Completed 3D Spiked Bat
polycounter lvl 11
Hello everyone! Its my first post so here is a little about me, I'm a game art and animation college student about to enter my 3rd year 
This is a spiked bat I made as part of a class project a while back, hope you like it!
Let me have it with any critiques you'd like to give. Thanks!!
This is a spiked bat I made as part of a class project a while back, hope you like it!Let me have it with any critiques you'd like to give. Thanks!!
Replies
The materials, uv map, and textures need a lot more work.
anyways, some crits, the textures are very yellow, maybe some more variation in those?
other then that and whats already pointed out with the Uvs its looking good.
Is this a first person weapon? You could use a lot more polys and actually model the barbwire, unless this is for mobile which then there is a lot of waste. Even TF2 has higher triangle counts and those weapons are stylistically overly simplified. For a FPS weapon 10k polys is not too many and I think you can totally nail this.
Or better yet, use the polys you have to better effect. It seems like you could simplify a lot of the geometry and actually make the barbwire out of simple geometry. The nails seem to have a lot of geometry and if you get rid of all of the planes it could really free up a significant amount of polys that will help you
Opacity mapped planes can be some of the most expensive things to render in a game and they often cause issues with things like fog, or other opacity maps. They can easily bog an engine down worse than adding a few polys. If this was a FPS weapon it would be rendering on top of everything else in the scene and may or may not cause issues, depending on how the engine works.
Either way, using opacity maps to save on geometry can easily backfire in a few ways and typically using a bit more geometry will work better.
The barbwire doesn't seem attached in any way other than just wrapped/floating, there should probably be staples, brads, or nails that are holding it on and in place? Function could help drive the design and make it more interesting. With the wire loosely attached wouldn't it bend, twist and bunch up when it gets used? So it hasn't been used before? What about adding a thick metal band to help hold the wood together.
Personally I would have modeled most of this. The barbwire in particular can be made easily out of splines or by path deforming a straight piece of barbwire mesh. That would make it much easier to work with, the UV's would pack well and would look better.
I agree about segmenting the mesh so the UV's can be broken up easily which would make better use of the UV space. It seems like the taped handle would make a good place for a UV seam.