Rebuilding this ship from scratch for optimisation reasons - trying to reduce the amount of triangles and materials drastically while improving the general look of the ship.
Cheers guys! I'll get some proper comparison shots once I'm all done but here's one with the old model on the right. Old model is 427k tris and 27 materials, the new one is 139k and 8 respectively ATM.
This is really amazing work! How many materials or single textures are you at currently? I'm also curious about the current polycount. This looks really detailed!
This is really amazing work! How many materials or single textures are you at currently? I'm also curious about the current polycount. This looks really detailed!
184k tris and 8 materials (4 hull materials, 4 decal materials). All the texture inputs (aside from the manufacturer decals) are greyscale, tinted in the engine with 3 tints per material (masked via pure R, G and B vertex colour). Looking at a 2048 normal map, a 2048 multimap (diffuse-roughness-dirtmap-transparency) and 512 colour variation overlay each for the metal and the paint materials. Additional couple of 512s for the decals and spotlight shape planes.
The main hull texture inputs are basically split into two with the top section consisting of unique normal map/alpha decals and the bottom half being tiling on the X axis. I've left a fair bit of space in case I need to make more normal map details for future ships, though the kit from this ship should take me quite far with clever reuse.
Basically, the intent was to crunch down the materials down as much as possible while making them completely modular and tintable in-engine for making skins etc without having to create new textures.
these latest ships are freakin awesome! well done! also well done optimising these models, thats never easy and sometimes not fun at all so well done for soldiering through that!
these latest ships are freakin awesome! well done! also well done optimising these models, thats never easy and sometimes not fun at all so well done for soldiering through that!
I still gotta make LODs for it ;__; But yeah the much lower tri count on LOD0 and particularly lower mat count is a big win in my book.
Looking great! These give me Homeworld vibes. I'm loving the different paint jobs you've played with. The LODs are coming along well too. Thanks for sharing!
I love the amount of detail you put into these, it's really quite impressive. How did you keep the poly count so low with that level of detail? I've attempted something similar and cant keep it below 300k tris without losing detail.
I love the amount of detail you put into these, it's really quite impressive. How did you keep the poly count so low with that level of detail? I've attempted something similar and cant keep it below 300k tris without losing detail.
Creative layering of individually inexpensive detail, good normal maps and shader trickery. I figured out that you can tile an individual colour channel in Unreal 4 for essentially free by instancing the texture sampler and multiplying the UVcoords only on that instance, passing a single channel through. That's basically what the blue channel of my multimap does, just a simple tiling dirt map blended into diffuse & roughness. Here's a slightly out of date wireframe:
Insane ship man, how much time aprox did it take to finish from start to end ?
I started a bit before my xmas break at work so maybe 5-6 work weeks altogether? That's including research/experimentation, materials and bespoke shader work. I reckon I can make the next one in half that, quite easily.
Hello, Could you make short breakdown how to achive that view? I mean how you make a normal map, what you baked and what just overpaint. How you manage your UV and what soft use for texturing?
The difference between old and new really shows. All the small details you added really help giving it a better sense of scale in my opinion. The color variations work really well too. Great job!
Hello, Could you make short breakdown how to achive that view? I mean how you make a normal map, what you baked and what just overpaint. How you manage your UV and what soft use for texturing?
Normal maps are almost entirely made in nDo2 with a couple bits baked down to a plane in Max. No idea what I'd tell you about the UVs, it's just manual work with nothing fancy about it. Textures are straight up Photoshop
Incredibly good work with loads of dedication it seems. Did you use deferred decal normal overlaying method on this?
I experimented with using them but they seemed to be causing more issues than solving them, so I opted for making two texture sheets (one for metals, one for non-metals) that have the normal map details in the same sheet as the tiling texture.
Replies
Also, nice quote
Finished! (For now, I want to go back and add further fine definition down the line because why not)
Skins
The main hull texture inputs are basically split into two with the top section consisting of unique normal map/alpha decals and the bottom half being tiling on the X axis. I've left a fair bit of space in case I need to make more normal map details for future ships, though the kit from this ship should take me quite far with clever reuse.
Basically, the intent was to crunch down the materials down as much as possible while making them completely modular and tintable in-engine for making skins etc without having to create new textures.
But yeah the much lower tri count on LOD0 and particularly lower mat count is a big win in my book.
Here's a slightly out of date wireframe:
I started a bit before my xmas break at work so maybe 5-6 work weeks altogether? That's including research/experimentation, materials and bespoke shader work. I reckon I can make the next one in half that, quite easily.
Could you make short breakdown how to achive that view? I mean how you make a normal map, what you baked and what just overpaint. How you manage your UV and what soft use for texturing?