I make a door WIP
polycounter lvl 12
I'm trying to make a door, this is what I have so far. I've baked the normal, and in my pic, I'm using a ambient occlusion bake as a temporary diffuse. It's currently 847 tri's, I'm not sure if that is too much, I'm aiming for current gen. Any C&C as to how I am doing so far would be great, suggestions are also welcome.
Replies
It looks good though, I like it.
Ive been drinking...
i think if you're going in that much detail, you could spend a few polies on the 4 big insets on the door as well
i tried my hand at both lowpoly things, didnt really get the polycount down a lot, i focused more on making the shapes rounder and the silhouette smoother
also tried an alternate solution for the crown but that didnt save polies =/
crown:
http://pixelsnader.nl/stuff/crown.png
http://pixelsnader.nl/stuff/crown.max
clobber:
http://pixelsnader.nl/stuff/clobber.png
http://pixelsnader.nl/stuff/clobber.max
looking at the first post some more.. i think the top 2 loops in thearch are pretty redundant
and while you've got 2 visible loops on the part of the door with the diamonds, there are 3 on the uvwmwap.. i think you could get rid of the outer one there ..takes off another 24 polies
Snader, thanks for pointing the 2 redundant edge loops. I think I'll keep the crown and handle as it is right now. It should be easy to change later if I really need to, but I like your crown model. I blame myself for doing a highpoly first and not even thinking about the low poly. Something I'll do differently from now on
Here is the diffuse, the original size is a 1024, but resized to post here
I like this in general, I want to walk up to it and twist its nobs, and grab its knockers. But, I think that with that strong green its a shame not to have red in. Im a total sucker for the complementary sucker punch.
Uhm I did a paint over, I hope you dont mind, I was showing you a little what I was talking about before with that open window thing i sometimes see..., just real quick, and I added some color stuff. I like the gold trim foot scraper thing, so I tried to replicate it into the crown accents.. You could easily push your diffuse into a more interesting way I think. Maybe you not finished the texture tho! Right now, im not sure what materials you are showcasing... like what stuff is made of, other than grey... at least make it "after rain grey" or something, not plain grey. "after rain grey" at least smells good.
Anyway, Im a fanboy now! go door go!
The arch at the top sticks out way farther than what you have, easy fix and looks better.
I dont expect you to do any window cutting I was just explainin.
That door looks so outta place in that wall, but is obviously original. probably repainted into that hideous white tho.
i also think the gold is too yellow and the wear and tear doesnt match up with the shinyness.
brave decision to redo the entire texture btw, and good luck with that
whats the polycount atm?
- The first diffuse is pretty good, the gold could be desaturated. But its the best out of the three.
- The second Looks like an attempt to add color using solid colors & paint bucket fill.
The last:
Each piece seems a bit monochromatic and overly saturated. The gold parts are glowing bright yellow, the door is very brown and hardly any other colors are making it into those pieces. Gold/brass isn't always R 255, G 255, B 0. Take a look at the ref photo, you know the material is some kind of shinny yellow-ish metal but its not banana yellow.
It looks like you're limiting yourself to 4 crayons when you have a room full of different kinds of paint.
I think KP and Snader make very good points. The door wouldn't be carved out of one big block of wood, but assembled from different pieces. The grain needs to be flipped on those seperate pieces.
Paint over:
EDIT: Three things I forgot to mention.
First is that you can apply a wood grain to your high poly. Make cuts and flip UV's around to get the grain working like it should, then bake out the diffuse.
Second, you can also create a second UV channel for your low poly that is a simple planar map. Put a weathering overlay that uses the 2nd channel in a blend material (or composite) with your diffuse and rebake the diffuse. This will take the weathering and accurately scatter it around your original jumbled up UV1.
Lastly, for weathering you can take just about any pic, blur it out and overlay/multiply it. I used this. If its for commercial work you'll want to be careful where you dig up those kinds of photos, best if you take them yourself, or just doodle blurry colors.
with these crits you should be able to make this door look awesome - the highpoly and lowpoly are already fine, and although the UV layout is a bit "fragmented" for my liking, I think with a good texture this will be an excellent portfolio piece.
edit ^ Mop got there first ^
personally i would have made a simpler low poly aswell, i generally think that cleaner results are given by letting the normal map do most of the work, at the expense of a few pixels in silohette definition, for example the detail round the edge could have been a simple cylinder with a lump in the middle and some lumps at the top, this would have removed alot of 90degree angles which are causing slight shading issues making the normal map more "solid" but mould have reduced the impact of the sillohette slightly.
also it looks like you are hand painting your masks between materials in photoshop, you dont need to do this, simply apply lots of different flat colour materials in max then bake a diffuse-only texture out, use this to select the masks (if you have three materials use R G B as then you can simply select the channel in PS)
Snader, I think my current model is 841 tris, just 6 tri's less from my original. I was only able to delete one loop on my top arch. The other loop caused nasty stretching, I couldnt seem to fix it in the UV editor, so I ended up only removing one loop
Edit: err.. forgot that I changed some of my lighting colours, didn't realise its making it a bit too yellowy
And my diffuse so far
Vj
Well, one last thing, and MoP already covered it and its easier then you might think to fix, and that's the UV layout. There are a lot of broken pieces which chunks up the vertex count quite a bit. Every UV seam is broken and verts along those seams are doubled when you get it in game. Less seams the better.
"Oh crap I have to redo my UV layout, but I just got done creating this great materials... It will take days to shuffle all that around in photoshop!"
Easy to fix, even at this stage. Here's what you do.
- Apply Unwrap UVW save the layout, call it DoorUV1.
- Apply a second Unwrap UVW, change the channel to 2.
- Rearrange your pieces, save this new layout as DoorUV2.
- Open RTT (0) set your object to render to UV Channel 2 and render a diffuse map.
- If you have normal maps and spec maps, put the old maps in your diffuse slot one at a time, and render with it set to diffuse.
You're UV's are totally fluid and open to change at any time
and my current diffuse
I liked those two things. While weathering is important, you should be able to do accomplish it without washing out the piece.
Keep going, this is looking good!
Edit: Looking at them side by side now, it may just be the lighting! Look at Vig's Paintover again, and see if you can get some of the dynamic range he's got in that one into yours.
Couple of crits:
- Address plaque could look better placed above the door rather than on the mid right.
- The trim where the top of the door and glass meet looks pasted in. Work on the transition from the top of the door to the trim, show structure and seam where the door and trim separate.
Keep at it!
I guess I just liked the warmer tones in that older version. I think you could potentially add a little of that color into the texture without making it look out of place/pre-lit.
Gamedev, I'll tweak it a bit more, I think I know which part you are referring to. As for the plaque, I think I'll move it up a little, but I'll probably keep it on the right door trim
Heres a screen cap with colored lighting. The thing that still irks me is that Unreal Editor keeps blurring out some of my details when I zoom out to screen capture the entire door </shrug> I'm so tempted to run a sharpen filter on my screengrab, but NO! No cheating !
Now you just need the building to put around it :P
Here are some large screens of the door as well as my final textures. Gonna add these screens to my portfolio, this will be my first portfolio peice, woot!
try turning the filtering/mipmapping off in the engine, get your screen res and size on screen as large as possible then downscale the image after, this can lead to a slightly sharper image but may result in some graininess/moire effects if you cant get the res large enough.
Paintover
Also, (ok two things) the normal map is missing the wood grain details like the deep cracks. CrazyBump (and I think XNormal too) does a pretty quick job of adding extra maps to your normal map, I wouldn't add your entire diffuse, but add just the cracks and maybe some detail to the stone.
/e Don't 'dwell' with one project for too long, especially if it's one of your earlier projects and as 'simple' as a door. My 2 cts.
No, don't feel that way, I like it that you guys push me and raise the bar for me everytime I improve. I'm still learning and I'd rather spend more time on this door and actually learn to do things properly than do more models and put out crappy quality, or be lazy on some things.
For example, because of your post I went back to try to put the lacquer effect on my door. It's something I wanted from the start but left it out because it was too hard. But now that I am trying it again, I'm finally getting that effect or at least the beginnings of it. The domino effect is that, I am revisiting my specular map and making it better and also looking into more Unreal Editor material settings. I'm also going to explore what Vig suggested, so I'll post a screen when I have something ready to show.
My thoughts is that I'm going to squeeze as much knowledge out of each model I make, and I thought this door was running dry but there's still milk in those teets!
That's not what I'm trying to say though. I think it's better to apply your new skills to a fresh project and expand on that, get new insights, instead of keeping on revisiting/hammering on an oldy. But that is assuming your aim is to get better at what you (want to) do, instead of trying to build the ultimate door. :poly141:
also, the door knob is the thing that kinda looks like a knocker near the top.. I think it's a eurpoean thing. My reference photo (on page 1) looks like its taken somewhere in europe
I think the thing up top is the knocker, and the handle is the thing in lower center. kind of like Bilbo's front door, but I think you're right its pretty European?