I should have speicified. Lightmaps only work on bsp surfaces. If you want to get rid of bad lighting and shadows on your meshes you'll want to tessellate them a little more. Here's a good exlpaination of how the engine handles lighting. Vertex lighting
Whargoul's way is good. SEM on the wiki Plane will work OK as long as it's bump-mapped. Without a bump, it'll probably just reflect a single pixel from the spheremap. You could also bend the plane's vertex normals outward, so it reflects more of the spheremap.
Rethink how each vertex contributes to the outline of your object. Yeah, even with speaking the heads seem a little dense. You'll find half of the expression in a conversation comes from the body, not the face. Check out how some of the crazy folks here spend their polys.
Gorgeous art and info bombs aplenty? Subscribed! Mech's look very noisy without vertex paint - it's difficult to work out what is a gun and what's just greebles. Any plans on this? It will probably be nice in game to be able to tell what weapons an opponent is carrying at a glance.
thanks the for the advice charlie, much appreciated! this is the wireframes. i think in order to fix that back bumper its going to be a lot of vertex moving, but should be fine. thats the first major thing to fix on my list, as it kinda ruins the look of the car without it being curved.
Mr Smo Thank you! I'll try to add some red colors to my scene, probably flowers or something of that kind. And maybe one more vertex color channel for wet spots. Thanks for the idea :) JellyBee Thank you for the comment! I'll fix the fish :)
Unfortunately this is just the way split vertex normals and normal maps work. See these two threads on how to fix it: Normal Maps: Can Somone Explain This "Black Edge" issue Understanding averaged normals and ray projection/Who put waviness in my normal map?
Love those clouds will be watching this, Only crit would be maybe to put a little more love in those cliffs to make them match up with the quality of the clouds maybe try some vertex painting if your using udk for this. Great stuff keep er up!
Seems like quite flat areas have gradient issues. This is because the associated vertex normals differ from each other (are pointing in different directions). These gradient issues can cause artifacts, banding, larger file sizes, harder to overlay other details on, etc.
High-res 3d models to bake textures from. Hand-modeled lowpoly (extruding/lofting splines is good for the branches). Crossing planes and alpha test for the foliage. Edited vertex normals for better shading. I put a bunch of stuff here http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentFoliage