[Model] Tigercat SAM (PR:F) [WIP]

[Rhino]

Looking good, keep it up

[zombie-yellow]

3 000 000 tris ? Damn, that is a little high I think

You're really talented at modelling ! Better than me in any ways haha

[lucky.BOY]

Well its called highpoly for a reason Btw, when I turn Turbosmooth on every part, it gets above 15 milion tris, which gives ,my pc something to crunch on ..

[CTRifle]

Ya know if you need someone to texture that....

[Rabbit]

[quote=""'[R-DEV"]Rhino;1830744']Well nobody goes straight to Dev, everyone first starts off as an R-CON (or tester or something) and then works there way up.

But yes if Luck continues like this I see no reason why he shouldn't get R-CONed [/quote]
Glad to see the PR team still growing!

[quote="lucky.BOY""]-snip-

Everything is heavy WIP, some parts dont have Turbosmooth yet, on some i forgot to turn it on [/quote]

Awesome work lucky, great stuff.

[Spush]

3 000 000 tris ? Damn, that is a little high I think

You're really talented at modelling ! Better than me in any ways haha

It's subdivision modeling or highpoly modeling, Just make it as detailed as you can then make a lower poly of it by taking out of the details and using the highpoly to bake down the normal maps and ao maps for the low-poly (game res) model.

[lucky.BOY]

Yep, still working on this

The highpoly is as good as done, just need to add some bolts here and there and possibly loosen some edges on parts I did a while ago. Baking normals for the M2 flamethrower gave me a much better idea of how the highpoly should look like, I think. Anyway, picture time


(here is BIG version: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kix ... 7-2013.png )








I finished the bottom part last, so that is why the pictures are focused mainly on it. Pictures of other parts can be found here Tigercat SAM - Imgur

Also already did lowpoly of the rocket, 230 tris:





Uploaded my refs here if anybody wants to compare:
Tigercat refs - Imgur

[Rhino]

That is looking really nice! Really glad your working on this again will be awesome to finish it off

The low poly missile is also looking really good, in fact, there is only a few tiny edge suggestions I've got for it which is to swap round your edges to this setup on the rear of your front thins to look like so which should shape them a little better


Other than that, totally awesome!

Can't wait to see the high poly bake to the low poly missile too, that should really help with cleaning up the smoothing too but first, need to get its UVs sorted.

For the Missiles UVs, just due to the slim chance it may also be used on a ship, I would UV it to its own sheet and also makes things easier all round as well as giving you a little more practice before tackling the complicated base

Keep up the awesome work!

[lucky.BOY]

Thanks for feedback, after looking closely at refs some more i decided to leave edeges on those large wing faces as they were, it replicates the wing shape tad bit better.

Did missile UVs today:






EDIT: Almost forgot to ask, the way I UV'd wing leaved their UVs stiched together on those sharp edges, can that be a problem? They would be overlayed anyway, and smoothing groups are all right.

[Rhino]

Looking good

Ye looking at the refs again I see what you mean, but I would still change this edge here as I think it will make it more accurate, but y,e base should go inwards:


Your UVs are looking pretty good although I think they could be packed a little bit better, if you want to match it you can set it as your UV background like your UVing to a texture then just match it


As for the overlapping both sides of the thins, tbh I'm not sure how well that's going to work out in the baking process. You may need to separate both sides of the thin into two UVs something like so for best normal results, then just baking one thin for every thins UVs:

As well as doing the same for the rear thin aswell.
EDIT: actually you probably shouldn't weld them like the above since each side are on different SGs but if you can do it using the space effectively I would place them like that with a small gap between the two sides which would be stitched like that, but ye, only if its space effective, although you could try putting both sides, possibly just the two front faces on the same SG and stitching them up then seeing if the normals will work out the smoothing to be just like what you want too

But this would require a repack etc and would probably need to up the rez of the UV map so try just one side first and see how it turns out

[Tim270]

You should definitely up the size of those smaller uv shells too, yes it will be slightly higher resolution than other parts, but the benefits are much, much larger than keeping it all 1 ration and leaving loads of unused space.

[Rhino]

Ye what I did on my example for mainly the thins and nose UV. You could up the rez a little more but like to keep a good gap around the UVs, although its currently around 8px for that rez but it could possibly come down a little then you've got mips on top.

[lucky.BOY]

Fixed 'er up



If this is good, ill move the rocket to 3ds max 2013 and do some baking. Cookies, anyone?

[Rhino]

Looks good, and for the missile I don't see any reason why not to bake it in max9? I find baking in the later versions of max is only really worth it when your doing massive renders/bakes that requires 64bit processing.

BTW have you tested to see if the overlapping thin UVs work with the bake? I'm still a bit worried you will need to separate the two sides of the thins to get a decent bake as per what I posted before:

Rhino;1915545']As for the overlapping both sides of the thins, tbh I'm not sure how well that's going to work out in the baking process. You may need to separate both sides of the thin into two UVs something like so for best normal results, then just baking one thin for every thins UVs:

As well as doing the same for the rear thin aswell.
EDIT: actually you probably shouldn't weld them like the above since each side are on different SGs but if you can do it using the space effectively I would place them like that with a small gap between the two sides which would be stitched like that, but ye, only if its space effective, although you could try putting both sides, possibly just the two front faces on the same SG and stitching them up then seeing if the normals will work out the smoothing to be just like what you want too

But this would require a repack etc and would probably need to up the rez of the UV map so try just one side first and see how it turns out

[Tim270]

I still think you can pack that UV map a bit more, just take the view that every free bit of space is a wasted pixel. Yes - some stuff will slightly be out of proportion but at the resolution you really wont notice it.

Especially if you are baking too, if the normal map edges is like 1-3 pixels you just wont even really noticed that it was baked.

[Rhino]

My main concern is pixel bleeding but I'm probably much more obsessed about that than I should be when it comes to normal models because most of the time I'm doing LM UVs and if youget any bleed in them, you know about it big time.

As for the actual packing, I can't see a better setup myself? Other than if you want to distort the pixels on the main central bit a little by moving that bit that sticks out to the right in to the left, them moving the entire UV to the right but ye, sucks for a texture artist then.

[lucky.BOY]

My new try on the UV's:


Main thing is i moved the large cluster around because there is more space on its right side then on the left side, this allowed me to upscale the other clusters a bit more, not sure about the packing though. Isnt there a tool that would let me see where is distance between clusters smallest? That would help a lot woth the packing...

---------

Baked some normals, tried it in both 3dsmax 9 and 2013 for comparations, and they ended up pretty much the same, so Im going with the versoin 9 ones. Normals resolution 1024p, I show them in 2013 because Xoliul shader is the best thing to view textures I found so far, didnt get anywhere near this with max 9.

Lowpoly:


Baking setup:


Now the main issues id like to get advice on are these:


See the artifacts in the bake?


Trying to fit a perfect circle onto a 8sided "circle"

[Rhino]

Looking good, and ye, good call with the UV tweaks, didn't spot flipping the main UV round

As for checking the septation gap, I don't know of anything that works well for max9, if anyone dose let me know but one way is to save your UVs in .png with transparency and then open up in PS, select the layer then expand borders and see how much you can expand them until they meet, then you can easily spot which spots need more septation and how much septation you have.

As for your test bake, first of all, are you sure your normals are being displayed the right way round? looks like you may need to flip the green channel or something like that?
As for your issues, can't see without the cage etc too well what's causing it but ye, not sure about the nose, as for the rear, maybe just lower the cage so it bakes inside the HP?

[Tim270]

Like Rhino Said - Attempting flipping green channel, although it looks okay

- Try splitting the nose cap smoothing group from the main body (as they have split Uvs).

- The one at the back could be a couple of things, HP simply is not quite matching the LP enough. Obviously you are going to get some of those black edges as it will always happen with low amounts of geometry.

- Make sure you are giving it at least 4px of padding (in the render to texture dialog window)

[lucky.BOY]

Cheers guys for the input, I played around with the baking quite a lot, and managed to fix nearly everything, apart from those artifacts on the tip of the rocket :/

This is the cage (didnt do any hand edits to it anyway)





And this is how it looks on the lowpoly:




The hard edge on the nose is rather distinct, dunno why is that, even though it hepled with the other artifacts a little bit

And here is the texture: