turbine scene
here is an asset for a scene i'm trying to start. it's a piece of a huge turbine...to give some perspective..there is going to be a stair case about fifteen steps tall to get on top of this thing. but i'm a little stuck at this point. so i need some direction. first the pics
the low poly will be optimized later. the ribbing you see in the high poly is actually part of the low but i hid it because it was in the way seeing the structure below. other gizmos and things are going to be added of course but what would be the best way to go about this as far as the smaller details go...scratches etc...do i really need to bring something like this into zbrush?
my school didn't have zbrush till i was already graduating so i never got a chance to introduce it to my workflow.
the low poly will be optimized later. the ribbing you see in the high poly is actually part of the low but i hid it because it was in the way seeing the structure below. other gizmos and things are going to be added of course but what would be the best way to go about this as far as the smaller details go...scratches etc...do i really need to bring something like this into zbrush?
my school didn't have zbrush till i was already graduating so i never got a chance to introduce it to my workflow.
Replies
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A: Model and bake them along with the main model. Z-Brush, subD whathave you. You can either model them into the main model (difficult) or model a smaller portion where these details are, conform it to the main model, then sculpt just that patch.
B: Make a greeble/decal sheet. Model a bunch of scratches, dents, paint chips etc on flat planes, Light them appropriately, then render them from above to get a normal map decal sheet. Copy and paste these decals in Photoshop to appropriate locations on the normal map, blending as needed
C: Use the Nvidia normal map filter in PS. Draw out the scratches in shades of grey like a height map on their own layer in PS, then run the nvidia filter on that layer. Presto insta details.
B and C both have the chance of running into distortion issues, but they are also a better option if your system has trouble with extra high polygon count models.
vailias - what i've been doing is cloning the model and breaking the clone into smaller parts, Then subD in max and render norms for each part and then combining the norms in PS...then i apply them to the original lowpoly and then optimise the low to get rid of extra polys...this seems a little pain staking...is there another way that might be a little quicker?
i haven't tried to use zbrush for detailing yet..i'm gonna try it out tonight on some simpler objects
the greeble sheet sounds pretty rad
i use the Nvidia for some stuff...what do you think about crazybump?
I think you have an interesting concept but i would suggest working on the execution a little more. The large cylinders you have cut into both the high and low poly could easily be floating geometry. Cutting them in has done nothing other than to deform the main bulk of the mesh you cut into and give a little bit of a smoother egde where they join (the cuts around them certainly wont show up in the normals). The surface will have a big flat spot where you have cut round the cylinder because you have modified the edge flow which you will probably notice on the normals.
The other thing i have noticed is that your ribs seem to be straight up extrudes. These wont transfer into the normals either because the rays wont spot the sides when you project from your high poly to your low unless you model the ribs on the low, which you dont want to do (maybe the bigger ones are an exception). Its better to bevel them slightly so thats in essence the sides of the ribs are visible just slightly. That will help them show up on your normals. Check here for a bit of a better explanantion.
http://www.acetylenegames.com/artbymasa/tuts/tut-modeling_for_next-gen_games.jpg
Other than that, like you mentioned your low could be optimised an awful lot more but i shall wait to see how that turns out!
Good luck
You should be able to get most of your mesh baked at once, From the look of it it won't be a huge number of tris to bake. It sounds like the best option would not be to clone it, but to select individual faces/pieces, clone those off to a new object, and subdivide them/model them to be the shapes you want for detail. For a mechanical thing like this it shouldn't go over a few million tris.
Do you happen to have any concept art that you can post? It certainly makes planning for these sorta things easier.
OH another trick is that you should be able to bake a displacement map on the high poly to the normal map for the low poly. I saved a lot of trouble that way on some artificial muscles.