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Ornate chest of drawers.


Gary Dave
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Bit of a weird thing for me to model, but I got the urge and had to see where it would take me. So far all work done in 3dc only.

 

Sculpt:

BK40JFI.jpg

 

And the current state of manual retopo:

IGG8ock.jpg

 

 

I do have a question:
For all the knobs/handles on this thing. Obviously I'm not going to generate unique UV's for all of them, and I do have many solutions for this, but the best always involved leaving 3dc at some point. Here's what I'd do at the moment:

- Retopo and UV one handle/knob only.

- Do the bake into per-pixel

- Export LP mesh out of 3dc

- Clone and position the relevant pieces

- Bring it back into 3dc for texturing.

 

This isn't ideal though, as it completely eradicates any sort of iteration. Once I bring the "modified" retopo back into 3dc, I can't then do a re-bake if I need to later on.

 

I know 3dc can handle overlapped UV's, I've done it in the past. I just worry about it baking out some weird texture where it's trying to bake all the information from all the clones into one UV island. Especially as I'll be positioning the cloned geo manually, so they might end up a few millimetres/pixels out of alignment from the object it's going to bake from. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

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Yeah cheers Tony, I went ahead and did a test with the cloned geo (after UV'ing one of them) and it seems to have worked flawlessly.

 

(low poly - after bake) Knobs = 192 tri's each. Handle = 524 each, and the smaller version of the handles are even less, coming in at 410 each.
axhCAe4.jpg

 

No I'm not familiar with AncienRegime's early postings, has he done stuff like this before?

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Lots of little tweaks to this over the Easter break, I didn't like the side-pieces and someone else mentioned them looking weak too, so I've completely re-done them. The retopo has been tidied in some areas and other than that it's just been a case of plonking down the polys. Nearly finished with that stage, then onto UV'ing, cloning and then baking. I'm dreading the baking, separately the pieces bake well, but I'm concerned that when trying to do the final bake with everything included, things are going to go very wrong.

 

z0IKFZz.jpg

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Lots of little tweaks to this over the Easter break, I didn't like the side-pieces and someone else mentioned them looking weak too, so I've completely re-done them. The retopo has been tidied in some areas and other than that it's just been a case of plonking down the polys. Nearly finished with that stage, then onto UV'ing, cloning and then baking. I'm dreading the baking, separately the pieces bake well, but I'm concerned that when trying to do the final bake with everything included, things are going to go very wrong.

 

z0IKFZz.jpg

 

 

Don't worry it'll work out well. You may have to wrestle around with it but if you persist you'll get what you want.

Edited by L'Ancien Regime
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You can bake all the pieces individually but all at once. Just make sure your vox or surface layers are named the same as your retopo layer and you shouldn't have any issues.

 

Hey Blaster, I remember that retopo layer/vox layer thing. I'll have to test it out when I've got some UV's laid out on this model. I guess it's a local bake? Does it also take other objects into account though? I think that's what you're saying, but just to make sure, it will bake the pieces separately, per layer-relationship, but also (as an example) would bake AO where my handles connect with the drawers, despite them being on separate layers?

 

I'll test it myself of course, but not sure when I'll be working on it again, hopefully some point this week.

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yes each seperate model part will get normals baked individually.  Just make sure you turn on name corespondent for baking option under the bake menu settings and your layer naming convention is the same between the retopo object and the vox or surface model.  As far as the ambient occlusion goes Im not quite sure it works the same way.  I believe you will just get a ambient occlusion based on the sum of all the parts which makes more sense in most cases anyways.  

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Been going back and forth on the handles, since there's 10 of them (plus the 3 knobs) I really needed to cut down on the low poly versions, they were coming in at about 4 - 6k before, which is just not acceptable for me.

 

First I tried a suggestion I got elsewhere, which was to use alpha'd planes instead. I didn't want to go full on with this though, as I do want these handles to have some physical chunkiness to them, here's what I ended up with:

O08DvMR.jpg

 

I was impressed with the results, but ultimately I knew it wasn't ideal, there's no sense in having a tiny bit of alpha on a model like this, that in itself is wasteful. So I took a few steps back and decided to alter the sculpt itself, something that would be more suited to a low retopo.

 

lklpamp.jpg

 

Probably going to stick with this, the total will come in at about 1.5k for all of them. I can live with that.

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Displacement mapping is a no, if I had the poly count to spare for displacement I wouldn't be worrying about the retopo of the handles. End goal is for general game engine use. I know displacement can be achieved with DX11 tessellation, but that's overkill for these handles. You're right though, the effect is certainly lost at harsher angles, but it's a compromise I'm happy with for such tiny on-screen objects.

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Ah okay, so a virtual displacement? I guess the game terminology for that would be parallax mapping. Still a bit over-kill for my end goal, but thanks for the clarification.

 

Managed to get into it again a bit this weekend, the priority was reducing the poly count over all and doing test bakes to avoid future hiccups. Here's the last drawers test I did, totalling 802 tri's I think for the lot, pretty happy with that:

1GJS5w8.jpg

 

Getting some normal map skews in a few areas, which I might tidy up later but it's pretty passable in my opinion. I'm still getting the grid and wavy artefacts as seen in this thread: http://3dcoat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19180 but it's only visible at certain angles, like when the light is hitting it more directly. I'd still love a solution to this, it looks like it could just be a rendering issue as I still can't find evidence of these artefacts on the normal map itself, and yet the normal map layer is what displays the weirdness.

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Cheers Tony, bit of a more interesting update this time, as it's nearly finished.

 

ZcPLH4M.jpg

 

Obviously need to add the rest of the handles, and my wood PBR material needs a lot of tweaking, buuuut I'm liking where it's headed, just a shame it's 1:45am on a Monday and I've got work to wake up for in a few hours.

Edited by Gary Dave
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On 4/10/2016 at 8:47 PM, Gary Dave said:

Cheers Tony, bit of a more interesting update this time, as it's nearly finished.

 

ZcPLH4M.jpg

 

Obviously need to add the rest of the handles, and my wood PBR material needs a lot of tweaking, buuuut I'm liking where it's headed, just a shame it's 1:45am on a Monday and I've got work to wake up for in a few hours.

Very nicely done. Thanks for sharing this with us.

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