Halversona's Sketchbook

[Halversona]

I'm going to start this by saying I'm a pretty bad 3d artist. But I'm never going to improve if I dont get feedback and tips from other people. Which is the whole purpose of joining GameArtist for me.
I'm mainly posting to see if I'm moving in the proper direction, to get advice, learn and for some place to post my progress.

I'm currently method for teaching myself is to take concept art, and turn it into a 3d scene.

The Current Concept Art is done by Zelda Geek for one of Concept Artist.coms Environment contests.





The chest needs work. I could probably extract some of the extra details from the general model and have it smoothed instead of the entire thing to save a ton of resources. I also feel I went a little over zealous on working the edges.
Next step is to texture the chests and move unto the bed.

[Halversona]

Decided to just redo the chest top part. Ended up with this..

The new on one the right, old on the left. The new one is only smoothed where I believe it should be. I still think its a bit high in terms of polys, but I'm still new so I could be wrong.
New: 14k Polys
Old: 40k polys



Does anyone have any advice for optimizing this a little more? I believe all faces that arent show on any side of the model are deleted. Only the ones that need to be smoothed are smoothed, ect

Also, for something like the side that hits the top of the cylinder. Should that be quad'ed as well?

[Istanbul]

One that that could save you on the poly count is modeling the handles, lid and base as separate objects so that you can maintain the quads on each piece and have the higher poly count where needed without putting a tone of wasted polies in the middle. Once everything is modeled to your satisfaction, you can then use 'Attach' to get them all together as a single object.

The one other thing is, you might not need quite as many polies on the lid to hold a convincing curve as you have right now. It is surprising how few rows you really need to have an acceptable smooth curve, with proper smoothing groups applied.

That aside, I think you did very good at producing the chest accurately, with good detail. That's always the first thing to get starting out.

[Halversona]

Originally Posted by Istanbul

One that that could save you on the poly count is modeling the handles, lid and base as separate objects so that you can maintain the quads on each piece and have the higher poly count where needed without putting a tone of wasted polies in the middle. Once everything is modeled to your satisfaction, you can then use 'Attach' to get them all together as a single object.

The one other thing is, you might not need quite as many polies on the lid to hold a convincing curve as you have right now. It is surprising how few rows you really need to have an acceptable smooth curve, with proper smoothing groups applied.

That aside, I think you did very good at producing the chest accurately, with good detail. That's always the first thing to get starting out.

Thats what I ended up doing to get the polys down. Before that I did nothing but extrudes and got the shape that I was happy with. Much happier with the way it turned out now.
I didnt even think of that. Next time I model a chest, I'll be dropping the polies on the lid down. I did apply that theory to some of the other items in the scene.

Thanks!

I havent gotten much work done and I'm kind of kicking myself for wasting time. This is currently where I stand.

[Halversona]

I'm happy with it in the modelling stage. I'm going to leave a few of the little details off like the stuff on the wall, potentially adding them in later. But I'm ready to move on to a different scene. Now to texture it and I'll be set.