Man, I should really do a concept like this too some time, I just never run into this stuff :/ Looking good, though that wall piece doesn't look that difficult to not use floaters on, no ? Or are you connecting everything as a single mesh ?
Finished the panel. No floaters where there aren't seperate parts on the actual object. If it seems really stretched to you guys let me know, this new widescreen laptop is driving me mad, all my work suddenly seems stretched haha.
Like poopipe says you can hack the blending of the handle by floating it over the bin. If you flare out the open edgeloop at the base of the handle you can trick the baker into baking what it perceives is a continuous surface normal. Like a floater.
Just a quick clarification on what you mean by floaters. You're talking about just sticking geometry right through and intersecting them? I've heard that poly flow rarely matters on high poly objects, if they are being made for a normal map that is.
Yes, so as I said, it's entirely up to you. Whether baked from high, stamped in texture, or baked from floaters, the results are all practically the same so it's a matter of personal workflow. Use whichever method suits you best.
I am also doing the flamethrower, I am really bad at keeping up with posts, but am working on it. Really liking the other models on here. This is my model with floaters, just need to get bakes and texture; will be done in Substance Painter.
These tools are cool in all, but am I the only one who watches these videos and thinks to myself, "That would be a hell of a lot easier and more efficient to work with if those were floaters"? Well, for most of the smaller/flatter bits like rivets and such at least.
odium: Looks nice, fix the floating fence though ;) Done more on the shotgun, still a bit more polishing to be done and I am planning to do a sculpt pass, to make it more rough. A few floaters here that look a bit funny with the ao.
Apparently can be solved (for the most part) by baking with ignore back-facing ticked within Xnormal. Or for 3ds as Joe 'EarthQuake' Wilson puts it "by disabling shadow casting and enabling backface culling on your floater object, by going to the object properties or something." [sic]
In the customize UI options you can drag them into a toolbar aswell or hotkey them (category "Poly Tools"). Just saying because I find them incredible usefull ;) You need to be in one of the Editable Poly submodes to activate the floater though.