Finals have come and gone! I'm still winding down. Here's what I turned in: (my udk crashed at 2am and i hadn't been saving my package... :( ) I wasted a lot of time with my UVs and they came out pretty bad in the end. :I I gave a lot of space to dumb stuff and then all the large important bits got left out. Not to mention…
I've been working on a hydraulic lift cart for class. I haven't started on my texture yet, but here is my finished high and low poly: The long handle in the back does have an unnecessary edge down the middle (it isn't mirrored) but I'd have to rearrange my UVs and I have a deadline looming. <:(
I'm using 3dsmax to bake it as well. I made a normal map earlier that seemed to look alright with unbeveled edges... ...but I messed up some of my smoothing groups on some of my parts (argh!) so I'll try beveling out those edges before I rerender my normal.
Looks good to me. I like that you added the welding joints. What will you use to bake this? You might want the top table bit on your lowpoly to have a simple bevelled edge. The highpoly is quite rounded and that might not come out in the bake on your low version.
No, it's all 3dsmax, I don't know how to use zbrush (yet!!). It's just a bunch of intersecting sphere primitives with a noise modifier along each strip to give it some variation. It got pretty resource intensive and doubled my filesize... Probably because I gave the initial spheres too many sides. :I
The welding is what stuck out for me too, it adds a lot of credibility to the model. I like the way you implemented it with spheres (I haven't devoted time to Zbrush either, so I may be borrowing the idea :-))