[WIP] First Asset Critique
polycounter lvl 5
Hello all,
I've been trying to learn as much as I can from tutorials, but I thought the best/fastest way to learn would be to try and get some advice and feedback from you good people.
Anything you have to help would be greatly appreciated.
The goal is a low poly mesh for a game asset in UE4 (not animated). It was made in Blender.
Next steps would be taking this to ZBrush and creating a normal map.
Thank you!
I've been trying to learn as much as I can from tutorials, but I thought the best/fastest way to learn would be to try and get some advice and feedback from you good people.
Anything you have to help would be greatly appreciated.
The goal is a low poly mesh for a game asset in UE4 (not animated). It was made in Blender.
Next steps would be taking this to ZBrush and creating a normal map.
Thank you!
Replies
I'd move on to sculpting
Next I'm going to create a normal map from sculpting in ZBrush. Would that fix the hard edges that should be soft?
This video seems to cover it:
It basically just controls whether an edge will produce a hard seam or whether it will smoothly shade. This is important when it comes to baking and having your edges not smoothed properly on your low poly can cause baking artefacts. In general I just use the rule that where ever you have a UV split you have a hard edge, there are probably blender scripts which automate this process.
I'll make sure to go back and edit it to better those edges!
The easiest way I find is to make your base mesh, sculpt it, build your low poly from your reduced base mesh (or start from scratch and build over your HP), UV and then do smoothing groups before exporting for bake.
Sometimes its nice to have your smoothing roughly set up whilst doing your low poly to get any idea of how stuff is looking but it doesn't matter too much at that point
I played around a bit, is this a little better? Like you said, I could move on from here and look at this again once I'm further along in the process, but it's always nice to have a rough idea haha
Arrimus did a similar series with a wooden box, it gives a good overview of the process up to the baking stage. I'd really recommend it
Its in 6 parts:
Youtube doesn't seem to want to autoplay it in the right order so you might have to click through the suggested links.
Thanks again!
Any thoughts and critiques would be very welcome!
So, as a beginner, if you spend like two weeks making this masterpiece sculpt, inevitably you'll find that, going through the filters of baking and then by simply applying different colros and surface qualities, much of what you painstakingly crafted will be lost, or muted, or changed in some way... So I just say this to caution against spending very long on the sculpt -- trying to make it perfect -- before moving into texturing. Once you've completed a dozen models or so, then you'll know how to get the most out of each phase of the process, but in the beginning it's better to just keep moving to get a sense of the overall process.
@ChrisLambert The sculpt looks good man. Keep it up.
Thanks for the advice, it's definitely something that has been in the back of my mind! I've spent most of the past 2 weeks researching workflows, baking, Painter... and also just studying lots of other peoples assets haha. A lot of that sculpt is using brushes I found. But I also wanted to spend the time just learning the software the best I could and playing around with different things.
If I remember correctly, Painter allows you to re-import altered meshes whilst keeping textures, you just need to re-bake (I really hope that's right) that way if I find areas I really messed up, I should be able to go back a fix it without toooo much headache - finger's crossed!
@Ashervisalis
Thank you!
Painter is pretty smart about reprojecting from 3d space, but it does have limits. Like, if you completely change the UV's, sometimes it will have trouble if you have complicated layers and masking. But anyway, you'll see.
Oh, and I forgot to mention in the previous post, nice sculpt!
Yeah, trying to get my head around everything is very confusing at times, hoping correcting all the mistakes won't be too complex haha and thanks!
Any more thoughts or advice would be very helpful
I may be misreading some things, but notice the harsh shading on the metal bracket on the lower right side? That may be due to having a smoothing angle that is too great. I think you are using max, sorry I don't know the jargon for that program, but basically if you decrease the angle threshold that recieves smoothing, that harsh black spot should look better.
I use Blender, and I have actually set that as a hard edge where it connects to the wood body, maybe I shouldn't do that?