I agree my favorite pieces are the cactus, the stone temple entry and the wooden doors in the indie game. I also agree that the spec on some of the metal or plastic surfaces could use some work. The metal on the stubby sword and the knight look a lot better.
Looking cool man, but I think the pattern on the body suit is too strong, maybe try really lowering the opacity of the pattern in the diffuse and increasing the contrast in the spec, could make for a cool result -just my 2c's, looking forward to seeing this one finished.
The tank is definitely the strongest piece! For all of them I feel like the texturing the needs another look. The Spec/Metalness should help define different material types and the gloss/roughness should describing surface of those materials. I hope that makes sense
It's almost the same as your traditional material creation but instead it introduces new concepts : Roughness (similar to glossiness), and Metalness( 1 for metallic materials, 0 for non metallic). Personally I find it extremely easier and more realistic than traditional spec/gloss workflow.
nice! i just think the skin and hair material definition could really use some work the skin is like with no spec and the hair lost a LOT of detail compared to the highpoly and also reads more like paperstripes did you use ddo for texturing?
How did you do the textures? Are the diffuse textures as easy as a flat color with an AO bake on top? Using spec maps to make it look less bland? Also, I'm really looking forward to seeing those tutorials. I'm loving your work.
UV seams? Smoothing groups? Non-normalized UV islands? Also, don't look at your normal map in diffuse since it's useless at helping your debug stuff, stick in your normal and throw in a quick spec + diffuse to see if the lines are really noticeable or not.
Yes, it is normal, even more so if your pc specs aren't that good. Try working smarter, don't overdo it with those turbosmooth modifiers (the double TS method can get you to the millions in no time), keep the scene as clean as possible while working.
What's neat is that using a tool like fozi's you can do one bake of your model and then convert the it to whatever engine spec you like. I don't think that maya's normals are 100% compatible to every engine out there, so there is still an issue.
i loved 3d on the DS too. 2048 tris goes a hell of a long way, and it's surprising how far you could push the textures. I have no truck with people saying "this is DS spec" on portfolio pieces, most of the time it isn't, nowhere near.