[GALLERY] Neuro's logical disorders.

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Originally Posted by neuro

i'm more worried that i actually HAVE to say it apparently.

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I know it's not done, but I still don't like where it's going. It just seems boring and doesn't compare at all to the front. You've got the details like the dial and buttons, and they're fine, but the base shape is uninteresting. It doesn't make me think "wow" like the front of the gun does. I would try to imagine what other components a gun like this would need, like capacitors and electronics, and somehow integrating them into the mid-section of the gun. A scope of some kind integrated with a flip-out display would be cool. Also, that canister looks like it should have more to do with the reloading than that shape on the side of the gun, although I don't know what you have planned.

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Originally Posted by ejburke

It's a separate object sitting slightly above the surface. Just copy the surface you want to add detail to, subdivide the copy as needed, delete the excess faces, retopologize as needed, extrude it off the original surface and then extrude it back to give the illusion of an indentation.

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*blinks*

i can make a minitut of it tomorrow.

though EJ is right, he isn't in that one particular case, they're 2 seperate objects, but the stripes on the front and underside are actually done in this way.

e:

http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/t...ut-floater.jpg

I've heard of people doing that for baking details to normal maps... but I've never tried it... would I have to do anything extra crazy to be able to bake that detail to the normal map?

no, just make sure it's in your projection list, otherwise it might just completely ignore it.
(btw, normalmaps are the only reason you'd do this in the first place)

if you know how to bake a normalmap, then there's no extra effort at all involved.

When you bake the normal map it ignores the UVs on the items you're projecting from, right? It should just look at what your projection target is, shouldn't it?

AKA do I need to UV that extra little piece there?

i thought you were in a school that's supposed to teach you this stuff?
if they haven't tought you how to bake a normalmap, i'm afraid you might not be in a proper school, but more of a money-grab institution.

read any normalmapping tutorial, there's a billion.

1, make highpoly.
2, make lowpoly.
3, unwrap lowpoly.
4, set up cage, and render normalmap+diffusemap+ambient occlusion (in 3 seperate renders, dont do them in 1 pass, or it'll boost rendertime EXPONENTIALLY)

you dont need to unwrap your highpoly, your highpoly's ONLY concern is a good surface, because that's the ONLY thing you'll end up seeing in your normalmap.

your lowpoly doens't need anything extra for that little thing either, since when you render it, it's all considered 1 object if it's all in your projection list.

normalmaps only store surface DIRECTION, no height information at all. thats why you can have geometry floating over your other geometry. as long as all your high res mesh fits inside your cage, there won't be any problems.

edit:
here's a few pointers to always keep in mind when doind next-gen work.
http://wiki.polycount.net/3D_Tutoria...Next_Gen_Games

in addition, this tutorial handles both floaters, and the general process of building next-gen assets in general (handles Quake 4 to be exact, do don't expect a max-tutorial. this is more of a general thing.

http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/ArtRe...6e0ea75dee4afa

Yea, they brushed over floaters like that in hardly any time at all (aka he mentioned it once and moved on.) The only other time I've really baked normal maps was when I took an object into Zbrush that already had UVs, then brought that back into Maya and baked the map from that so at that point the high res object had UVs laid out and such anyhow, I was more so wondering all of that because I was playing with baking floaters to a normal map and it wasn't working out properly, was wondering if UVs were a problem or not.

Thanks a lot for the links and info sir +rep as always :P

Neuro, you are awesome :P I so need to learn Sub'D modelling, but I am too lazy atm, next year at Uni I will learn. Lok.

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Originally Posted by Hunter

Neuro, you are awesome :P I so need to learn Sub'D modelling, but I am too lazy atm, next year at Uni I will learn. Lok.

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Its not that hard to learn. I picked it up in a few days.