Project Reality Forums

make that hole a cylinder on the hipoly. it will bake its normals onto the cone of the lowpoly. will be good enough, and also as rhino posted, keep in mind the racer.jpg

Yeah already did that . I understand the baking concept much better than I did before and with that in mind I've redone the handle. The shape was really hard to get down for some reason but I think I did a decent job. I mainly want feedback on whether the low poly is too high poly or not.

High Poly:

Low Poly:


Right now it's a six sided cylinder.

This is the ref I used for the handle:

http://www.mp44.nl/images/equipment/pio ... rge_01.jpg

6 sided is ok. but id remove every 3rd or so edge, it will lower tris alot, while not really sacrificing looks on an asset this small.

its an important part of modeling props, knowing when your tris are worth it and where to get rid of them. especcially in older engines like refractor. CE3 and UE have so little perf drop by tris it almost doesnt matter anymore, but this best be learned, as it differentiates a mediocre artist from a good one

can we see the rest of the lowpoly, if its done?

PS. i see the triscount is almost 1000. try to get it around 700 or so. i can say more when i see the lowpoly.

PPS. are you just subdividing the lowpoly handle? dont do that with a 6sided. subdivide an 8sided cylinder,as its shape will converge towards a circle when subdivided, a sixsided wont. ill stick a comparison later

Dont forget to check boxes near to "Generate mapping coords" and "Real world map size", in spline settings. It will automatically UV your lowpoly and save you some trouble down the road

Or wont, as max 2012 may have better UV tools than 9 , but still best to do this now.

it should. afaik...

also i reccomend renderhjs's TexTools. great little plugin that takes away a ton of manuality from UVing and speeds it dramatically

Thanks for the tips guys. If I check both of those boxes under the spline settings will the UV still be retained if I convert the object to an editable poly after? I need to delete faces and weld vertices.

While yes, the UVs should stay when you convert it to edit poly, every change you make after that will chnage the UVs in some way as well. So if you want to get rid of some edges, best way would be to collapse them or remove them, as this should keep the UVs in relatively good state.

As always its best to try things out and see how they affect the UVs for yourself.

Okay then, well I did that. Redid the handle with 8 sides as opposed to six and checked the map coords and real world map size boxes. In addition, I took out every 3rd edge as you suggested Doc.Pock and it still looks pretty good for low poly. I personally think if I remove anymore edges it'll start looking really blocky but do you think more edges could be removed? I completely understand your point about tris and it's something I definitely need to work on with more experience. I guess I just need to get familiar with how much geometry can be sacrificed in the low poly model because as of now I'm really not sure. Anyways, this is what I have low poly wise.

Polys: 305
Tris: 568
Verts: 286







Now, if I'm getting the normal concept correct, with regards to the clamp piece, I only need to model the rounded piece, correct?



Again, it's probably something I need to do to really understand it, but on the high poly model Does that circular piece/rounded part of the clamp have to be the exact same dimensions as that piece on the lowpoly?


So here's what the low poly will end up looking like. Unless of course I'll have to attach the handle and circular part all to the main mesh?



In addition to all this, I plan to just redo the high poly off of this lowpoly (As Lucky.Boy mentioned earlier) as that workflow seems much more intuitive than doing it the other way around.

http://i1332.photobucket.com/albums/w60 ... 79e2ac.png

Dont just remove the edges like that, you need to keep the edge distribution even on the whole shape. I'd just revert back to the spline (You should save before turning things to edit poly, anyway) and turn the number of iterations down there, will keep your edges spread evenly.

As for the clam piece, I'd just extrude the straight bit of the handle so it fits the clamp peice on the lowpoly, then detach that bit from the handle and edit it so it matches the highpoly better, for example it doesnt need to be round on the bottom. And no, you dont need to weld it into the main mesh i think.
This is a bit hard to explain, sorry.

For the actual box, you dont need those verts, should target weld them as marked by arrow.


Also, you I think you can model this extrusion, as you certainly have the tris to do it.

Hey guys, I've finished the low poly and high poly of the model (hopefully). Take a look and let me know what you think!

Low Poly:

Polys: 299
Tris: 594
Verts:305








Low Poly Fuse:



High Poly:




Once I get the OK, I'll start looking into UVing this.

Looking great!

Yeah, the edges could be softer, wont be really noticable on the bake now i fear.

regarding the lowpoly fuse


The larger parts need more sides then the smaller parts. And the large part here does really need more sides, it needs to apear cylindrical as it will be right in your face in the anim.

Thanks for the tips lucky, I exaggerated the edges a bit more and fixed the fuse. Let me know if you need more screens showing different things or whatnot.

your edges on the hipoly case seem very flat. like if you chamfered with one iteration and then added supports in. can you show your cage maybe?

Yeah I did exactly that. I guess I misunderstood what smoother meant. Do corners need to be rounded as opposed to flattened?

Redid the edges to smooth them out more.

Dont use bevel fpr your hipoly edge definition. Its a destructive workflow and shoukd be avoided. Just add support loops in. The way catmull-clarke subd works makes that kind of geo smooth into a pwrfect corner

Edit. I see you dont have the hole in your lowpoly. Id either put it there(not the extrude around it, just the hole) and also model the outer ring correctly with a small incline on the 90? edges, as otherwise, normal map wont read it at all.

Edit 2. Your fuse hipoly adges seem veeeery tight. Exagarate that shit up immensly. Dunno if it got posted before, but search google for "racer.jpg" to see what i mean

Okay cool, regarding the edges, unfortunately I've chamfered them and I can't undo that as far as I know. I could get the original box shape and then add edge loops in by moving every vertex back and aligning them individually but that would be incredibly tedious. Unless there's an easier way to do this that I'm not seeing, is it worth the effort to do it over again with edge loops? Although, that's something I will definitely take into account in the future. I'm not sure why I didn't do it that way in the first place. :/

I know what your talking about regarding the tight edges on the fuse, just forgot about it . Will fix that up.

And then about the hole on the low poly, It's not part of the silhouette so I assumed it would be taken care of by the normals?

And then are you saying I should modify the outer ring on the high poly to be more angled in order to exaggerate the edge?

M_Striker wrote:Okay cool, regarding the edges, unfortunately I've chamfered them and I can't undo that as far as I know. I could get the original box shape and then add edge loops in by moving every vertex back and aligning them individually but that would be incredibly tedious. Unless there's an easier way to do this that I'm not seeing, is it worth the effort to do it over again with edge loops? Although, that's something I will definitely take into account in the future. I'm not sure why I didn't do it that way in the first place. :/

yeah, its really tedious getting rid of bevels... you could delete the corner faces, then manually move the edges together and weld them. or search the web for scripts.

always remember this motto when subd modeling. USE ONLY AS MUCH GEO AS YOU NEED TO GET THE SHAPE and a corner is defined by 3 edgeloops at minimum

I know what your talking about regarding the tight edges on the fuse, just forgot about it . Will fix that up.

yeah do that

And then about the hole on the low poly, It's not part of the silhouette so I assumed it would be taken care of by the normals?

And then are you saying I should modify the outer ring on the high poly to be more angled in order to exaggerate the edge?

it will be taken care by the normalmap (the outer ring) but the hole itself is waaay too drastic to trully work, atleast without the option in refractor for paralax...



do it like this, and always use a slight (30?) angle on surfaces that are only to appear extruded on the normal map.

this must be done due to the way normal maps work and is awesomely explained here:




edit:
here is a topology example of how this ought to be. HP on the right


edit2: (damn i love editing)
the edges on that inset on the top, where the handle mechanism is located are also waay to tight.
reference this:

see how the softer edges hold their shape at all distances. thats what you gain by exagarrating detail. remember, your hipoly doesnt need to look realistic, as long as the baked normalmap does its job.

Thanks Doc. for the tips. You're helping me out a ton. Although are you referring to these edges that need to be softened?



The angle of the slope itself is such that if I "soften" those edges that whole thing will be a blur!

Yeah soften tkose abit. Even if it will look weird on the hipoly, it has to be picked by the normal map...