Mitsubishi FTO

[UnsteadyTeddy]

4990 tri, 1x 1024 diffuse and 1x 512 alpha.

[Xoliul]

Can I see a wireframe please ? And maybe your textures too ?
Model looks nicely smooth, but I think you could get some more out of your texture and geometry here and there.

[UnsteadyTeddy]

Here's the wires and texture scaled down to 512.

[WesleyTack]

Modeling looks good, UV map could be layed out a tad better though, you have a lot of lost space around the wheels, the important thing in the UV map is the car, and yet you only use half of the UV map for it. You could separate the hood / doors / trunk from the car and divide them more on the UV map. The textures are obvious photo sources, which is good, but make them less conspicuous. Also, some good specular map would have made a big difference in the render final.

[Xoliul]

Thanks for that, can't give decent crits without. Cars are my specialty, so I'll go all out on crits here

Modellingwise it's very solid, just some smaller things;
Biggest problem is the hard edge at the side of the roof. Looks ugly and is a very prominent part of the car, so you should definitely chamfer it. Would also make the corner of the front and rear windows softer.
Also, you've got quite some chamfers at the front air intakes, i personally wouldn't have done that and just used smoothing groups. Mirrors are also too much detail for a 5k poly car. Those saved poly's could go to the roof chamfers.
And finally, it's not a bad idea to have your mesh follow the body creases. make your polygons follow the hood and doors, helps unwrapping and is a good habit if you'd want to go all the way modelling door insides and engine. Not a real use in this car, but i would have done it anyway if i had modelled this.

Textures have quite some more problems;
The basic thought of just one 1024² is actually not really optimal. All car games I have modelled for use at least three different texturesheets, mostly one 1024 for the body, a 512 for details and often a shared 512 or 256 for the glass. Often there's a seperate texture for wheels, sometimes shared with other cars.
Biggest thing is that the body should be seperate from every other detail. Reason for this is most games change the color of your car by doing something like a Photoshop color overlay with your greyscale body texture. So having all your other textures on there makes it useless for this already.
Having other stuff seperate is mostly because you can share textures between cars, for windows this always happens in games that allow your glass to break (which is pretty much every single racegame nowadays). Downside is you can't have those car-specific black borders around the windows, but trust me, you won't notice a lack of those ingame. Can be fixed by using a little bit more polygons for it.
Another big reason is that games can use different material shaders per texture, for example a chrome shader for rims, but just plain lighting for the tires. Same thing body and interior.
Soo, suggested texture structure(s);
one 1024 for your body, with nothing that can't be colored by the carpaint on it.
a 256 for the windows, including alpha, but no black borders.
a 256 for the lights; with a lit and unlit version.
a 512 for your wheels and interior (if you had an underside and engine, i'd say a 512 for wheels and 512 for other details).
If you use this structure, you could use your car in most racegame engines nowadays.

Then, on the texture creation;
Your body looks brushed, this is fine, but for a lowpoly car you should always use a baked texture. Really easy basically, you render your diffuse to texture. Set the car base mesh up with a grey material, set some light (I would suggect not using Global Illumination for this), but just spreading some omni's around the side, and setting a direct light on top of it, making sure all is lit adequately. Then just use that as base to brush a bit on, makes sure you shading on the texture is as good as it gets.
The body details like inset crease lines is all good work though.
Your wheel is also good, but looks like some wasted space around the front view. Also the frontal tire texture looks a lot more splotchy due to photosource than the tread texture. No nig thing, but mathcing these more is a good idea.
Interior is okay, could use more detail but this is one of the hardest parts of a car texture in my opinion.
Another big problem I see is that the lights are mapped together with the body. They need way more space as they define a car so much. Also, games do lit headlights through the texture (and a light flare), reason to map 'em more effective. Which is duite easy, as you've got your polygons following your light shapes nicely, but don't use this to your advantage. Especially show in the rear, where the light texture blurs onto the body. Just detaching them and mapping them larger would look a lot better for all your lights.
On the actual light textures themselves, they could use work. The front headlights look lit but will look better with some fake painted chrome, and the black surrounding them should not be pure black, but can do with some Dodge tool light faking. The rear ones are pretty good, getting them from photo's is the best you can do as painting car headlights from scratch is extremely difficult to do realisticly.
And that red border around the brake texture looks horrible on your texturesheet (I know you can't see this on the mode, but still)
That's about it, good work nonetheless, keep this in mind for your next one and it'll be perfect.

Phew, now how's that for some o' that Good Crit

[UnsteadyTeddy]

Hells bells what a crit !
Thats awesome man thanks so much!
I'm guessing you work in the industry as a vehicle artist with crits like that? I have never thought of or received a crit about reusing texture sheets like you said for the windows and car body for different colours etc, thats a great bit of advice!

I know my texturing is terribly weak, its what I need to practice a lot really. I screwed up with the wheel uv which wasted a lot space on the sheet. The lights are bad and I completely forgot to do smooth groups when I made these pics so i'll have to go back and do those. I've got a few polies to play with so i'll throw them in the a pillar as you suggested. I'll definitely look into baking the texture aswell.

Well, I think i'll bookmark this post and keep referring to it, its an awesome post!
If I could give you some cookies I would!

[Xoliul]

Hehe, nope, I'm by far not an industry artist (yet), wouldn't mind becoming a car modeller though. I've just modelled custom cars for a fair square of games (GTA, FlatOut...), and I've looked into the methods of even more games, really helps to see how it's done by the real pro's. And a lot comes from just having made mistakes with stuff like the recoloring, shader types, etc...
If you've got any racinggames installed on your computer, just try looking at the car files for them, or look for a place that has them for download. Here's a site that has the cars from the SimBin GTR & GTL games for download; http://www.archeoskins.com/ (I'm not familiar with these games though, probably differs a bit from what I said earlier).

And your texturing is not weak at all, how you did the bodylines for doors and hood and brushed highlight on the body is really wel done, I don't do any better myself. You shouldn't compare car texturing with all the cool looking FPS stuff that gets whipped up here at GA most of the time; you won't be able to do a lot of grime, rust and dirt (unless for some offroad game i guess), and spec and normal maps are not that common yet for racing games, it gets down to optimal polyflow and polyplacement and creating the best possible diffuse texture to hide the lowpolyness. You could try doing some higher standard stuff as well, the texture guidelines I put down are the average current-gen pc game, none of that fancy nextgen console stuff (which you can't mod / look into anyway).

Anyway, keep at it, good to see another car here at GA, doesn't happen enough yet, so I'll be looking forward to your next one

edit; almost forgot, do have a look at www.smcars.net if you plan to go further with car modelling, very cool community for car-modellers, has taught me a lot.

[UnsteadyTeddy]

yeh when im playing games i tend to spend more time with them on the select screen or in the garage rather than actually racing them
I've got a few higher poly projects on the go aswell at the moment which i'll post on here soon. I think next gen will suit my strengths more as I can use the polys well and let shaders do the work rather than texturing everything =)

you should show more of your work, not some of those boxy lambo tanks haha would love to see more of your work

[Tiros]

Sorry for being off topic, but Xoliul... Are you trying to make my brain explode? heeh

[Xoliul]

Lol Zeinthar, I just got enthousiastic about seeing another car here
And I don't really have a car I'm working on atm, no time at all due to school, it's extremely busy these days. I'm quite sure I'm able to do a lot better than that Lambo as well, having learnt a huge lot the last months.
I should start modelling a self made concept this week for school though, I'll start a topic for that wednesday.
Back to painting for me now