What are you working on RIGHT NOW? - Community WIP thread

Judith on 22/2/2009 at 12:40

Well, that was somewhat hard lesson about UV unwrap, but the result looks fine, more or less. The texture seems a bit blocky, but I have to worry about the UV placement in UT3, so I used some detail normalmaping to mask it when player gets closer to the mesh. I don't have to worry about it in T3, so I'll scale these up, so the texture looks less blurry.

Inline Image:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3390/3298012961_ac446ced42_o.jpg

Inline Image:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3556/3298013003_0a2ef7600a_o.jpg

Renzatic on 22/2/2009 at 19:56

The gate is done! I learned a few valuable lessons while making this, mainly don't do the overly fancy crap until you've got the basic shape down first. What I did was start out with something small, make it all fancy crap like, start something else, make it all fancy crap like, repeat. Later on, when I started welding the model together, I had to contend with all the extra edges and vertices on my huge collection of fancy crap, and it was a pain in the ass to put together.

So now, pictures and files time!

(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/arty.jpg) Drama Shot

(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/arty2.jpg) Close up of the curves. The .obj file is regular polygons, since that particular format doesn't export subD surfaces. I think the Max equivalent is the turbosmooth modifier.

(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/nouveau_gate.rar) And the gate itself, for you brave souls who want to attempt getting this into a game.

Any critiques are welcome. Be as harsh as you want. I won't learn anything if no one badmouths my stuff.

Judith on 22/2/2009 at 21:55

Awesome! And now, onto less pleasant things... How are your doing with the UVs? ;) Actually, just auto-flattening those took a few seconds on my PC :cheeky:

Renzatic on 22/2/2009 at 22:55

Maybe later. Right now I'm dead set on learning to model better. Specifically, I want to learn how to do surface details. Something like carved leaves on a wooden door, inlaid curves, bas reliefs. The complicated stuff I've always wanted to do, but didn't feel like I had the necessary skills to pull it off until here recently.

Course I ain't giving up on the game stuff in the meantime. I'm doing one of those doors I posted in the shots above. It's fairly simple, so it'll be textured, normalmapped, and ready for everyone to play with by the time I'm done.

Renzatic on 25/2/2009 at 07:28

(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/curvy_door.jpg) Door

Depending on how deeply detailed I want to go, I'm either almost done or just starting. Right now, there isn't much left to do on the basic shape. If I wanted to finish it up, I could have the low poly model textured and normalmapped in a day or two.

...well, maybe.

Judith on 25/2/2009 at 10:28

Basic shape looks cool, you can either sculpt a wood texture in Zbrush/Mudbox and render it later in Modo/Max or just paint the mesh wit some basic wood texture and add some dark lines and highlights. Well, I'm preaching the choir :) Anyway, I've been trying to incorporate the high->low poly workflow in my mesh building, so I'm adding high level of detail to my railing now:

(http://img100.imageshack.us/my.php?image=railingsculpt.jpg)

Inline Image:

http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/5730/railingsculpt.th.jpg

Renzatic on 25/2/2009 at 16:52

That is nice. You've actually got a great scarred metal look going on. If it were me, I'd have just throw a few bumps and dents on there and patted myself on the back.

Judith on 26/2/2009 at 02:39

That's exactly what I was going to do, but I couldn't resist to see how it will all end when I'd take all the baked textures to Gimp and play with them for a while:

(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3653/3309910407_3f18b09ac5_o.jpg)

Inline Image:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3653/3309910407_3cc8fd8c08.jpg

That's the UE 3.0 model, I thought that 1000 tris would be enough. This technique is absolutely awsome ;)

Renzatic on 26/2/2009 at 22:57

Man...you don't even have any seams on the normalmap. Nice stuff. The only downside I see is the polycount. A thousand tris is kinda high for that model.

Judith on 27/2/2009 at 00:26

Quote Posted by Renzatic

Man...you don't even have any seams on the normalmap. Nice stuff.

I used the "usual" trick - dividing the UV faces for horizontal bars so the seam actually goes in the middle of the bottom, or at least between the bottom and one of the sides ;)

Quote Posted by Renzatic

The only downside I see is the polycount. A thousand tris is kinda high for that model.

I'm still working on a proper approach here. I guess using the optimize method for MP mesh wasn't the best solution. I could just prepare the target low poly mesh which would be used for projection mapping later. Well, live and learn.

Meanwhile, the revisited version, with and without the rust. I think I'll exchange the wood for something more worn out, at least for the second part, it looks too new in comparison.

[Edit] Final version:

(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3348/3318932060_0623a1f2b6_o.jpg)

Inline Image:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3348/3318932060_7a35c58829.jpg