nDo2 Awesome Sauce

Little update, I've been playing with nDo2, not just by clicking on one button to create a Diffuse to Normal although I'm creating the normal map in nDo2 with masking and layers, and overlaps, I'm doing this to create my dumpster, within my allyway scene, this is a more challenging way for me as I've never really incorporated this workflow into my model creation. Usually I do Low poly to High poly and bake the details although creating the normal information within nDo2 gives a lot more control on the type of edge or curve I'm wanting. Below is a screenshot of the dumpster so far, with the details being created in nDo2.

Better Late than Never

Well, its been too long, I'd come up with some massive excuse to why not much as been done.. but really its just been modelling other things and wanting to polish some portfolio pieces, this is a screen-grab of the environment so far, what excites me the most with this piece is that i'm only 1/3 in TRI limit of the overall environment, this really does help me throw more eye candy into this, and so far its already looking fairly filled out, below is a screen grab of my new bins in place, these have been unwrapped and ready for me to go to town on them as these are the most important pieces within my environment why you can see a fair few more polys being used.

Tomorrow or possibly through the week I'm going to be doing a run down on how to utilise UV space correctly when texturing low resolution assets and how approach an unwrap when knowing textures are limited.

Low Poly Vent Shaft

Created another model which is the ventilation shaft, this is the lowest poly model I've done yet being 66 tris as this model itself has graffi on it I've increased the texture size to 512x512 as this is a fairly large asset, although through creating the other assets and texturing them, I'm able to tweak all the material sets as I've rendered 1024x1024 texture maps for all these to tweak the textures to get the best possible feel for the environmental, I'm going to be creating my corner environment within UDK and once I've got all the assets done in 3ds max and looking well in regard to there colour levels i'll export it in and begin building the scene and materials to create the still.

256x256 Boiler Exhaust Low Poly Bake

Well I wasn't intending this boiler exhaust to take so long to bake. I'm wanting to keep this a 256x256 texture and no more than 200tri's I needed to do a lot of tweaking with UV sets, and how I created the high poly model, to work with the low poly. This is only going to be seen from the distance the camera shot isn't going to be zoomed in so at a fair distance this will not look as low detailed although for render purposes I've shown the low poly asset close up to show the depth of texture information from the normal and specular so that the detail I've spent on the texture shows. Its a bit late now to go into depth on how I created the low poly from this high poly, although with each asset I'm creating for this competition I'm running each model through the baking pipeline, to help familiarise myself with the common problems faced.

Todays Grand Scheme

Well sleep has been had, time to model! Thought of what I could work on today, and its going to be the high poly boiler exhaust and possibly creating the highpoly 256 tiling brick texture. and see how that goes.

I'll post later in the day when I've done both of these and show the beauty shots and fun times I've had making these.

Air Conditioning Unit - High to Low Poly

Well, another day another model, well two actually. I've created both the low poly bin bag and the low poly air conditioning unit, the unit was tricky as a lot of tweaking was needed so that the grills showed in the right lightning, as you can see from the images below the specular and normal map help to define the grill and allow the normal map information behind that push through, so that the fan can be seen. I'll post an image of the Highpoly and Lowpoly with wireframe.

Pleased with the result of the bake and the texture work as this texture is 512x512 can be pushed to 256 if needed without losing to much quality.

Bad UV's and Smoothing Groups

Well, so far I've been sticking to my IT WILL BE LOW POLY methods! with this I've had some experience with bad unwrapping on my part and also smoothing groups on low poly objects are more difficult to grasp, so to others thought i'd elaborate on the process on how I tackled this problem.

1) this is the binbag basic low poly with normal UV seams that I thought would work, as you can see across the top theres a bleed all across the 3rd edge up from the bottom, this is because when baking the high poly version of the bin-bag as the seams are in an obvious place its noticeable.

2) This is my "lazy arse way" to try and fix bad UV seaming with putting the smoothing group on opposites so the light around middle of the binbag is taking light from one direction and the top above the 3rd edge is the opposite way, as you can see this helps slightly, although you can still see normal map bleeding.

3) This is the final result of trail and error really, as you can see I chamfered the 3rd edge up so that it had an extra edge on each side, so the angle of the baking process wasn't as harsh as you can see this has got rid of all seams and it now looks like a binbag!

Broken

Fixed