Starfighter retopo

[philnolan3d]

This is an older model I did a couple years ago of a Jedi Starfighter as seen in Episode II I believe. I decided to do a low-poly game model of it. Almost all of the low res work was done in 3DC with a couple of minor details in LightWave, just because it was easier to edit the original model.

Hi Res:

Low Res:

[LJB]

I really like it! Did you import to voxel 4 retop' or just midify existing?

[philnolan3d]

Thanks! No voxels, it's imported as a Reference Mesh.

[Tinker]

Nice model and retopo!

[philnolan3d]

Thanks I have a friend at a game studio making some suggestions so there will be a few more small changes before I am ready to UV and texture. I've actually already knocked off over 100 polys that weren't needed.

[kay_Eva]

that's some really cool modeling!

[philnolan3d]

The original model was for a modeling contest on Spinquad.com which is great since they often have real prizes unlike CGTalk where you win an image to put on your forum posts. I didn't actually win, but I posted it on CGTalk later and within an hour was on the phone with a recruiter from EA who called me. Sadly it was EA Chicago and they went out of business shortly after. You can actually see the art test I did for them on my demo reel (the "basement" scene).

[Taros]

Nice result. The pedals looks a bit to flat to use them.

But nevertheless: cool work! I am a star wars fan, and not really objective in my opinion...

[Dele]

Nice retopo. Are you going to texture it in 3DC too? It would be cool to see with some nice textures on it.

[philnolan3d]

Yes I just want to be sure I have the Low-poly right before UVing, then I'll texture in 3DC.

[philnolan3d]

Question for you game guys: When UV mapping does it make sense to keep all of the polys in the map the same relative size to the real polygons or is it better to make more important polygons bigger on the map so they'll get more detail. Like suppose I have some out of the way polygon "island" that may well never be seen, or it's going to be all one solid color. Would it make sense to make that one smaller than the others?

[Dele]

Some of the pros around here would know better, but it makes more sense to me to size the islands based on what kind of detail you need in that area. I can't think of any advantage to keeping the UV's relative to polygon size.

[philnolan3d]

Finally finished UV Mapping. I made two maps, for interior and exterior.

[Tony Nemo]

A lot of detail there, Phil! Is AO next?

[philnolan3d]

Well, baking normal maps, but I guess I could do AO in LightWave now that I think of it.

[philnolan3d]

After much hassle I got the normal maps baked at the highest baking settings possible, 2048 res. I loaded my lowpoly model into 3DC, imported the normal maps, and became a little sad. The maps have some major errors that I'm not quite sure how to get rid of. I noticed some could be smoothed away with the paintbrush in 3DC, but it doesn't work for all circumstances and I really shouldn't have to anyway. An over all problem is just that all of the lines just looks really aliased. Anyone have any ideas?

Here's the exterior normal map (small sized for the web)

[Taros]

After much hassle I got the normal maps baked at the highest baking settings possible, 2048 res. I loaded my lowpoly model into 3DC, imported the normal maps, and became a little sad. The maps have some major errors that I'm not quite sure how to get rid of. I noticed some could be smoothed away with the paintbrush in 3DC, but it doesn't work for all circumstances and I really shouldn't have to anyway. An over all problem is just that all of the lines just looks really aliased. Anyone have any ideas?

Here's the exterior normal map (small sized for the web)

Are you using the Texture Baking Tool to export the normal maps oder the regular texture menue? I would try it with the TBTool.

And it looks like there are no padding in the textures. Are the uvws overlapping somewhere?

[LJB]

Phil did you go from the TextureBaker from the texture menu in the retop room and point it to the saved Obj rather than use the current. Looks like you are getting similar results to what we were finding in Taros, Texture baking thread. I seem to rtemember i had to up the 'in scan depth' and 'out scan depth' a little from the default, and you'll need to check 'create padding'

[philnolan3d]

Are you using the Texture Baking Tool to export the normal maps oder the regular texture menue? I would try it with the TBTool.

And it looks like there are no padding in the textures. Are the uvws overlapping somewhere?

I used Textures > Texture Baking Tool with these settings:

Some of the UVs do overlap, I usually don't like to do this but since it's a game model some of them are doubled up Like the two engines for example are mirrored with the UVs overlapping. As far as no padding... Did you look at the map I posted? It's like 98% blue. I was wondering if I could reduce the padding but I didn't see a setting.

Phil did you go from the TextureBaker from the texture menu in the retop room and point it to the saved Obj rather than use the current. Looks like you are getting similar results to what we were finding in Taros, Texture baking thread. I seem to remember i had to up the 'in scan depth' and 'out scan depth' a little from the default, and you'll need to check 'create padding'

I couldn't go straight from retopo room because I had to make the model in a number of different pieces, then I exported them all and combined them in LightWave, so in the Texture Baking Tool I chose the low res model like you can see in the above image. Also as seen above in order to get all of the details I had to increase the scan depths as high as they would go, 20.

[LJB]

Ok But when you did use the Texture baker and point to that mesh did you do it from the Retop room? try setting the out scan depth to 50 also that was what andrew had it set to when he demo'd the technique.

got exactly the same inflated /bevelled details that you get, until i followed what Andrew said to the letter

[philnolan3d]

Like I said I couldn't go from the retopo room. Thanks for the 50 tip though I didn't even try going that high since the slider only went up to 20. Where did Andrew say this? I probably read it but don't remember.

[philnolan3d]

Well I figured out some of the problem. On the glass areas I didn't realize that I had just placed single sided polys in there and set them to display as double sided. That worked fine for the model's original purpose years ago, but I guess the texture baker didn't recognise the the double sided-ness of it. So I added some thickness to the glass.

[philnolan3d]

Semi-improved. I baked it at 4096 and scaled the image down to 2048 in Photoshop, that gave me much nicer edges. I think the smoothing is the main culprit. I'm probably having the most trouble because I neve intended this high-res model to be baked into a normal map when I first made it a few years ago.

[philnolan3d]

Since the baked version wasn't that great, I basically just used it as a guide to repaint most of the normals by hand. I think the exterior is done. So what you see here with no interior details is 3985 polys.

[Oliver Thornton]

Sorry I didn't see this thread earlier. The key to good baking values is adjusting the scan depth, the default values do not always work. This is like a Focal distance for the rays when the baking occurs it seems, and wrong values can easily lead to patchy normals. You can adjust padding width in Edit>Preferences. The default value that installs with 3DC can be way too strong for some maps, which can be a problem sometimes because you will not see it until export.

Looking good Phil, how many polys did you drop it down from? (original>retopo)

[philnolan3d]

Minus the interior parts the high-res is about 340,000. Believe me I screwed around with the scan depth for hours and hours. The main problem I think was that the original model was not made to be baked. For normal maps on game quality stuff the high res model should be exaggerated.

Anyway, here's base colors and spec:

[Taros]

Minus the interior parts the high-res is about 340,000. Believe me I screwed around with the scan depth for hours and hours. The main problem I think was that the original model was not made to be baked. For normal maps on game quality stuff the high res model should be exaggerated.

Anyway, here's base colors and spec:

Very nice. Don't paint the specular information too early. Maybe you will paint dirt on the spaceship or something similar, than it will be interesting to paint specular information. Stay tuned!

[philnolan3d]

That's true, well it's just a base, I would think it would be easier to remove spec as the dirt is painted. Just set it to a lower amount than what is already there. I'll have to do some tests.

[philnolan3d]

Added decals and some dirt.

[GED]

nice, now its starting to get there, are you going to put a little tiny bit of variation in the colour? paint scratched off? scratches in the metal? burnmarks around the engine? and even some sorta lighting info like shadows where the wings meet the cockpit etc?