http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=101777&page=23 It's a sticky. I haven't posted my progress, but have been getting crit in person instead and in the hangouts. I suppose I should start a thread though or something. So far everything is sculpted, about to retopo and do diffuse and all that jazz.
I hope you plan to lower the tri count before you submit it. 38k is way too high for a game model. Also make sure you bake your AO into your diffuse :) My entry is my first time doing a proper character too. Has been a good learning experience!
More fun camera updates. Got though most of the bake and began working up what are very early textures right now. Most of my work has been in the diffuse, so I'm going to transfer to working and pushing the spec soon. Crits and comments appreciated. EDIT: Updated image instead of thread.
Hey RODPV, :) Cheers for the post - will give it a go when I have a moment. Essentially, I did the same; just used a different method to get the IDs done whilst faffing around with this bug. Aforementioned above, I just baked the Materials to Diffuse colour, instead of Vertex Paint projecting and exporting to XNormal.
Updates- Took the textures into Marmoset 2 to set up materials and rendering. In doing so I tweaked the diffuse to work better with the lighting and materials. I set up 3 renders, a rounded cube, cylinder, and sphere. Look forward to thoughts and feedback on which render looks better and other comments and critiques.…
What did you bake in? Your normal map generally will not "align" at the seams when looking at the texture as a flat diffuse, its just not how normal maps work. The color a pixel is in your normal map is a combination of a bunch of things, highpoly angle, smoothing(lowpoly mesh normals), uv direction etc etc.
A preview of what I've done so far - mostly been on the diffuse map, once that's done I'll work on the normal map like was suggested and get a specular map done. I'm trying to do get the alpha planes for the hair done atm, hopefully it should be more or less done by this weekend (fingers crossed).
Uneven texel density in a normal map is basically invisible, the only time you'll see this issue under normal circumstances would be when the diffuse texture goes on or when you have a lot of noise in your normal map. +1 for selecting clusters and allowing them to scale up through tagging that is a valuable feature.
They are actually rendered separately: the point of my school work was to render different objects using layers (diffuse, spec, reflexion, shadows, etc.) and then put them all together to make a comvincing render. The bike is all rendered separately so that problem you're talking about will be very easy to correct. So…
The process was quite simple. Mesh in 3DS Max then Diffuse in Photoshop and Crazy Bump for Normal Map using several layers of black and white to keep the most control as possible. So, no sculpt or Hi poly for the props, that was a choice in order to save time. For the carved wood stuffs, this is basically from pictures of…