hookay so done with the basic shapes for the high poly all the pieces are turbosmoothed up and now i just add some more details and floaters Uploaded with ImageShack.us edit: better render
EDIT: Reup'd with blinn applied little rectangles at bottom kept giving me pinching and stretching and I didn't want to adjust my topology for the top part. So floaters. Fuck the police.
If all the detail is floating geo, an easy way to do what Predator suggested with combining the two renders is to render the floaters separately. And when baking them, add an alpha to your output maps.
yeah but apparently it messes up some of the graphite modeling tools, do that at your own risk. I guess it shouldn't be to hard to script a floater or pop up as the old style of modeling in max.
Care to show your work? It's hard to help you without knowing where you have exactly failed. Have you failed in the baking process or there's a tricky shape that needs to be done by floaters?
Tbh, I find it a drag setting this stuff up in Max (especially if you need to exclude floaters from rendering shadows into the AO), so xnormal is my weapon of choice. And it's quick too.
Thanks for your feedback Stromberg, I was aware of the bad floaters on the front and the smoothing errors but I didn't noticed those hard edges at all. I will fix this asap and then start to unwrap. thx
I hope to go back and add more detail as floaters later. I also now see some proportions that I missed, as well as one part of the mesh that is crooked in the side view.
I used a high poly sphere and cut into the model in order to achieve most line work, there are floaters like the bolts and the main pieces on the ends. Update: Added the smaller eye to the Head piece.
These are just an quick attempt to make a floater to add bullet ricochet details for a mesh, either by adding it to a mesh for baking or just adding it to the mesh. I didn't use reference it was just a shot in the dark.