Halo 4 Battle Rifle

[Computron]

I don't think you understand the concept behind High-poly to normal map workflow.

That's the triangles in the 3ds Max scene. (I.E the high-poly version)
The Low poly Br is around 7000 with a normals map. (The one that goes in the game)

The low poly will retain most of the detail of the low poly at a much lower performance cost.

[mech]

You got some nasty non planars fucking up your normal.

[Computron]

On the stock? Yeah, those are temporary UVs/smoothing groups. Still test baking.

[neuro]

You got some nasty non planars fucking up your normal.

hoaerse shit.

non-planar faces havent got a damn thing to do with it, whoever started that bandwagon needs to get shit.
the reason he gets fucked shading, is because he's got very sharp smoothing angles (which happens when you try to smooth stuff like a 90-degree angle)

first you have to keep in mind that smoothing is a mathematical operation, and your normalmap only has a range of about 128 pixels (one way) you'll always get some smoothing-bleeding on extreme smoothing angles.
then in addition to that, when you bake stuff, it uses a specific algorithm, to bake vectors.
when your engine reverses that process, it needs to follow the same algorithm (what computron mentioned with synched)
this has to do with the way your 3d application/engine calculates vertex normals.

if they're even SLIGHTLY off, you'll get normal-bleeding.
UDK allows you to get around this by allowing importing vertexnormals from FBX-format (Assuming you export with explicit normals) and your normalmaps will display perfectly.
because it used MAX-baked normalmaps, on MAX-based vertexnormals.

i know that BRINK for example was synched to Maya-baked normalmaps, so all we had to do was bake our stuff in maya, and it'd all work perfectly fine without normal-bleeding.

as a general rule-of-thumb.

split your smoothinggroups for 90-degree angles.
split your UV's for any smoothing-breaks.

those 2 guidelines WILL fix 90% of your average normalmapping issues.



edit: you can also download the 3-point-shader for max, which has a quality-normal modifyer, which will synch your mesh' vertexnormals to the vertexnormals the shader is based on, and give you 'correct' normalmap display. (no silly bleeding) and you can get away with far sharper smoothing crap. (because the normalmap will compensate CORRECTLY)
(but will not get rid of pixel-artifacts i mentioned before)

back to the whole """"non-planar"""" issue because people just LOVE throwing that term around.

the ONLY reason these are considered unpreferential. is that your exporter might not triangulate them the same way your bake-app does, resulting in just plain wrong bakes.
so whne you've got your final cage set up and make your final bake, triangulate your mesh.
in general you would already do this for curved surfaces where you have an intended curvature (like the grip in this place)

[Spartan314]

I don't think you understand the concept behind High-poly to normal map workflow.

That's the triangles in the 3ds Max scene. (I.E the high-poly version)
The Low poly Br is around 7000 with a normals map. (The one that goes in the game)

The low poly will retain most of the detail of the low poly at a much lower performance cost.

Oh I see. 7000 should be good for going in-game for CE.

[Computron]

Yup, Neuro is right. Most of those problems are because the Shitty Auto unwrapped UVs and smoothing groups I had when I took those shots. As I mentioned earlier, I was using Xoliul 2.0 Shader with qualified normals (and also tried 3-point), and it still gave me those shading errors from most angles, so having a synced renderer doesn't solve everything, but helps tremendously.

I put some more time in and got all my seams in the right spots (Green lines are the seams):

These type of hard surface assets end up having a ton of UV Islands and are a pain in the ass to unwrap. And the concept artist put a lot of concave 90 degree features in the gun which only exacerbates the problem. I still gotta go back and fix the ray misses and re-pack the UVs to make them more efficient.

Man, I've probably spent a good 3/4 of a workweek on it at this point. Gotta get faster .

The Battle Rifle looks sweet though.

Nuero, did I read correctly, you worked on the Brink Guns? How long would one spend on one of these assets up to the texturing stage?

I asked earlier, but Neuro, do you know if Halo's renderers are synced to any bakers?

[neuro]

nah, i did environment stuff.

and for the 3point shader, you need to also apply the quality normals modifier to your mesh.

as for the last question, i don't know, if you dont know, avoid harsh smoothing, and try to have your normalmap as flat as possible, and you generally speaking won't have any issues

[Computron]

The quality normals modifier didn't make much of a difference since I already had qualified normals turned on in Max 2012's .ini.
The version of the BR I have now shades perfectly in Nitrous Viewport, so it should shade just as well in any engine.

Do you got a portfolio site I can look at your Brink environment work? I loved the art in that game.

[neuro]

i haven't actually got a website with my stuff up at the moment, but you can see some of the stuff i did for crysis2 here
http://www.forgestd.com

[Computron]

Got back to this model and put a little time into texturing it today, got the base layers in place.

I am a real noob at texturing, but it is already baked out (Final!) and looks sick without textures.

This is what I got so far, with a shader doing most of the work through my Diffuse, Spec, Gloss, Normal and Glow maps.

Got my boy Xoliul (2) shadin' the pixels. I wonder what kind of shaders the Halo 1 engine supports? I know Halo 2 is pretty locked down from experience.