Virtual/lias' Sketchbook

[virtualalias]

Well, I've spent hoooours on this. I'm not really sure whether or not a dumpster is -supposed- to take hours, but it has. Granted, this is my 3rd or 4th model, so I suppose it's bound to take some time.

Engine: N/A
Model: 3DS Max
Texture: Photoshop (1024x1024)
Polygons: 67
Maps:
Diffuse
Normal (Generated using heightmap)

(No specular map, yet, but that's coming eventually.)









I bake Ambient Occlusion, but it didn't do me any good. It just made a 'mask' basically, where all my pieces were pure white and everything else was pure black. Not sure what I did wrong, but I ended up using that AO 'mask' to bring my corners out a little bit with some internal glow / black / lower opacity in Photoshop.

Anyway, if anyone can come up with any CC, I would really appreciate it.

[kYo]

try sampson´s tutorial for the AO part, its simple and works at least for unique/unshared uv´s:
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/su...usion-max.html


maybe you could improve realism by beveling some edges and adding normalmap details to them, and generally by a bit stronger and richer use of normalmap details?

at the moment i find its too flat and lowpoly-looking (lowpoly is good but lowpoly-looking is bad)

so i´d probably try to increase its "thickness" too
nice reference: Meshforum 2006 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!


additionally please think about your presentation, like a proper lighting with viewport shaders or putting it in a unrealengine3 or cryengine2 level for example. currently in your shots lighting is non-existent which isnt eye-pleasing at all (making your work seem worse than it probably is)

[virtualalias]

Thanks for the feedback, kYo. The tutorial about AO's will, likely, be incredibly useful.

I'll definitely use the tip on Normal Map details. I used a height map to make the normal map, so I lost some details that probably could have been done better by creating a hi-poly version for the normal map. (At least when it comes to the bevels in the front of the dumpster.)

As far as lighting goes, I used 3 omnis and doylle's viewport shader for normals. His shader allows for the object to react to one light, but I honestly didn't realize my presentation method wasn't just fine until you told me. Thanks a lot for that. I'll look into dropping my WIPs into a game engine from here on out, and I'll check out some tuts on a better lighting rig for presenting my screen-grabs.

[kYo]

thanks for thanksbutton ^^

if you´re in max 2008 or later, feel free to download my example 3-point lighting and scene setup also with doylle´s shader. posted here below the images: http://www.game-artist.net/forums/sp...html#post71387

if you take a look you may want to tweak it a bit to your needs and of course bake your own ground AO map for each object, but is most likely the faster alternative to the game-engine way

[virtualalias]

Thanks, dude. I wish I could get at that file, but my version of Max won't open it. I'm running 3DS Max 9 and it keeps saying: File Open Failed: <path>/tirescenebykyo.max.

Edit: This is a version error on my end, not a problem with Kyo's files, just to clarify. I didn't realize it wouldn't work in 9.