Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

Exteel Gun (PBR)

1
greentooth
Offline / Send Message
Dmellott greentooth
What's going on folks! I've just wrapped up a project a few days ago and I have been working on this thing since.

I really liked the concept for this gun, I guess it's for this Korean Gundam style shooter that NCSoft published. The gun concepts they had for this game have a really cool style!

My focus for this project is to really nail the detailing in the gun and to be on point with the PBR texture. My last project really let me get my hands dirty with PBR and Substance Painter for the first time, so this time around I really want to push things further.


So here goes!


Concept I am following:
[IMG][/img]qvGarIn.jpg



HP Blocked out:
[IMG][/img]5z6Ye8m.png

Replies

  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    I've added a few of my own pieces to the gun and the next step is to take this thing into Zbrush to do all of my fine detailing!
  • C86G
    Offline / Send Message
    C86G greentooth
    While I like the heavyness of it the the overall shapes, I think it´s terribly uncomfortable to hold and use. The grip could be way softer (I know it´s based on the concept).
    Maybe it´s just me but the gun could be a bit longer, no?

    And give us that cutout in the front of the barrel : D
  • Ged
    Offline / Send Message
    Ged interpolator
    good work so far. It looks like its missing quite a few of the nice big squared off bevels of the concept and the handle doesnt look as cool as the original concept which is straighter and more angled with no yellow block things.
  • beefaroni
    Offline / Send Message
    beefaroni sublime tool
    Looking good so far.

    My only crit is that it feels a bit more squished vs. the initial concept. It loses a bit of the heft when the handle isn't that long n ridiculous.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    @ C86G: Good call on the gun being too short man, I couldn't unsee it once you pointed it out! The grip is definitely very blocky right now, I took another crack at it.

    @ Ged: Thanks man, I feel like some of the bevels I have are a bit small right now just looking off of the concept. Anything that is still feeling small I will emphasize in Zbrush when I do my detailing.

    @ beefaroni: Thanks for the comment dude, I took another crack at the handle and made it more in-line with a revolver. Hopefully it lends itself more to the weight of the front of the gun.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Updates after a great round of feedback! I softened up the grip and stretched out the gun as it was definitely squished. I am going to do my smaller detailing now, pending further critique!

    [IMG][/img]UWlEptS.jpg

    [IMG][/img]Ys9WJxw.jpg

    [IMG][/img]iDdmR5s.jpg
  • ZacD
    Offline / Send Message
    ZacD ngon master
    I really do not like the extra yellow stripes added to the back of the handle/butt of the gun, it's adding too much visual noise.
  • beefaroni
    Offline / Send Message
    beefaroni sublime tool
    Yea. I agree. I also think that the yellow is a accent color throughout the weapon to draw the eye around and to help smaller mechanical details shine against the larger shapes. Having that much yellow in the rear kind of removes that.

    You'll also inevitably draw a bumblebee comparison.

    Otherwise, the changes look good. I'm excited to see this progress, and to take what you learned from the solider dude into this!
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Thanks for the feedback guys! I was wondering about the stripes in the back adding too much noise and taking away from the piece overall. I'll just go ahead and leave those out!

    Thanks again guys! Will post again whenever I get some more detailing going.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    I'm comin in from the Global Game Jam here in Pittsburgh with an update on the high poly. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts.

    My plan from here is to put in some minor wear and tear, tight up some of the pieces that are feeling a little "gummy" from remeshing, and polish up some of the less sharp cuts and paneling. Bakes coming soon! I can't wait to get this thing into Substance Painter!

    stjJrwI.jpg
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Hey everyone, finally got to bake down the gun and I can see there are some issues with the normal map as it looks like ass!

    I've been doing some research and the conclusion I have come to is that I will need a seam wherever I have a hard edge and in my current unwrap I don't have that for the vast majority of the pieces. The game plan now is to go back and re-unwrap, and re-bake my normals for a better result.

    If anyone has any advice on input on this it would greatly help, and I would very much appreciate it!

    4sksFzh.jpg
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Here are some early tests in Substance, checking out how the normals look and blocking in materials.

    Y1cGEQs.jpg

    FoqfxuR.jpg
  • LMP
    Offline / Send Message
    LMP polycounter lvl 13
    You've got some re-baking to do on those normals. I'm seeing all kinds of shading errors and banding from what I'm guessing is 8-bit channel depth on the bake. I like your high poly and think it looks great. Can we see the wire frames for the low poly? The shape looks solid, but the normals are just ruining it. Once you can get the shading issues figured out it'll look better.

    It feels like the mesh you baked with and the one you've presented the maps on are slightly different possibly when it comes to triangulation. Also, increase the anti-aliasing on your bake settings, you're getting some nasty jaggies especially in front of and just behind the tank.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Thanks for the feedback LMP. I am definitely getting some bad distortion on my normals. Currently, I am posting around in various forums and doing some more research as to what the problem could be. I'm going to try adjusting my smoothing groups and seeing if that does the trick, and if not I'll adjust my seams and see if that works any better.

    Thank you for the comment man, definitely going to give a look at my bit depth and see if I can adjust it for a better result.

    Here is the wireframe for the low as well.
    5TFELq4.jpg
  • Ged
    Offline / Send Message
    Ged interpolator
    In my experience adjusting smoothing groups after the bake makes it worse. You have to keep the same smoothing groups on your final mesh as the mesh you baked with or you will get wierd smoothing errors. So it really really helps to just use exactly the same mesh to bake as your final in game mesh.
  • Joopson
    Offline / Send Message
    Joopson quad damage
    Check out this thread for how to get rid of those shading issues:

    [Looks like you might have already seen it, but I don't know if you're following every step, with the results you're getting]

    http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196

    To boil it down, anywhere the UVs are split, there should be a hard edge. And there should be a UV split just about anywhere that is a sharp angle in the mesh (~75 degrees or more). And you need to make an averaged cage, to use when baking the normal map. It's explained in detail in the thread, and it'll make this look fantastic.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Hello everyone. So I've read all of Earthquake's documentation and watched the Handplane video and I guess I just don't understand what is still going wrong with my mapping.

    So what I have done is added extra supporting geometry where it is needed to fit the high poly more closely before I try to do any "quick fixes". What that solves for me is that I no longer get the bunching in the edges of the mesh like I did in my original bake. Problem solved in that regard.

    The problem I have now however is I am getting gaps on all of my hard edges. I have tried making a custom cage and doing Averaged Projection Mesh bakes. I have tried doing Explicit Mesh Normal bakes in xNormal. I have tried adding extra edges and I have also tried adjusting my smoothing groups to no resolve.

    Currently, it seems to solve the gaps I would need to go in a put UV seams with padding wherever I have angle changes in my Smoothing Groups. I can do that easily enough, but then I'll have a bunch of seams everywhere and I'll only be doing so for very small pieces, especially in the example piece below and I'm not even sure if that is the right way to go about it. Ultimately, I feel like I am missing something on this.

    Definitely going to keep hashing at this and see if I can get to the bottom of the issue.

    If anyone has any information I would greatly appreciate it. I have exhausted as many options as I have seen throughout researching the problem to no avail and any help is solid gold haha.

    Test Bake on a section of the gun
    94vTcBo.jpg


    Normal of that same section
    Y3tjCE1.jpg
  • beefaroni
    Offline / Send Message
    beefaroni sublime tool
    Any time a normal edge is more than lets say like 75 degrees, you need to have a cut in the UVs. You can then create hard edges by UVs.

    The other option is to add more bevels so the normals aren't so extreme.
  • james swanson
    Offline / Send Message
    james swanson polycounter lvl 5
    Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the reason you're getting those lines on your edges is because you have no UV splits along those edges. As beefaroni said, you need to split your UVs when there's an angle greater than 75°. Right now you seem to have those flat surfaces in different smoothing groups, but in the same UV shell.


    Here:

    b70408d5a4bbbb859c8a640658689ad7.png

    Each different color outline represents a different smoothing group, as well as a different UV shell. Right now you have one long UV shell that has a lot of hard edges. Hard edges need UV splits and padding. So break that UV shell up according to your smoothing groups and then rereneder.
  • Envart
    Offline / Send Message
    Envart polycounter lvl 6
    If you're using Max, you may wish to use http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/ - this has a script that will auto convert different UV islands to their own smoothing group, very handy and can save a lot of time, all you have to do is split your UVs where required and the script will do the rest.
  • skyline5gtr
    Offline / Send Message
    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    Jon W wrote: »
    If you're using Max, you may wish to use http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/ - this has a script that will auto convert different UV islands to their own smoothing group, very handy and can save a lot of time, all you have to do is split your UVs where required and the script will do the rest.

    I use textools but maybe im not using it right can you elaborate exactly on how to do this. I usually start unwrapping with split UV tool
  • james swanson
    Offline / Send Message
    james swanson polycounter lvl 5
    Once you're done unwrapping your model, go to the tex tools menu and select 'tools', and then select "Smoothing groups from UV shells".
    46fae1b986bc6ed34a3474139c7f08c2.png
    This will automatically assign smoothing groups according to how your UVs are split up.
  • EarthQuake
    Those gaps look like you aren't using a cage/averaged projection mesh. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154

    Though it looks like you haven't split your uvs at hard edges either.
  • skyline5gtr
    Offline / Send Message
    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    Thanks James, awesome gotta try that next
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Alright folks, finally this is heading in the right direction again. Thank you guys so much for your feedback! It is incredibly helpful and very informative. I haven't run into an issue like this before and I was having trouble wrapping my head around all the mechanics involved. I am sure it will still take a bit more configuring but I am feeling much better about this now.

    Special thanks to Sean Vangorder for taking a look at my mesh and smoothing groups and showing me how to approach this problem.

    Here is a current bake on the same piece above.
    oh5btWZ.jpg

    No gaps, no problem! Will update again after repacking and rebaking. Thanks again for all of the assistance guys! I really appreciate it!
  • Joopson
    Offline / Send Message
    Joopson quad damage
    You've still got some funky shading there, though; but it does look loads better.
  • NicolasW
    Offline / Send Message
    NicolasW polycounter lvl 13
    I wonder if your tangents are synchronized between the bake and the visualization ..
    What do you use for baking / viewing the normal map?
  • chetanmaac
    also try to straight the uv for perfect baking normal map results rest look so fine use edge padding as well like 1k need 8 pixel padding and 2k 16 as just 2x multiply it according the size of texture size.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Hey guys, update on Version 2 of baking. There are still a few hitches yet, but it's a much better result that the first round of baking. The game plan now is to iron out what is acting up and start that texture!

    8l0H3hA.png

    Bonus Akimbo!
    3GnuM7K.png
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Thank you guys so much for your help and feedback. Thus far, this has been an incredibly valuable learning experience. What I thought I knew about normals before this doesn't amount to very much now haha. I really appreciate the feedback and advice!
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Blocking in the texture!

    B4IM6t8.jpg

    F0vS79T.jpg
  • dzibarik
    Offline / Send Message
    dzibarik polycounter lvl 10
    you still have waviness in your normal maps - 0Pdh9Zv.png

    What software do you bake in?
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Hello dzibarik, I normally bake in xNormal but it was giving me trouble this time around so I ended up baking in Max.

    I may have not had my Tangent Space set correctly in Marmoset when I took these renders.
    I took another shot with the texture blocked in and it is much less pronounced.

    I am wondering if I could get rid of it entirely by editing my smoothing groups post-normal map or perhaps painting it out as a last resort.

    2YIxpJn.png
  • Joopson
    Offline / Send Message
    Joopson quad damage
    Dmellott wrote: »
    I am wondering if I could get rid of it entirely by editing my smoothing groups post-normal map or perhaps painting it out as a last resort.

    Neither of those things are good ideas. Editing smoothing groups after baking your normal map is kind of contradicting what the normal map is trying to do. And painting it out is just putting a bandaid over a deeper problem with your workflow.

    Do some baking tests on simpler objects, and figure out what works. You'll be able to do it faster on those simpler things. And you can keep the texture blockout when you finally do rebake your gun, because it won't involve changing your UVs.

    Also, I'd recommend xNormal instead of Max; if it's giving you trouble (unless it's crashing or something), it's not the program that's the issue, it's something in your process. xNormal is a more compatible tangent basis than Max, in my experience.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    @ Joopson: All of the normal documentation on Polycount said the same things that you are. I definitely don't want to simply bandaid the issue as I don't want to have hiccups later on down the road.

    I'm going to put the brakes on the texture for the time being and work on fixing those normals! Thank you for your comments and feedback!
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Alrighty folks, so I've taken some time this week to really dig into this UV Seam / Smoothing group thing and I think I'm getting a grip on it finally. Here are a few updates of the new normals and smoothing groups, I think at this point nearly all of the previous normal issues are solved.

    7tgS6Ae.png
    H2W2tBR.png



    I think the only issues sticking out are some edge line waviness on some of my pieces with very small map resolution and I plan to sample the normal and paint out those minor details.

    So with that being said, back on track to the texture!
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Texture update, any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated! I'm going through and putting in some larger scale wear before going too micro. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or critique!

    o13XvFm.png
    onKZU9c.png
    UHZWUac.png
    Hwh88cP.png
  • dzibarik
    Offline / Send Message
    dzibarik polycounter lvl 10
    Nice, normal maps look good now.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Thanks dude! I appreciate you pointing out those issues earlier, definitely helped me to get a better result.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    What's up everyone! Coming back with another update. Still working on the texture for this piece. I am really hoping to get some feedback on it's current state.

    I am referencing the gun art of several other artists and trying to get some subtle value/saturation shifts in the metal to really sell the black metal bits. Also playing around with color variations. Again, any feedback would be really helpful and I would greatly appreciate it!

    Q1ILRH4.jpg
    HYA5PC9.jpg
    eLwuolL.jpg
    wFCOvl6.jpg
    jRRjwtf.jpg
    Bo5i9ee.jpg
  • beefaroni
    Offline / Send Message
    beefaroni sublime tool
    I think the base texture is not quite finished yet.

    Right now, it feels like a lot of dust/dirt stamped on top of a simple base materials. It feels very muddy. The wear really doesn't seem to have a story behind it. Maybe some edge chips on the top of the gun from hitting it on a wall or something. Maybe a large dent in the metal cylinder.

    The dirt should be more towards the crevasses. I think the biggest offender of that is the trigger and the yellow part down by the handle. Why is the area where the two meet perfectly clean?

    I'm also having a problem with the read of the green and the yellow. The yellow in particular feels like a plastic, and the green feels a bit plastic-y.

    I guess to try to simplify. You kind of have the base texture down, and the tertiary detail (kinda). The secondary detail isn't currently present.

    My advice would be to get rid of all of the dust/dirt/scratches/etc. Focus on some amazing base materials that are super clean. Then, once you have base materials that you are super happy with, think of the edge wear and where chips may be in the paint. Then figure out where some dirt and that kind of stuff would be.
  • Grusti
    Offline / Send Message
    Grusti polycounter lvl 10
    • Think more about back story of this weapon.
    • Look on photos of real weapon and try to avoid putting all damage and weathering effects randomly.
    • Do not think that if it is a sci-fi weapon, then you can not compare it to the damage on weapon from life.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Thank you Chris! This is exactly the kind of feedback I am looking for! The base material just doesn't look or feel right and I definitely agree that it warrants a re-do. Thank you so much for the feedback man, very very helpful. I really appreciate it!
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Ilya, thank you so much for the feedback man! Really great point about it being a sci-fi weapon. Really great advice man, thank you again I really appreciate the help!

    I am going to start from scratch on a lot of these materials and really try to nail this thing. Thanks again guys!
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    Hello everyone. Took another crack at the materials for most of the gun. If anyone has any thoughts please let me know, some critique on the new materials would be very much appreciated!

    xazswVW.png
    sj9Wn63.png
    w4Q8j3q.png
  • beefaroni
    Offline / Send Message
    beefaroni sublime tool
    Can you post the ref that you're using for the materials and the wear? If you don't have a ref sheet, make one!! Do you know what material each part is made of (like exact material)? Or are you just kind of guessing?

    It feels slightly better, but still pretty far off.
  • Dmellott
    Offline / Send Message
    Dmellott greentooth
    The only reference for materials I have is the concept. For the most part I would say that I am guessing the materials based off of that. For the yellow bits, they could be plastic or they could be metal. Right now I have them more as a matte plastic. For the tubes they would be a plastic. I figured that the majority of the gun overall would be some sort of steel.

    Any suggestions in regards to material would be a great help. I think the tank is looking the best of all the pieces but I can't seem to nail down the black or grey metal. As for the yellow bits, I'm going to change them explicitly to metal and not have them look like matte plastic. Again, any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

    Thank you a ton for your feedback man, it is definitely very helpful.
  • beefaroni
    Offline / Send Message
    beefaroni sublime tool
    While you don't need to make a ref sheet, I would highly recommend it.

    Figure out exactly what type of material everything is. Is the metal steel/iron/aluminum/titanium, etc? How does the paint apply to each metal? Does the texture of the raw metal show through the paint and produce a unique normal texture that other metals don't? Once you figure that out, go online and grab a ton of ref of that specific metal in similar conditions (so maybe war or something).

    Guessing a material broadly (metal, plastic, etc) is going to hinder the quality of the materials in my opinion.
  • Oniram
    Offline / Send Message
    Oniram polycounter lvl 15
    while your materials read pretty well overall on the main surfaces, i cant help but feel like your normal map is hurting this piece. for the most part a lot of your major pieces are very blocky, yet your normal map gives it SUUUUUUUUUUUPER soft edges. that, coupled with a targeted realistic metal material, just makes the whole thing feel unbelievable. it looks weird in some places, almost like youve done away with the bake entirely and tried to normal map your UV shells with ndo or something.
  • Ged
    Offline / Send Message
    Ged interpolator
    yeah I cant help but feel theres something gone wrong with your smoothing groups/phong shading. can you post a pic of the highpoly in gray next to the low in gray with just normal map? then maybe people can help sort out any issues?
1
Sign In or Register to comment.