Filling model requests

[ZanderNao]

Remarkable progress. Thank you for taking this challenge on, and showing your work to inspire other modelers and mod makers. Inspirational.

[ChalklYne]

Remarkable progress. Thank you for taking this challenge on, and showing your work to inspire other modelers and mod makers. Inspirational.

I appreciate that.

 

I like to post all of my fails in hope aspiring modelers will get off the porting bandwagon and try. If you post a model thats crap, you'll never hear it from us, we're here to help. I dont see crappy models, I see me 8 years ago.

 

And as for making the Jabba look old or young... I was honestly just trying to get something that could be retextured to any hutt... Im hoping i could sculpt in his older looking fat folds and apply the ambient occlusion from them to the texture and fake it. I guess we'll see. I have no problems going back a few steps, or even releasing 2 different models.

[AshuraDX]

@@ChalklYne - did you uplaod the correct model?

The tris on the back are still there

[Psyk0Sith]

Another quick fix: look at him front view in silhouette mode and smooth the belly to make it more spherical (think of a giant bead bag thrown on the ground) just pull verts on each sides as needed. I like where this is going!

[ChalklYne]

@@AshuraDX ok i fixed it lmfao

 

in my defense i never claimed to be coherent

 

@@Psyk0Sith Ive updated it in accordance to your advice. Like this?

[Psyk0Sith]

That's good, you could improve it some more by adding a single vert like so:

 

 

You might be reluctant to do so because it won't be an all quad mesh anymore but order is irrelevant in low poly models. As the budget gets lower, more triangles are necessary. As long as you have the edgeflow established you should always check the silhouette in all directions and drop single verts to smooth where needed.

Overall the mesh looks smooth enough imo. The only area left to tweak would be the lower belly in sideview. If you look at the back where the tail meets the body you have a nice sweeping curve, however when you look at the belly, it looks quite sharp and blocky.

[Archangel35757]

That's good, you could improve it some more by adding a single vert like so:

 

 

You might be reluctant to do so because it won't be an all quad mesh anymore but order is irrelevant in low poly models. As the budget gets lower, more triangles are necessary. As long as you have the edgeflow established you should always check the silhouette in all directions and drop single verts to smooth where needed.

Overall the mesh looks smooth enough imo. The only area left to tweak would be the lower belly in sideview. If you look at the back where the tail meets the body you have a nice sweeping curve, however when you look at the belly, it looks quite sharp and blocky.

Adding a vert where you suggest still results in all quads if you remove the top vertical edge, and ignore your two lower red diagonals... but just add another edge loop all around-- this would allow you to round out that existing bottom belly edge loop and allow for better fat roll, no? Looks great @@ChalklYne!

[Psyk0Sith]

Adding a vert where you suggest still results in all quads if you remove the top vertical edge, and ignore your two lower red diagonals... but just add another edge loop all around-- this would allow you to round out that existing bottom belly edge loop and allow for better fat roll, no? Looks great @@ChalklYne!

 

You're still thinking in subd mentality. i'm talking about real time cost vs. smoothness. The reason i want those edges like that is they don't get rotated at export time, i want control of edge orientation. The whole model in fact can be revised and have edges turned manually to get the best smoothing.

[Archangel35757]

@@Psyk0Sith - (to my knowledge) the dotXSI exporters do not turn edges on export.

[Psyk0Sith]

@@Psyk0Sith - (to my knowledge) the dotXSI exporters do not turn edges on export.

Never trust exporters

[ChalklYne]

Would either of you gentlemen care to elaborate on rotated edges?

[Psyk0Sith]

Since quads are in reality two triangles connected to each other, every quad has an edge dividing it, that edge will be invisible depending on how you set your render view. Whenever you change the location of verts that middle edge will either poke outwards or inwards (in simple terms). When you see an edge messing up the shading, you can flip it the opposite way to correct the issue.

[ChalklYne]

Im getting artifacting along the orifices. seems like a novice problem, ill probably include more of the mouth and eye sockets into this piece of mesh so it hides those and try again. if that makes any sense. heres the low poly mesh with the normal applied. xnormal was giving me a weird problem i didnt feel like researching so i rendered this from the high poly mesh in substance painter

 

 

 

 

 

 

im wondering if it could be from dilation padding or something also? i have it set real low, 2 pixels in fact

[AshuraDX]

@@ChalklYne - do you have smoothing group breaks along those edges by chance?

[Daedra]

Woah. The speed of this is nuts! I really can't wait to slice people up playing as Jabba with a light saber, or blasting people as Jabba with a gun. I'd laugh my butt off seeing what the opening cutscenes are like with Jabba as the playermodel!

[ChalklYne]

@@ChalklYne - do you have smoothing group breaks along those edges by chance?

the mesh is cut along those edges. i was trying to make his eye sockets and inner mouth different meshes. im sure i shouldnt have XD

Whoa my text boxes are white... dont judge it by its color though, its whats inside the white boxes that counts

 

 

 

 

Woah. The speed of this is nuts! I really can't wait to slice people up playing as Jabba with a light saber, or blasting people as Jabba with a gun. I'd laugh my butt off seeing what the opening cutscenes are like with Jabba as the playermodel!

Well... I wasnt planning on all that? I was planning on giving him a custom skeleton so he could move correctly and just give him jabba anims. I guess i could rig him to the humanoid skele and release a separate version?

 

As for the speed of production, i have a simple approach... just disregard family and friends and sleep and food and give sole undivided attention to the model relinquishing control of all aspects of your life outside of Softimage. Then it just kinda falls in your lap. Much like the soul sone, it requires a sacrifice

[Daedra]

the mesh is cut along those edges. i was trying to make his eye sockets and inner mouth different meshes. im sure i shouldnt have XD

Whoa my text boxes are white... dont judge it by its color though, its whats inside the white boxes that counts

 

 

 

 

Well... I wasnt planning on all that? I was planning on giving him a custom skeleton so he could move correctly and just give him jabba anims. I guess i could rig him to the humanoid skele and release a separate version?

 

As for the speed of production, i have a simple approach... just disregard family and friends and sleep and food and give sole undivided attention to the model relinquishing control of all aspects of your life outside of Softimage. Then it just kinda falls in your lap. Much like the soul sone, it requires a sacrifice

 

Ah I see. I just thought it would be cool to have a playable Jabba as well as an NPC Jabba that you can kill.

[ZanderNao]

the mesh is cut along those edges. i was trying to make his eye sockets and inner mouth different meshes. im sure i shouldnt have XD

Whoa my text boxes are white... dont judge it by its color though, its whats inside the white boxes that counts

 

 

 

 

Well... I wasnt planning on all that? I was planning on giving him a custom skeleton so he could move correctly and just give him jabba anims. I guess i could rig him to the humanoid skele and release a separate version?

 

As for the speed of production, i have a simple approach... just disregard family and friends and sleep and food and give sole undivided attention to the model relinquishing control of all aspects of your life outside of Softimage. Then it just kinda falls in your lap. Much like the soul sone, it requires a sacrifice

Having both would be ideal certainly to apply to all circumstances, but your animations are so good, we want to be sure to get that!

[ChalklYne]

Before you ask... why fully model a klatooine paddy frog? Ask yourself... something else.

I made these last night on my down time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

figured maybe for cutscenes or something

 

platforms 4k tris... paddy frog is like 2k

 

the frog just needs a dead anim maybe a swimming one, and a frog jumping one and he would be so boss.... put him in the jabba bong swimming around... dead ones on a plate.. and a few hopping around here and there

[ZanderNao]

Before you ask... why fully model a klatooine paddy frog? Ask yourself... something else.

I made these last night on my down time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

figured maybe for cutscenes or something

 

platforms 4k tris... paddy frog is like 2k

 

the frog just needs a dead anim maybe a swimming one, and a frog jumping one and he would be so boss.... put him in the jabba bong swimming around... dead ones on a plate.. and a few hopping around here and there

That is some above and beyond right there! My goodness!

[Psyk0Sith]

the mesh is cut along those edges. i was trying to make his eye sockets and inner mouth different meshes. im sure i shouldnt have XD

 

Some guidelines when baking...

-Before you bake always check the mesh for errors such as open edges, double faces and "rat nests"

-When you are happy with the final look of the low poly, triangulate the mesh before exporting / baking (keep a backup of course or use non destructive modifiers)

-Padding should always be a crazy high number, something like 64 should be enough, bump number up as the texture res goes higher.

 

-Keep in mind that the state your mesh is baked in (either 1 smoothing group or assigned smoothing group) needs to be kept at all times within the pipeline, if not it will create a mismatch between the tangent map and the altered model.

*Note: this issue can be resolved with handplane: let's say you bake your model and it looks fine but you decide to use rend2 and start splitting your model for dismemberment, you'll get nasty seam lines, the same goes for changing edge orientation and adding loops (well most of the time). The workaround for this is to bake a world space map first and then feed it to handplane along with your modified mesh, handplane will outpout a correct tangent map.

 

-If you bake your mesh in zbrush and display in another software there's a chance you'll run into a sync issue...it simply means different software calculate and display normal maps differently, the solution is to stick with bakers & renderers that are matched.

[ChalklYne]

wow crazy information right there. thank you very much. I learned a bunch and im sure anyone following this thread can learn plenty from it as well. ill get into handplane tonight then! never used it lol now im going to go watch handplane tutorials and figure that thing out. yeah ive learned today that zbrush is perfect for creating a high res mesh but not rendering it all out. thanks again!

[AshuraDX]

Some guidelines when baking...

-Before you bake always check the mesh for errors such as open edges, double faces and "rat nests"

-When you are happy with the final look of the low poly, triangulate the mesh before exporting / baking (keep a backup of course or use non destructive modifiers)

-Padding should always be a crazy high number, something like 64 should be enough, bump number up as the texture res goes higher.

 

-Keep in mind that the state your mesh is baked in (either 1 smoothing group or assigned smoothing group) needs to be kept at all times within the pipeline, if not it will create a mismatch between the tangent map and the altered model.

*Note: this issue can be resolved with handplane: let's say you bake your model and it looks fine but you decide to use rend2 and start splitting your model for dismemberment, you'll get nasty seam lines, the same goes for changing edge orientation and adding loops (well most of the time). The workaround for this is to bake a world space map first and then feed it to handplane along with your modified mesh, handplane will outpout a correct tangent map.

 

-If you bake your mesh in zbrush and display in another software there's a chance you'll run into a sync issue...it simply means different software calculate and display normal maps differently, the solution is to stick with bakers & renderers that are matched.

Xnormal and substance Designer can alkso convert back and forth between world space and tangent space normals

[Psyk0Sith]

Xnormal and substance Designer can alkso convert back and forth between world space and tangent space normals

 

That's good to know, i haven't updated xnormal in a while so i was not aware (and do most of my baking in max)...does it support unity, unreal, maya, max, source, input tangent? etc.

[AshuraDX]

That's good to know, i haven't updated xnormal in a while so i was not aware (and do most of my baking in max)...does it support unity, unreal, maya, max, source, input tangent? etc.

That is something that I do not know for sure.