AngelWolf's Adventures in models, maps, and code

[AngelWolf]

Gothic chair I'm currently modelling:

 

Textures can have transparent areas right? I haven't gotten my feet wet with normal map baking yet but could all the detail on the backrest be baked and mapped onto a flat plane so that it appears to have all those holes in it?

[Bikerdude]

Thats a very cool looking chair, how many polys does it currently have? as it look a tad too high res atm. Also if you can make it skin-able in DR that would extremely usefull (assuming your upto this level atm)

[Sotha]

Very cool!

 

Also, be sure the seat is on the same height as with our existing chairs so that the AI will not float when they sit on it...

[Melan]

I like this chair a lot. We need more gothic-appearing assets, and this will come handy (especially with alternate skins). If the details are too high, maybe the back can be a flat plane - with a good normalmap and transparency, a lot of tris can be shaved off.

[AngelWolf]

 

Got the top shaped. It's currently around 3k without subdivision. I'm going all out with the details because I want to sell the high poly version on turbosquid and donate the low poly version to the mod. Going into sculpting mode next as there are lots of details in that solid upper part. There's also a bevel ridge and some more details around the front. Haven't really read up on skinning just yet. I'm learning as I go.

 

Link to the real chair photos: http://www.drawrm.com/5256.htm

Edited September 16, 2012 by AngelWolf

[ungoliant]

3K???? that can't be possible. nice work, btw.

[Tels]

Yes, textures can have holes. We probably could use a highpoly for close-up and a low-poly for faw-away.

[RPGista]

Hmmm, if thats from a nurbs modeler like Rhino Im afraid you'll have no choice but to create a low poly version from scratch... Even in a subd modeler, you could have a lot of difficulty decimating all those curves and small elements without loads of mesh problems (maybe by doing piece by piece woud be better?), which means you are probably looking into manually remodeling at least parts of it as a low poly.

 

There are some more experienced modelers around, but I also wouldnt create the back as a texture - its the part that is closest to the player most of the time and a simple geometry with a good detailed normal map would work better in that case, IMO.

[AngelWolf]

3K???? that can't be possible. nice work, btw.

 

Why can't it? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the info bar at the top of Blender says around 3300 vertexes and a similar number of faces. With render subdivision level 2 it jumps to 500000. I'm probably making some newbie mistakes in the geometry of those spirals as it was my first time working with the spin and screw tools. I made a profile in the shape of the letter S made up of 10 vertexes and screwed it at the default 9 step. Some of the edge loops could be removed, but that would mean redoing the places where the spiral ends for a third time.

[Nosslak]

Why can't it? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the info bar at the top of Blender says around 3300 vertexes and a similar number of faces. With render subdivision level 2 it jumps to 500000. I'm probably making some newbie mistakes in the geometry of those spirals as it was my first time working with the spin and screw tools. I made a profile in the shape of the letter S made up of 10 vertexes and screwed it at the default 9 step. Some of the edge loops could be removed, but that would mean redoing the places where the spiral ends for a third time.

What Blender counts at the top is faces which means it'll count a triangle, quad, pentagon, hexagon, etc as 1 face when on the graphics card what really matters is the number of triangles (2 triangles/quad, 3 triangles/pentagon, 4 triangles/hexagon). You'll need to add a decimation modifier for each model and then add up that count (it converts all the faces to triangles before counting).

[demagogue]

It's pretty. I think it'd look better to keep geometry for the top part than transparency too, well for the higher poly version if you could get it around 1-2K triangles, then maybe a low poly LODE version that uses transparency (when the chair is distant from the player). You could knock out a lot of triangles just baking in the corkscrew & details on simpler geometry.

[AngelWolf]

I was already planning on it. Back around Christmas when I first found Blender I paid for a video series on making assets for game engines. It's huge and takes you step by step through the creation of a video game character from concept drawing, to high poly sculpt, to low poly, to importing into Unity. There's a whole section on normalmap baking. I have to tell ya: http://cgcookie.com/blender/ changed my whole life. I was always intimidated by 2d art. I grew up reading Elfquest comics with a friend who could draw so much better than me. But 3d feels more akin to woodworking, which I was always good at.

[pusianka]

Very nice! Me just wondering - Who buys models online?

[demagogue]

They're the high poly ones, so I imagine it's CG enthusiasts that need high quality models for rendering their own CG scenes. It's a big investment for people to build literally every model in a big scene.

[AngelWolf]

Pixar, ILM, Rockstar Games, and Activision to name a few. Check out: http://www.turbosquid.com/ It's not all high poly either. They have lots of low poly game assets, rigged characters, vehicles, weapons.

[AngelWolf]

I was just going through Sir Taffsalot's Vengeance for a Thief Pt 1 and I noticed something wrong. There's an upside down table in one of the interrogation rooms and I noticed that the legs on the table were leaking. I imported it into Blender and saw that the bottoms of the table legs were missing faces. The table in question is table_set01.lwo I tried fixing it myself but it appears the script for exporting lwo files has been removed from Blender ! I've been trying to find any info on an lwo export script for over an hour now...

[Springheel]

The table in question is table_set01.lwo

 

Thanks, I'll look into it.

[AngelWolf]

I found another model glitch. This one is statue_citywatch_salute.lwo

 

 

 

 

There seems to be a lot of overlapping areas in the model:

 

I'm hardly an expert when it comes to modelling but this mesh doesn't look very clean. There's lots of holes in it.

[Springheel]

Yes, that's a bit of an understatement. Back when we didn't have any statues at all, I took the character models and ran them through a utility to make them look blocky and undefined. They're a strong candidate for replacing.