yea, its the 2 flat inset areas on either side that instantly pop out to me. looks like someone riddled the area with bullets. if you were to even just get rid of the bullet marks it would look fine i think.caant wait to see this finished.
I really like that paintover. I think its overlit though, it would look pretty cool f you had shadows in those small inset things by the ceiling. But then again it all depends on the look you want to go for, anythings possible with sci-fi scenes.
Ah, yes you're right about the flat normal test! Here is the actual normal map I was using when I noticed the problem. The inset image is what it looks like on the sphere in the scene. I tried flipping the green channel but this doesn't fix the problem, unfortunately.
I would ditch that entire mess you've created on the helmet to create the inset for the helmet. You could get away with making the helmet hexagonal like its wireframe profile suggests and just paint in the inset and save yourself a bunch of tris. I'm not opposed to the major silhouette changes that you've made, but the…
Great work so far. There were a few things that caught my eye so I made a quick mock-up to point them out. 1. The bright yellow section (profile) should protrude and not be inset. It reads as the part of the outer casing that protrudes the most, (barely). The dark carbon fiber/patterned plastic bordering it should actually…
I've got an oval-ish tube mesh with some stuff like bolts, bevels, and insets, so, I can't just use Loft with a spline (or could it? I don't have much experience with Loft). I was wondering if there was any method I could use that would repeat the mesh on a path as long as needed as well as bending it to and fro?
Looks pretty good :) Is it intended to be a first person weapon? if so, what does it look like from that view? Also, you could probably cut quite a few tris on all your symmetry seams (on the handle and magazine, also have a few ngons on the front where it's inset)
Based on what I see so far, you are taking EXACTLY the wrong approach to modeling in all the details. Model in everything that affects the profile or silhouette. The smaller, inset details should be flat (unless large enough and/or at player level), and I'd model those shields as alpha planes.
Also one more note on when too far of a ray distance can be a problem. Particularly on convex shapes like this: 1. Base mesh 2. Cage, may look problematic but it is fine 3. Cage overlapping onto itself, will cause all sorts of problems here in the inset.
I'm pretty much done modeling now. hovering right above 212k polys. the bricks, and pillar/moulding/door inset geometry will be removed and replaced with normal mapping. so it'll probably drop down under 200k. time to start texturing! some ambient occlusion renders: