What are you working on? II

[Talon]

All those odd shading errors looks like it's coming from the underlying vertex normals being really screwed. Long, thin triangles and triangle fans can usually be a major cause of this, as are having too few tris to cover too large an angle (and is exaggerated further if they're right next to a lot of tris covering a large angle). When at all possible, tris should zig-zag evenly across a surface, rather than having loads coming to a point. When that's not possible, try and make sure they're as evenly sized and spaced as possible.

You might want to try adding 2 or 3 divisions lengthways along your barricade. That should give the akward bits somewhere to tie up to that's a bit neater and also prevent the mix of long, thin tris with shorter ones. That should alleviate the wonky shading a bit.

The seams you're seeing... I dunno. If you physically split the seam, does the artefact go away?

[Xoliul]

Read this: Normalmaps for the Technical Game Modeler
That UV island+smoothing group thing is what you need to get your head around.

[Ironhawk]

Pretty much done on this puppy.

Rendered in Unreal.

[Talon]

it's looking good, but I think you could do with adding a bit more specific dirt and damage.

It looks to be all made from the same metal and uniformly covered with an even coating of dust, whe really there should be build-ups of dirt in nooks, dust scaped or worn off on edges and open faces, etc.

It would help the shapes to jump out a bit better. Some AO wouldn't hurt in that respect, either.


Xoiul: Be careful with splitting stuff into too many separate UV islands - a UV seam will terminate a tri-strip. For engines like Unreal3, it hear it's usually more efficient to add tris that facilitate tri-stripping and smoother normals than it is to split them or have hard edges to get around smoothing errors.

[Craig Lewis]

Cheers Talon and Xoliul
Made a bit more progress on this today and I'm pretty pleased with how it's looking. Still a WIP, but shouldn't take too long to finish up.



I ended up having to add in a load more triangles to get rid of the smoothing errors. you can sometimes notice some very slight ones, but I think I'm being too critical of my work. Though I hate the workflow of just auto optimising a high poly mesh. Seems lazy and the mesh it outputs was full of these errors (which the guy never seemed to have in his pillar in the tutorial). I assume for something like this, modeling the low poly by hand would give better results?

Also, for the seams, I ended up just changing the UV map to hide them.

[Talon]

Yeah, I don't think I've ever used a reduction tool for a low poly mesh. Usually they suck.

[IchII3D]

Working on my production pipeline knocking out the kinks and trying to really get down methods of producing assets.

[Talon]

Bit of shameless fan art of the best game ever made.

[glynnsmith]

Good lord James. Looks like you applied subdivision to the original JC Denton model - Looks a bit too smooth and lumpy :P

He reminds me of Keanu Reeve's with Mark Lamarr's hair

All joking aside, I think it's an awesome idea that you make a newer version of JC, but I don't think this is close to your best work, dude. I hope you take that as a compliment.

Serious crittage = His filtrum is rather on the long side, his nose looks a bit short and bulbous and the corners of the mouth look like they might give you some jip. His ears look a bit low, too - usually with the top of them lining up with the centre of the eye.

[snake85027]