[Weapon] Matra R.550 Magic I [WIP]

[IOSIF_M]

Thanks for the feedback Rhino! And would appreciate any help on normal mapping!

[IOSIF_M]

Little changes as suggested

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[Rhino]

This seems like a pretty good tutorial here, although you can skip the bit about making an AO map since you already have one, although it might be useful to give some of your details a little more of a 3D feel
Photoshop: AO and normal maps from a height map tutorial - UDK Developer's Group - Mod DB

This one here may be useful too: Creating height maps for bump mapping

I mainly make my normal maps from High Poly Normal Bakes so I don't have that many examples to hand but one small example of a HM I made was for the plate that holds the rear thins for the Blowpipe Missile I made.



I did most of the normal details on this missile with a high poly normal bake:



But this didn't turn out so well for the rear thin base plate so I did them with a HM.

Diffuse Texture & HM, then when I converted to a Normal Map And finally combined it with my HP Bake:


Its worth noting that this texture doesn't have that many details (some may argue it has waay more than it needs), since its only seen when firing, unlike your missile which can be seen on the hard points of a jet, which is also why the final textures for this blowpipe missile are saved at 64 x 256px (the promo shot seen above was shot in 128 x 512px).


So ye basically how a HM works is 50% white, or 128,128,128 RGB is a flat surface, 100% (255,255,255 RGB) white is something that sticks upwards really far, and 0% White aka, Black (0,0,0 RGB) is a very deep hole. So things like your rivets, its hard to see on the refs but it looks like they stick out very slightly, I would have them at around 60% White (153,153,153 RGB), and the grooves between each segment of the missile look to indent quite a bit, so I would have them at around 30% White (77,77,77 RGB), and other than that I think that's all you really need, then you just need to convert it to a normal and play with the strength of it till you get what you want

Hope that helps!


EDIT: Nice work on the Spec updates but it looks like the IR Sensor on the nose of your missile has now lost all of its details and I would say make it brighter too as you want it to really shine

[IOSIF_M]

Reworked the nose in the spec map, and made height and normal maps

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The normal I made using Crazybump since the nvidia plugin crashes my photoshop, tutoril came pretty handy thanks Rhino

[Rhino]

Very nice, I in fact use CrazyBump too most of the time to do my HMs and the odd bit of making normals from textures, very powerful tool in the right hands

One thing however is CB, and most other normal map tools make the normals the wrong way round for what BF2 uses. Its the way round pretty much every other engine uses but tbh, this is one area which makes more sense since visually looking at the normal the BF2 way round looks more sense

But anyways here is your normal map currently, can best see it in the lighting mode:



Its hard to tell but your rivets are actually going inwards currently and your dividing lines are sticking out.

Select your normal map layer (and if you have multiple layers you need to do them all, one at a time), go to the channel tabs, select the green channel then hit Ctrl+I to invert it. This will flip the Green Channel to be the right way round for that layer, within your selection which you should have either the entire sheet selected (ctrl+a) or no selection when doing this:


Before and After Normals, note how on the after ones the rivets actually look to be sticking out now and the dividing lines are looking to go in:


And now if we look at the normal in the editor its the right way round, which you can tell the most in the lighting mode:












Its hard to see the normals true effect in just pictures since they mainly help with you or lighting moving around it in a 3D world but they do add a lot to the model

So ye do that and then the textures are pretty much done and you can start on the LODs!


EDIT: BTW I just applied the Falklands light settings to it and its a bit bright, might be worth darkening the diffuse a bit?

[IOSIF_M]

Inverted the normal so it looks right now!

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[IOSIF_M]

And for the diffuse I made a new layer to give it opacity with a fill of 5% 10% 15% and 25% which would you think fits betters or should I go darker even? The first is the original

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[Rhino]

The second to last one (4th from the left) looks good!

BTW do you know what you need to do for the LODs?

I did post this a few pages back if it helps

Rhino;2058105']As for the amount of LODs, it really depends on the object itself. For the R.530 I made a total of 4 LODs, with the final lod just being a 3 tri spike which I would recommend for all missile like objects since the final lod just wants to be a basic shape of the object that is seen at extreme ranges:





For this just see how many tris you can cut down on each lod, remember that LOD1 is seen by low gfx users up close so it should just have the fine details removed while still keeping the main elements intact

Any questions let me know!

[IOSIF_M]

Copied, I'll begin working on LODs

[IOSIF_M]

Sorry for being late, I've been sick.

Here's LOD1, reduced the tri count to 152 or 88 poly

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[IOSIF_M]

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Made the wings planar and reduced the sides of the body down from 12 to 8, also removed some polys from the exhaust. Didn't touch the nose much just made it eight sided in the nearest part to the body

[Rhino]

Looking good!

If I was being very nit picky the only thing I would say that one little tweak to make the LOD switch a little less visible would be to put the new line either 1/2 way between the two old lines (green), or at the very edge of where the old line was (yellow) which will make the change less visible:


With the left thin in that pic I would go with the green line, and right thin I would go with the yellow line and that should give you the best result, although you will need to tweak the UVs slightly too to compensate for this move otherwise the UV warping will be the most visible thing.

[Rhino]

Hey IOSIF_M, made any progress on this? So close to being finished and if you can't finish it yourself please upload all the files you have on it and send them to me over PM so I can finish it

Cheers!