Home Contests & Challenges Archives Handplane Contest

Worn Stanley handplane

interpolator
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huffer interpolator
Final images uploaded! Textured in Substance Painter, renders in Toolbag, using 2K texture sheets, ~6900 triangles.

Renders:





Breakdowns:





It was a fun challenge, I'm glad I got the time to complete it. The overall experience with handplane was good, it can certainly replace xNormal for me, especially after tweaking settings for the slower maps, like ao and curvature.

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Hey guys, this looks fun, I'll be making a well worn handplane, inspired mostly by a Stanley 4 1/2 with some slight modifications to add more interesting details. Key reference:



A bit of rust, lots of dust, worn wood, different and interesting materials. I'm curios how the baker will handle projection groups and the overall quality of Curvature and AO, for Substance Painter later.

High poly progress:




Replies

  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    Progress on the highres, only some little things left to do now:


  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    Low poly and UV's done! Triangle count is 6900.



  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    I made a couple of tests with the baker, results are looking pretty good so far, here are some thoughts:

    1. Dither output looks super useful, but I still prefer doing it in Photoshop, the pattern looks a little too obvious:


    2. The path in destination appears after choosing the folder, but after saving it's empty (the maps still save in the folder I chose). It's also always missing when loading a project.

    3. It'd be cool to auto load your last project, or have an open recent option.

    4. When baking Vertex Color, unless all objects in the high res have Vertex Color applied, bake is cancelled for: "Failed to load mesh file [t1_high.fbx]. Missing required component(s) [color]". Xnormal bakes fine with the same mesh: high res parts that do not have Vertex color show up as white. Sometimes I don't apply vcols on all parts, as I only need a small mask selection, so it took me a bit to realize why it didn't work with handplane. I also think a pop-up message would be useful if baking is cancelled for whatever reason.

    5. I always seem to get the low poly triangulation message, even though I export from 3dsmax only triangulated meshes.

    6. The material ID bake looks interesting, but I have to export the high res meshes one by one (or in groups at least). It'd be cool to export 5 objects in a single OBJ and in the baker have the option to expand this highres file to the individual, named objects in it. (Projection group -> loaded files -> objects in each file). Then you'd be able to change the ID color both for the group, and for the objects in it.

    EDIT:
    7.I think the baker would benefit greatly from a variable blur filter like in Maya or Mightybake, as intersecting high poly parts leave visible jagged lines. It's especially noticeable with the curvature map, and the downsampling option doesnt appear to improve this map as it does the normal bake.

    I tried to bake at higher res and rescale to get rid of the jagged curvature, but facets appear when baking higher res, and intensity is increased? Any ideas?

  • AlecMoody
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    AlecMoody ngon master
    huffer said:
    I made a couple of tests with the baker, results are looking pretty good so far, here are some thoughts:

    1. Dither output looks super useful, but I still prefer doing it in Photoshop, the pattern looks a little too obvious:

    I haven't seen this before. I'll look into it. Its possible we just need to tweak the dithering math.


    2. The path in destination appears after choosing the folder, but after saving it's empty (the maps still save in the folder I chose). It's also always missing when loading a project.

    The paths are all relative to the location where the project file is saved. This is to make it easier to zip and and send baking projects to other computers. If your output location or model location are the same as your bake file location the paths will be empty except for the filenames (or for the output totally empty). Are you seeing a behavior other than this?

    3. It'd be cool to auto load your last project, or have an open recent option.
    Yeah, I think that would be good. There are a lot of tweaks I want to do around saving and loading projects.

    4. When baking Vertex Color, unless all objects in the high res have Vertex Color applied, bake is cancelled for: "Failed to load mesh file [t1_high.fbx]. Missing required component(s) [color]". Xnormal bakes fine with the same mesh: high res parts that do not have Vertex color show up as white. Sometimes I don't apply vcols on all parts, as I only need a small mask selection, so it took me a bit to realize why it didn't work with handplane. I also think a pop-up message would be useful if baking is cancelled for whatever reason.
    I think having non vertex colored parts bake out black or white would be good. It could be a user configurable option as well.

    5. I always seem to get the low poly triangulation message, even though I export from 3dsmax only triangulated meshes.
    I have been noticing this on some meshes. Not sure why it happens yet.

    6. The material ID bake looks interesting, but I have to export the high res meshes one by one (or in groups at least). It'd be cool to export 5 objects in a single OBJ and in the baker have the option to expand this highres file to the individual, named objects in it. (Projection group -> loaded files -> objects in each file). Then you'd be able to change the ID color both for the group, and for the objects in it.

    EDIT:
    7.I think the baker would benefit greatly from a variable blur filter like in Maya or Mightybake, as intersecting high poly parts leave visible jagged lines. It's especially noticeable with the curvature map, and the downsampling option doesnt appear to improve this map as it does the normal bake.

    I tried to bake at higher res and rescale to get rid of the jagged curvature, but facets appear when baking higher res, and intensity is increased? Any ideas?

    Is this mesh from zbrush or does the highpoly have mesh normals (zbrush files don't)? You might try increasing the pixel sample radius in the curvature map to 6 or 8. Also you could try forcing smooth mesh normals in the options.


  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    Thanks for the answers. The output path works as you described, I just expected it to always be visible, since it is when you first you pick it, but vanishes after you save the project. The first time I was confused whether it even registered it or it got lost.

    The high res mesh is from 3dsmax, and the normal map bakes fine, without facets, it just happens for the Curvature (with smooth normals on or off). I had already increased the radius to 8 for the 2k bake, since with default 4 I got facets. With the same settings of radius 8 at 4k or 8k, facets become once again visible, and it appears the contrast also increases. I can get good results by setting it to 16 at 4k, then resize down.
  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator

    These are the maps I baked for texturing: normal, object space, AO, gradient and vertex color. Gradient map needs to be 16-bit non-dithered or else I get some artifacts inside Substance Painter.

    Unfortunately I can't use the baked curvature because of the facets problems and Increasing the pixel sample radius has the side effect of losing a lot of details around the edges - I can't get nice edge wear. So for now in Painter I have a curvature derived from the normal map, with some Photoshop tweaks.

    Also, a WIP of the texturing:





  • Joopson
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    Joopson quad damage
    Wow, looking lovely so far!
  • AlecMoody
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    AlecMoody ngon master
    If you can packup your files and send them to alecmoody@gmail.com I can figure out the curvature issue. I haven't run into this before and I have done a lot of bakes with handplane.
  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    Here are the final bakes:


    The results are good, and for the curvature map, subdividing the high res mesh as you said get rids of the facets and the bake is fast, but tinkering with settings I got good results with these settings too (it took a little longer, and with low sample radius there are still facets):



    Another thing that would be nice: ray misses on AO could be black instead of white:


  • AlecMoody
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    AlecMoody ngon master
    Yeah, the raycast curvature is something I hardly ever use. How long did that map take to output?

    Also, your AO map is very very clean.  Is that a ton of samples and a very long bake or are you processing the result in photoshop? I never sample AO that far since it takes a long time and on anything textured a little noise won't show.
  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    It took about 6-8 minutes for the curvature and 10 for the AO (on an i7 3820). The AO was baked with 60 samples and full AA, and it was almost perfect, only did a very small Surface Blur in PS. It was still significantly faster than baking in xnormal.
  • AlecMoody
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    AlecMoody ngon master
    What resolution? 60 samples with with 16x AA is a ton but your result is really nice. I have become really impatient with baking and waiting 10 minutes sounds like an eternity to me.
     
    One of our planned features is AA sample smoothing and automatic sampling based on a noise threshold. That should let people pick how much noise they are willing to live with and prevent sampling beyond that amount.


  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    That sounds like a good timesaver, with no more hassle of tweaking and testing. I baked everything at 2048x2048 and committing to the long bake was not a problem since I knew it was final after fine tuning the projection on the super fast normal bake.
  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    Updated first post with final images.
  • Phoenix995
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    Phoenix995 interpolator
    this looks awesome!
  • LTS3D
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    LTS3D polycounter lvl 5
    @huffer your curvature map looks amazing! I tried using your settings but my result comes out super noisy even with the samples cranked up to crazy numbers.
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