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Darkwatch - Rifle
June 16, 2009 - 12:27pm
- 4668 reads
Pretty much done with the HP. Everything modeled in Max with some Zbrush work helping do the leather straps. Love me some Decimation Master.
Mark
Very nice mate!
Really clean work and a great design.
Great job 
gotta agree here, very nice, love the stock
-B
This is an incredible piece. What was your inspiration and was all this freehand or was there and existing peice you used as reference?
I like it. I can't model stuff like this. At least I don't think so. Would like to see a wire, unless its all triangulated.. just to get an idea on how you went about it.
Thanks guys. I'm working off a piece of concept I scanned in from the Art of Darkwatch book. I loved that game. Here's the reference shot.
I'll get a wire of the full gun later but I had some people ask how I did the straps and I had a few versions of it to put into a screenshot to give an idea of the process. Here's the steps I used and the screenshot.
1. Did a low poly version.
2. Ran connect to add some edge loops.
3. Extruded every other row of faces.
4. Ran connect again to get edge loops in place for running turbosmooth.
5. Pushed/pulled geometry.
6. Played around in the modifier stack and found tesselate gave me a good base to work with.
7. Took it into Zbrush and moved, painted folds, smoothed, etc..
8. Ran Decimation Master
9. Imported back into Max
Calling it done unless anyone has anything to add I should look at. Thanks.
Looks great man!
Can we see some flats please?
My only crits would be that the spec looks a little hot on the wood and on the leather.
I think diffusing the highlight on the leather and maybe adding a little more AO would add more contrast to it.
Amazing stuff though mate
Ok I'm not done. The feedback I'm getting is really good so back I go. 
Here are my flats which are all kinds of crazy stupid. ENJOY!
any chance we can get a hi res shot of those flates Marc. Rifle looks great by the way
-B
I'll post a high tomorrow since it's changed. Here's my latest based on feedback I've been getting. Thanks.
Flats
Great work mark, since you provided the higher res flats Id like to take a moment to give what I hope to be is good advice.
Refer to the image I attached to see what Im referring to exactly. Keep in mind that I dont have the 3d model to test this out but I know generally this helps loads.
Diffuse: Needs to be "leveled" as referred in the texturing DVD. Although the render looks nice, most of the detail is hidden in the darkness or is being washed out by the lack of detail in the spec. This may be ok for a certain style, but a lot of that texture information is just not "coming into the light" if you will. What I display in the image may not work out of the box but you could tweak from there to hopefully get more details in there. You may have to tone some of the highlights down but Im just not sure.
Spec: This suffers from a similar problem, one quick way I did what you see in the image, is just to take the new diffuse I made and desaturate it and then use your original spec as a color dodge @ 50% Opacity on top. What this did was bring over the leveled changes I made which had more details in them, and the color dodge migrated your bright highlights and stuff like that, I think it would work out great.
Normal: Im not sure why you baked it out the way you did, the only normal maps Ive seen in production are tangent space ones. I would highly recommend rebaking the normal maps using tangent space, if anything it will be easier to tweak in photoshop and predict how it would look in the game engine.
I hope this helps man, let us know!
Nice textures Mark.
I think Riki covered just about everything 
I must admit i am also confused with your Normal map.
I could be wrong (and i probably am ), but it looks like you have baked an Object Space map and then baked a Tangent space for the mirrored parts (to compensate for the fact that Object Space cant use mirrored UV's) and then combined the two maps.
Wouldn't it have been easier to just bake a full Tangent Space map or am i missing a trick?
Looking forward to the next iteration
HUGE help. Thanks for taking the time Riki.
A definite jump in quality using your advice. Funny thing is I was watching your texturing video during my time texturing this and was using your "leveled" technique but I think I failed since I was using it on layers and not the flattened texture when I was done with it.
And yes metalliandy you are wrong. LOL You give me too much credit. I only baked an Object space map. My tangent bake came out fine but I was getting some odd shading/lighting in Marmoset on the revolver section. I thought it might have been a smoothing group but my attempts to fix that didn't change anything. I remember reading on PC about using Object space so I gave that a go and it rendered correct. I think I need to revisit this since I do agree using Tangent is better.
Here's some new shots. Thanks again fellas.
Looks Great!!
Hopefully the Fountain Part 2 will help you with understanding tangent space baking and what is involved with removing those shading problems. Its actually a combination of things..so stay tuned!
Thanks Riki.
I have no doubt I'll learn a lot from the Fountain Part 2. Can't wait to get a look at it.
I also solved my shading issue. Looks like I did have a bad bake in that area which was giving me the shading issue. I did a test and just baked out that revolver section and pasted it into the Normal map and it showed up fine. I used xNormal and I think I may have had my ray distances off too much for a good bake.
Fun stuff to learn.
ahh yeah, I forgot about xnormal, it has a great feature to average the normals. Post the result!
Actually two things went wrong with the normal. It was partly a bad bake but the other thing was Marmoset. I read on PC sometimes you have to check off optimizations for normals in the OBJ export. I still have a small shading issue in the back handle on the normal. I'm debating if I want to go through getting it to work right in Marmoset or move on to my next piece I want to make. I may just revisit a bit later.
Also Xform helps. I forgot to run it before.
Here's what I got from xNormal.
lol i thought it would be a strange way to make a normal
All the object space maps i bake only really contain rainbow colours and not the flat blue that tangent maps have.
I was reading up on them a bit and apparently for mirrored parts can be used if the shader has written support for them included in it.
As for Marmoset, when i have had problems with rendering errors on Tangent maps i have just clicked the "Object space normal" check box and it seems to fix most stuff.
Its looking great man im really impressed!...Just sharpen that normal a little are you a good to go i recon!
Beautifully done, great silhouette and a good mix of details with smooth areas for contrast.
-Riki