1996 Buick Roadmaster sedan

[Sir Apple]

I can open them up fine.

The car is look great imo, very solid.

[Schaefft]

Thanks man, heres some more stuff, started the engine and modeled the engine bay, textures and normalmaps should add some nice extra details. Still alot of stuff missing in there.

[Schaefft]

More details:

[Schaefft]

And the models done, I think. 82500 tris with everything, now I gotta unwrap it

[Matroskin]

model looks great. Rare to see insides adn stuff.

I think all those tiny champhers along the edges could be done with normal maps though. U don't really need to make em in the your "low poly" model.

Great job anyways

[kinetichaze]

Hey mate, this is pretty good work. I am guessing you enjoy detail? :P

Your model is good and you seem to have a firm grasp of creating all the shapes. It is clear to me though that what you need to work on the most, is exactly how you spend your polygons. It should be perfectly possible to retain the level of detail you have here, but with much, much less polygons. I mean there are a lot of areas I could pick on, but take the door hinges and the rubber grommets for the door wiring as a single example - that is way overkill dude. You could make a dead simple mesh there, and then just normal map the smoothness back into it. In fact it may make it look even better, since there is no polygon limit when creating your normal maps. I realise that normal maps are not suitable in every game engine or situation (you seem interested in GTA4 which I am not familiar with), but it is something to consider.

Also one other thing I would like to pick on is that you modelled the brake calipers at the front almost as thin as the discs themselves. That is really bizarre to me. Take a walk outside and look inside the wheel of the first car you come across please! In your last images they seem to have disappeared completely. I hope you didn't delete them in an attempt to save polygons. They really should be there, even if simple. Calipers are very easy to fake detail in the textures with because you typically see them from a straight on angle and from above, so that the shadow almost always looks correct i.e. if you saw the car lying on it's roof, then only would the static lighting would break down really noticeably.

[Schaefft]

Thanks kinetichaze for your comment.

Well, I deleted the brake callibers because GTA IV (or gta in general) makes it hard to place them right. They dont move if you steer the car which means they are static objects that show up and hide behinde the brake disc while driving which looks quite weird. Since the way the wheel looks like I thought it would make sense to delete them completely, you cant see them and I can save some polygons so I thought why not.

@poly balance: Hehe yeah, thats true. I used those cable tubes from one of my other cars which I modeled for GTA SA. San Andreas didnt support any normalmaps so I had to model everything. That changed with GTA IV and I might use the mesh to bake a normalmap for a lowpoly one. Thanks for that idea! You said there are more areas like that, it would be great tif u point them out for me. I wont model highpolymeshs for every part, it would just take too long. But maybe theres something I can fix fast and it would be great to know where it makes sense and where it doesnt. After looking for such a long time on the car, you kinda lose the eye for sth like that.

[kinetichaze]

Ah ok, cheers for explaining that. You wouldn't think calipers would be a big deal in a modern game. After looking at your wheels again on page 1, I see that the brakes would not be terribly noticeable so you have made the best compromise then I think. Pity about GTA being that way.

Edit: I thought "poly balance" was a member on this forum lol. You started that paragraph a bit funny.

Anyway...I think the bevels all over everything are a bit much. You could use the normal maps to put them back in, while leaving just squared off edges on parts. Specifically, I could point out the steel bar under the rear bumper and the plastic strips along the side of the car. The inner edges of the doors too. Where you have large curves, you can just do a simple bevel (one polygon strip - not two or three) and then normal map again, so that it is not obvious that you are using trickery. So really, how much you bevel should be dependent on the scale of each part.

[Schaefft]

Thanks man, followed your advice, I think I saved quite alot of tris. Now I gotta bake a normalmap for pretty much anything tho.

Okay, heres an update guys. Finished the mapping on the car, rendered some templates and put them on the car. Next step is baking the normal and ambient occlusion maps and improve them in photoshop later.

[Schaefft]

Okay, heres an update. Finished all exterior and engine/undercarriage textures, Ill show pictures of the last two later if my wifi at home works for more than 1 minute.



Critism (render, textures or the model itself) is highly appreciated!