GAMC #3 - neenerpants

[neenerpants]

okay, I'm ridiculously late starting a thread on this one, mainly because I really lack confidence in my work ( ) so I always delay and delay and delay.

however, at this point I'm more or less stuck. I need a break from this one for a bit to come back to it with a fresh eye, and I'd appreciate some helpful tips.

I always try to make my projects a little bit different, so my concept this time was for a sort of post-WW2 Nazi UAV. Perhaps an alternate timeline or something. Cliche, of course, but it seemed different enough for this competition!

Here's my progress so far:



things I'm still going to do:
- obviously finish painting certain bits like the jet intake and the camera underneath
- scratch up the decals, and probably put in a couple more small ones like triangular warning stickers here and there
- probably add more metal scratches across the whole model
- add more normal map details like rivets and small vents and the like
- if I have time, paint in one of those anthropomorphic mouths at the front, like they used to do in the olde days, and see if it looks okay or ridiculous.

but other than that, I'm not sure what else I could add to make it seem more realistic. I'm not entirely happy with it right now because I think it looks a little too last-gen, but over-doing the normals and specular would probably make it seem too plastic and silly.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Oh, and in case people hate the deviations from the concept, the only thing I really added were wheels, which I think is fair given the size of the thing. Personally. Who knows.

edit- oops, would've helped if I'd uploaded a picture with all the normal layers turned on, instead of just a few. fixed now.

[andybozo]

looks like a fairly good texture job but personally i dont like the wheels. maybe if you made them smaller it would look better im not sure. overall nice work, id love to see some more angles.

[neenerpants]

yeah, the wheels are a bit esoteric, for sure. they, and the wings as a whole, are based on the old Stuka divebombers. I actually already toned them down a bit, but I do admit they look a bit clownish. I might still modify them a bit but probably only at the end if I have time.

as for other angles, here's a shot from the rear side, with a little bit of progress on the texture (chipped paint, added some rivets, etc). since marmoset doesn't let you rotate the light vertically, it's about the best I can do beyond crappy Maya viewport shots.

[neenerpants]

slight update front and back, and now I'm stuck again.




can't think of much else to do with it. gonna shrink the wheel down a tad but beyond that, dunno.

does the 'shark jaw' decal thing look stupid or add character? I can't really decide.

[Xoliul]

Pretty cool idea, definitely one of the better executed ones!
I do feel it's a bit thick and lumpy in many areas, lacks some refinement. You can especially tell by how fat the wings are.
And I don't think you should add that much more to the texture: an artist should now when something is finished, if you feel you can't add more, and it doesn't feel like something is missing: just call it done then. Perhaps the only thing that might need a bit of work is the specular highlights, both in the specmaps and presentation. it might be largely due to marmoset that doesn't allow much control though.

[neenerpants]

cheers, Xoliul, appreciate the feedback.

I think you're right about the chunkiness of it. I used a lot of WW2 planes as reference, but very few were obviously jets and tended to be a lot 'sturdier'. I also looked at modern UAVs like the RQ-2 CM2 which has those defined panels, and perhaps ignorantly I combined paneling with WW2 and came out with something looking a bit too much like armour. I mean, it doesn't look a million miles away from the late German jets like the Henschel 132, but still, thicker like a rotor plane. I know Chaosquack is going to be furious at the unflyability of this model!

oh, as for the speculars, the reason is most likely because there's actually no specular map. it's just a base spec material across the whole model because I ran out of time. aside from that, I do need to work on getting multi-light setups going in Max to complement the single-light Marmoset shots. I model and unwrap in Maya, but the viewport in Max is much better, I've just never really delved into exporting between both apps. hopefully it's easy enough.

[Xoliul]

No specmap? I'd recommend creating one then. It took me 10 minutes, I just duplicated my diffuse layers group in photoshop, and then going over each layer one by one, desaturating, adjusting brightness & contrast and sometimes inverting colors. It's really not that hard if you fully grasp what a specmap does.

As for exporting: you're exporting to Marmoset, you could just as wel export to Max. Setting your exported model up with my shader in Max is just as much work as marmoset, but you have more control over lights, while you can still use fancy IBL cubemaps. And am I right: you can't actually rotate your model in Marmoset, to try and catch the perfect specular in your snapshot?

[neenerpants]

spec maps is something I definitely need to improve on. it would take me more than 10 minutes, that's for sure. I'll add that to list of skills to try (and fail) to hone.

and yeah, as far as I know, no rotating models in Marmoset, just the light (and even then, only horizontally) unless I'm missing something glaringly obvious. you could obviously rotate the model and re-export I suppose, which is quick enough but, yeah, not ideal. still, I find the trade-off worth it.

[neenerpants]

alright, so, I'm trying to take on board the main criticisms people had, in an attempt to improve. If anybody could help me out, I'd appreciate it tons.

so thankfully, it seems most people agreed the presentation was the main problem, a lot of which was down to Marmoset. So, I threw the model into Max to get a look at it, and made a very (very) quick light setup. Now, I could've spent more time on this, without a doubt, but even so the first thing that struck me was how much blurrier the texture became. No worries, I thought, every app reads textures differently, so I brought it up in Photoshop and selectively tried to sharpen it up. Unfortunately it took a LOT of sharpening, way way too much in fact, to get it to look even okay. Again, I didn't spend long on this at all, but this is what I'm talking about:



the lighting is probably nicer, but the diffuse still looks washed out and I think overall it's not an improvement. And I feel stupid beating the hell out of the diffuse map just to get that.

Slightly discouraged, I went back into Marmoset to experiment a bit more. Someone (I think it was Pankake?) mentioned the bloom was awful, so I turned that off and switched to a different environment, trying to ramp up the specular a little bit. I think this was an improvement, but still perhaps not perfect:





for ease of comparison, I'll link to the pretty standard Marmoset shot I submitted.


Now, I think lighting-wise those last two are the best so far, the front looks great, but I'm still getting the artifacting, especially on the wings. It isn't jpeg artifacting, as someone suspected, but rather just a side-effect of Marmoset. I can't get rid of it 100%, it's just a fact of life of Marmoset as far as I know, but I can lessen it by reducing the sharpening. Unfortunately then I'm back to square one with a too-blurry texture.

Does anyone have any advice? Is it normal to have such blurry textures in Max, and have to virtually ruin them in order to get details to show through, or am I doing something wrong there? What are good lighting setups to get the most out of the model? Is the artifacting in Marmoset worth the overall improvement in crisp textures? What else can I do to improve the final shots?

all these questions and more, same bat time, same bat channel.