in Max, display in Max with 3p Shader or with the latest hotfixes
Baking in Maya, display in Maya
Baking in renderbump, display in doom3
etc
not so sure about the specular, I'm still playing around with it.
Really nice choice on the colours!
Although from what I've noticed it seems to look better when I'm not looking at the picture full scale. I'm pretty sure it's because your spec on the metal is just rather consistently noisy and lacks large shapes. Also the Bluish area of the gun could use some more work so we get a better indication of what the material is.
I guess overall it just seems like solid colors.
you may have seen this guy, but in any case take a look at his amazing textures :P
http://polygoo.com/weapons.html
Would love to see your textures.
timwiese, jeremiah_bigley - wish I could work on this some more but I ran out of time. Learning the baking process and cleaning out the normal maps left little time for texturing. Still I'm rather happy with it for a first model I think it came out rather well.
IAmTheClayman - I added the lines in Photoshop with the pen tool and then ran the nvidia normal map filter on it.