Nosslak

Why are you making them with DR anyways? I've barely used DR but to to me it feels like a modeling app would be a lot faster and grant you more control.

Yeah, you should show it so that we can judge whether the rejection was just or not. I think you should add a couple more segments for the rope handles otherwise they look pretty good. Looks good though I think the bars feel just a little bit too thick right now so if you could scale them down they'd look great.

I just supposed it would get reloaded more or less like an and other modern guns in that you just switch out the whole magazine. I like this design as it's a bit more exotic and more challenging to make than a regular crossbow.

Thanks! I think it's pretty obviously fake because there's no dirt, imperfections and the liquid isn't particularly realistic either IMO, but it's easier for the artist to see those things I suppose. Maybe but it'll be a great reference for some extra details anyway so thank you, Tels, for the link.

Yeah, I guess it could, but I think it makes the silhouette a bit richer and makes the weapon look a bit more exotic, so I'd prefer to keep it. I were going to make those materials and were just going to make a little test-render with Cycles with it as I haven't used it so much (this is my second project that I've used cycles, here the first, you might recognize it) but it turned out so good that I decided to post it. Making good materials with Cycles is pretty hard IMO so I just went with the default metal and a basic clay material. Yeah that's what I thought too.

Thanks a lot, everybody! Thanks! I'm using Blenders new Cycles render engine so that's part of why it looks so good (that and excellent modeling). It is a physically correct engine that takes a rather long time to render the models so I'm sorry but the final result won't look as good in-game. Yeah, I'm very unsure about it myself too. It looks cool on the concept but I don't think it really works in 3D. I'll probably skip it for the next update. Yeah, I'm no history buff so I didn't really think about any of those things. I'm not really sure if I can address those problems without some major redesigns that would make it look a lot less cool, so I'm not sure I'll actually deal with them. All I really did was follow the concept art as I assumed that it'd be a somewhat plausible design. Yeah, I don't mind some constructive criticism, quite the opposite actually as it helps me make better models. I don't think I'll change the design to make it more realistic though because I don't think anyone would really notice it in-game and as I said it'd take some major redesigning. Thanks for the critique anyway!

Marmoset for lowpolys. Cycles for highpolys. Bi-WINNING! Yeah, thanks a lot!

Thanks! Nearly done: Just need to add some details to the curves at the front and the handle at the back.

Yeah, I don't know how good the stock texture is (haven't played a lot of FMs) but if you want I could export mine as as a separate texture too. Yeah, I could pretty easily convert it to a design like that. I'd just have to remove one leg and scale part of the mesh. So yeah, I can try to do that. Pipes aren't challenging to make and I'm not sure what dimensions to make them in or anything so it'd probably be better if someone else made those.

Thanks! Yeah, thanks. Here's the tutorial that I learned from: http://cg.tutsplus.c...metal-textures/ There's not all that much to it really. I've just laid several layers of grunge and scratch textures and brushes over each other to make the base-texture and then just repeated that texture all over my texture map and overlaid that with some grunge and scratch textures again. The trick to really sell metal is to make the diffuse (color) texture pretty dark, with a very bright and contrasted specular map with a lot of dirt and scratches as unique details for the specular map. When I make my brass/copper work I make the diffuse yellow/greenish and then the specular more orange/redish. When you make your specular map you should keep n mind that if the material in question is a conductor (leads electricity e.g metal) the specularity should have kind of the same color as the diffuse, but if it's non-conductive (e.g wood) the specularity/reflection should be white. There is a scientific reason for it that I read in an article a while ago but I can't remember it.

I posted so much stuff yesterday that I forgot about one of my improved models: Old one for comparison!

Yeah, that was just the untextured highpoly. I'm almost finished with the lowpoly I just need to redo those side details as they were kind of fugly when I tried the old design with alpha maps.

Thanks! I had no internet for a few days so without Youtube and all that other crap to steal my attention I got to work on some of my models. First I reworked the tables sides a little bit (old one for comparison) so they wouldn't need alphas as that didn't work out as good as I hoped: Not really sure what I think about the new side-details. What do you think about it? I also polished up my old spyglass to fit my newer quality standards: I also remade the texture for my old lampmodel: The bulbs glass texture is imo way too lowres, has blurry details, has a 1px white border, too yellow (there should be a white/blue-ish one for electrical light imo) and tbh is just generally bad. Maybe someone can make a new texture for lampglass? I also started working on Springheels crossbow: It's far from done as I'm sure you can tell. Julio is still working on the zombie concept so I haven't started modeling that yet. I guess I ought to lose my internet more often.

I haven't used any of these programs but couldn't you just generate terrain with Bryce and import it into an optimization tool (Blender has a Decimation modifier if nothing else but it's not very good), then just export it to Blender or whatever to do vertex colors and export it for D3? It might not result in as good/optimized terrain as if you'd model everything by hand but it shouldn't require much time/skill.

Looking good, but the metal parts don't really read well as metal. I think you should add some specularity to them (not too much though) and maybe also try to differentiate the metal strips from the underlying plate (you could do that with added grunge, changing the colors of either one, adding rust, etc), Also I think you can afford an additional loop for both of the top stones as it looks a little bit too lowpoly.

Nice, thanks! Thank you too, Serps! Quick normal bake test before school: I think it turned out great (no alpha yet though)!

Some of the details are replaceable with normalmaps, but the thing is that normalmaps can only really simulate concave details (details pointing inwards) really good as they won't change the silhouette. Also normalmaps can't simulate 90 degree angles in a satisfying way either, so they are pretty limited to be honest. I have a pretty curved silhouette so that will need a lot of polys. The detail at the top of the legs will be simulated with alphamapped planes though instead of actual geometry (the downside with this is that if they're viewed at an extreme angle you can see that there is no width to them). Most of them should be available already but here's some of the one's that I haven't uploaded: - Alembic (I think Springheel or someone were going to make a shadowmesh for, maybe 1.08) - Barrel (need materials and all that jazz) - Bed (basically finished with material and all, should just need to upload it) - Cart (need to make materials, CM and SM) - Clock (CM, SM and materials again) - Walllamp (had some trouble finding a suitable glass texture otherwise finished) - Lamppost (not satisfied with the quality, so I won't upload it) - Royal orb (had some baking troubles, but they're solved so I can finish it now) - Tree (CM and SM is being worked on by Springheel I think) I'm a modeller and that is what I signed up for and want to do, that is why some of the other stuff takes time. If you're wondering about any model in particular I can probably find it for you. Alright, I'll do it then. It was the inside edges that I collapsed before.

Thanks! I managed to cut down the polys a bit further: - Visible mesh is now at about 1700 polys (25% less) - Shadow mesh is at about 740 polys (about 20% less). Making the legs triangular didn't even save 100 polys so I skipped that. - Also made a collision mesh with about 500 triangles.

The LOD idea does sound pretty good in theory but I don't know how useful it'd be in practice as this table belongs inside where there are no really long drawdistances where it'd be suitable. The legs for the shadows are currently box-based but cutting them down to a being triangle-based would probably be good. Just to be clear that was the highpoly version (added a clarification in the original post too). I'm not sure where to reduce it as I've done that a bit already. I guess I could replace some of the ornaments on the legs (near the top) with planes as I am planning to do for the ornaments hanging down from the wooden circle under the table surface but otherwise I can't do much without worsening the quality. Here's how the lowpoly looks:

Thanks! It's based on the mudokons from the Oddworld games. I was a little bored yesterday and felt that I sure could use some kind of pedestal to present my models better on which resulted in this highpoly: Took about 2-3 hours to model. I'm having some problems making suitably low poly lowpoly mesh, as it has a pretty distinct silhouette. Right now the lowpoly is at about 2300 and the shadow at maybe 900 triangles or so. Is this too much? I know I should probably finish up the masks but they're almost done and I'm easily distracted. Julio is helping me with a zombie concept so I can't start that just yet either.

I played it a while ago and I think it's pretty awesome!

Alright, thanks for clarifying, but that's not at all what it's like working with curves in Blender. Here's a video showing blenders curves (old interface though, so it's a bit easier now): http://cgcookie.com/blender/2009/05/20/modeling-with-curves/ You can also deform other meshes along curves and this is what I usually do to wrap complex patterns around my models. Thanks, I haven't used ZBrush all that much (I've done maybe 3 models with it, no ZSpheres yet) but I'd say that for me it's easiest to make a base-mesh in Blender without any real detail but with good topology (edge-flow) that follows the anatomy which makes it easy to add details and then sculpt muscles, bones and such in Zbrush. Here's the third and latest model I've made with Zbrush (and Blender for the base-mesh): Sorry for the shitty render, it's just an old screenshot that were already up on photobucket. I forgot to ask earlier, but if you're going to make a masquerade FM when would you need the male mask?

Looks good, but you should add a trim around that balcony/window/thingy.

Actually, the mask itself is the only thing that I've optimized and I just removed 34 polys (about 18 percent). Optimizing away 18 percent of a mesh without degrading the visual quality is probably a pretty good exercise but to be honest the original mesh was pretty flawed and could need a little clean-up even though it might not matter much in-game. Yeah, thanks! Many of the polys for the regular version were there to prevent clipping and as I couldn't spend all that many on this it will be offset a little bit from the face so there might be some popping if changed when the player is too close. Thanks! I use Blender, Photoshop, xNormal (generates normal- and AO maps) and ZBrush (only for the plague doctor mask so far) to make my models. I'm not really sure of the terminology outside of poly-modeling but for the design above with the LOD-mesh I used bezier curves which I think might be a kind of spline and the white surface was just regular old polygons with subdivision surfaces (smoothing). For most of my models I do use curves, on some models (like this) to convert to polys and bake to maps or to deform my geometry, but you can make good models without them if you want to. I've never used nurbs so I can't comment on that, though AFAIK it is basically the same as subdivision surfaces so I don't see any reason to use them. Trying to learn modeling is hard (at least with Blender as your first program) but when I was 13-14 ish (6-7 years ago) I wanted to learn how to make my own games, which led me to making real-time graphics so I tried to find a suitable tool for modeling and eventually landed on Blenders site. I installed Blender and had a horrible time, until I learned to love it by sitting several hours every day with it until I felt comfortable with it (I was very mtivated). So yeah, learning a 3D software for the first time is hard work but (at least Blender) have gotten easier since then with a revamped interface and lots of good tutorials. Being able to model as good models (IMO) as I have done for this mod is hard, but so very, very rewarding that it makes it all worth it.

Yeah, you're probably right but I think every modeler should learn to properly optimize their models. I don't think I can optimize it any more without sacrificing the quality or making it clip into the face though so I'm just going to stop right here.