Turret for tower defense game

[kcbanner]

For which Engine -
Current Polycount - 362
Texture Size - 1024*1024
Description of background information on piece -
Where are you looking to receive criticism - Textures, Modeling :P

This is a turret I made for my current game project. Its a fortress defense style game, with an RTS view (hence the low poly count). I am a programmer so my art skills are lacking, but I'm trying to learn, any criticism is welcome! No normal maps yet (support for them I have not programmed in to the engine yet).

Videos (old textures on the gun here):
YouTube - another engine demo
YouTube - engine demo 4

-kcbanner
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[joukejan]

An RTS game doesn't require such size for textures and certainly not 3 textures for 1 model.

I would suggest to make the UV map of the model as one so you will only need 1 texture for the model. Then it's not a big problem if you have a texture size of 1024x1024.

I like the model though and the big black lines on the edges looks cool, gives it a bit of cartoony style.

[ae.]

I was about to say your on the right track then i saw your textures.

You could of easily put that on a 512x512 map. I recently did some rts contract work and the texture space for the models were very limited you have to be able to squeeze as much out of your uv's as possible. it kinda gets a little harder when your working with some normals but yeah re-do the uv's, Put it on one map and come back, then ill crit the texture it self.

[snah]

What everyone else said... Put it all on one map and, where ever possible, place parts of the weapon OVER the top of other parts, for example, all the segments that connect the barrels and all the barrels can be on 1 UV space if you get me, they dont need a separate texture each. You gotta remember the player is going to be never close enough to the models to SEE the texture in great detail and generally he is going to be fighting off things the whole time and wont really be looking in the 1st place. Try mirroring parts of the turret also, for example the thing is symmetrical, use that to your advantage when breaking up the UV spaces and place as much of it over the top of each other as you can, obviously you dont want to go OVER board with this doubling up because you dont want the whole thing to look the same, but it will help a LOT to keep it all inside 1 smaller texture map.

I think you could mabye watch some tutorials on how other people skin metal, im not saying the way you did it looks bad or anything, everyone has their own style, but there are sorta "conventional" ways of skinning and painting metal. Ive lost links to all the really good websites i had with tutorials on how to skin metal, but just a google search brought this up: [ H F X - t u t o r i a l s ]. It cant hurt to look at how other people do things, your bound to learn something .

The model its self seems fine though, the tri count is pretty low. Im not really sure about this though, i havnt played RTS since like age of empires mythology came out and i remember their models were VERY low poly, probably lower poly than yours. You could always lower your models by doing stuff with alpha transparency and planes (2D objects). You could turn those barrels into 1 big circular alpha plane, you could probably turn the segments inbetween into 2d planes with alpha transparency also.

It depends on how your engine works i guess. If you can programmed it to work better with poly counts and worse with transparency i guess you don't want to do that. Anyway, KEEP IT UP becuase i love to see a person who can program taking the art side of things into their own hands. I personally find it quite frustrating when the programmer for our mod asks me to do completely irrational things with modelling simply because he doesn't understand how models are made and assumes its the easiest thing in the world and we are just lazy.

[kcbanner]

Hey thanks for the good crits, I'll work on my UV unwrap skills to get it down to a smaller texture

[kcbanner]

Ok, I took your advice and tryed another model with a 512x512. This is meant to be a resource node in the game:




I guess its obvious I need advice on how to blend the crystals and metal/cement base together, it looks pretty bad at the seams.

However it did work combining the UVs of all the pipes onto the same spot on the map, as well as the sides of the base, so I learnt how to do that

-Casey

[sampson]

fake some soft shadows at the bottom of the crystals, maybe paint a bit of blue specks around the base aswell.

[BARBEERIAN]

The Crystal node looks pretty cool so far. You could make it look a bit cooler with an Alpha map. Make the crystals partially transparent with the Alpha map. Then paint a nice blue glow on the on both the crystals themselves and on the concrete base. You might even want to just have that blue glow as it's own emissive map so it actually lights up.

[laughing_bun]

for the crystals dont unwrap them. Stuff that doesn't have any specific details that need adding, just use a regular uvw and a seamless texture. You can get drastically better texture resolution. Your first model all the textures should have been on one map. This Time i think you should have the crystals on their own map. Its ok to seperate textures with drastically different materials. In this case you completly wasted 1/2 of your map on the blue crystals. I would fix the pipe unwrap because that is really wierd looking. scale the concrete map so it takes up the entire space and place the pipe in the black space in the center of it.
also if you find your wasting space you dont always have to use uniform textures. You can Use a 256x512 for instance.

and just a tip for better unwraps. Tools>relax>Relax by face

[kcbanner]

@BARBEERIAN Yea, for the renders I could use an alpha and emit maps...but my engine is custom and I haven't written shaders for alpha/emissive maps yet, so they wouldn't be show up in game.

I'll have to brush up on my shader skills, so far I just have basic texturing and per pixel lighting in game.

@laughing_bun Ah, good idea with not using UVs on the crystals, the unwrap on them now is just a crappy cube projection by Blender. I didn't think of putting something in the empty space either :P

Is "relax by face" something specific to max? I can't find a similar option in Blender (yes I know, but I can't afford Max :P).

-kcbanner