Finishing Hilt Model + Texturing it (Help / Request)

[Siegfried]

Hello!

I've started to learn how to model on Blender but i'm horrible at texturing in it and i need some help to:

1º: Finish the model so it can be used as a JKA Hilt;

2º: Texture it;

 

Could anyone help me with that?

The hilt is based on a character's sword in the animated series RWBY.

I have done some quick and not that big changes in the hilt and i'd like to keep it like that (the model was not smoothed yet)

 

 

 

Link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/mdsetp0o9fegdd5/winterschneehilt.rar/file

 

Here i have some references of how the texture should look like

 

And

 

[the_raven]

Nice hilt actually.

I tried making a hilt a few times back in the days, but would also get stuck at texturing - never could figure out the wrapping bit. Alas, I cannot help.

But you have my spiritual support.

[AshuraDX]

Did you unwrap it already? If you have not, you'll have to get that out of the way before you can texture it.

[Siegfried]

Nice hilt actually.

I tried making a hilt a few times back in the days, but would also get stuck at texturing - never could figure out the wrapping bit. Alas, I cannot help.

But you have my spiritual support.

Thank you! xDD

 

Did you unwrap it already? If you have not, you'll have to get that out of the way before you can texture it.

Well, i'm a newbie at this so i don't know what to do properly. Didn't ever unwrapped it too.

Could you help me with that?

[AshuraDX]

@

I don't use Blender, so I can't tell you were to click to do it. But I can review the UV Layout you create after watching this Tutorial:

 

I watched the first half of it and this guy does a great job at explaining it while demonstrating how to do it in Blender.

[Siegfried]

@

I don't use Blender, so I can't tell you were to click to do it. But I can review the UV Layout you create after watching this Tutorial:

https://youtu.be/scPSP_U858k

I watched the first half of it and this guy does a great job at explaining it while demonstrating how to do it in Blender.

Thank you! I'll try to do my best.

[Siegfried]

@

I don't use Blender, so I can't tell you were to click to do it. But I can review the UV Layout you create after watching this Tutorial:

 

I watched the first half of it and this guy does a great job at explaining it while demonstrating how to do it in Blender.

So, it was kinda troubling and i didn't do it perfectly since it's my first try in this unwraping tool.

 

 

I know it's not good at all but this is what i've got for now... Perhaps i over exaggerated in the quantity of vertices when creating the model...

[the_raven]

So, it was kinda troubling and i didn't do it perfectly since it's my first try in this unwraping tool.

 

 

I know it's not good at all but this is what i've got for now... Perhaps i over exaggerated in the quantity of vertices when creating the model...

Holy..!   

[AshuraDX]

Oh dear...

@ this is indeed quite the mess, but we can fix it

 

You should make sure that you at best only have 4 sided faces (quads) on your model, a few triangles may be unavoidable and that is not a problem. Just make sure to cut up and eliminate all faces with more than 4 sides.

 

Once that is through, you can give unwrapping another shot.

 

A clean mesh helps tremendously while unwrapping.

 

Most of the really badly stretched island you have there stem from concave n-gons, like the sides of that handguard.

[Siegfried]

Oh dear...

@ this is indeed quite the mess, but we can fix it

 

You should make sure that you at best only have 4 sided faces (quads) on your model, a few triangles may be unavoidable and that is not a problem. Just make sure to cut up and eliminate all faces with more than 4 sides.

 

Once that is through, you can give unwrapping another shot.

 

A clean mesh helps tremendously while unwrapping.

 

Most of the really badly stretched island you have there stem from concave n-gons, like the sides of that handguard.

Perhaps this one here?

 

 

 

[Artemis]

@Akagi Gin That's a pretty cool design!  You don't need to model all of the tiny details into the hilt, though.  JKA is an old game, and you should aim for lower poly models when possible.  The best way to get the details into the texture would probably be to make a high poly mesh with all of the nice details and bake it to a low poly mesh.

 

I went ahead and uhhh... rebuilt it with a lot less detail so you can see.  There's probably places where you could cut out more details, even.  I'm not so sure about what to do with the weirdly shaped bits near the emitter to cut down on polygons.  2D planes would work well, except for the fact that they look positively ugly ingame.  Right now I just have them projected so the UVs are flat.  The big downside to this is that the edges can't really be textured.

 

Model comparison:

 

 

 

 

 

UVs (these are a bit of a mess and could be much better):

 

 

 

 

 

Download link for my blender file here.

[AshuraDX]

@Akagi Gin That's a pretty cool design! You don't need to model all of the tiny details into the hilt, though. JKA is an old game, and you should aim for lower poly models when possible. The best way to get the details into the texture would probably be to make a high poly mesh with all of the nice details and bake it to a low poly mesh.

 

I went ahead and uhhh... rebuilt it with a lot less detail so you can see. There's probably places where you could cut out more details, even. I'm not so sure about what to do with the weirdly shaped bits near the emitter to cut down on polygons. 2D planes would work well, except for the fact that they look positively ugly ingame. Right now I just have them projected so the UVs are flat. The big downside to this is that the edges can't really be textured.

 

Model comparison:

 

 

 

 

 

UVs (these are a bit of a mess and could be much better):

 

 

 

 

 

Download link for my blender file here.

A good start and since you made this for Feedback purposes I decided to go ahead and polish it up to enhance the educational value, by replacing some of the less ideal solutions that you came up with.

 

Here's what I did in summary:

I welded a few vertices in some spots to further decrease the weight, aligned some mismatched surfaces and deleted a face that was never to be seen between the "braking handle" and the ring that's attached to it.

I also completely remade the UV-layout, most of the time you want a seam at all 90° angles, while keeping seams away from flat, conjoined surfaces. An example for this would be the "Emitter Rings", in your layout you just sliced them apart along a vertical loop, which gave you these rather weird looking, awkward and wavy shapes on the UV Layout. Texturing those would have been a pain, if you treat these kinds of shapes like cans of baked beans or whatever and jsut slice the top and bottom parts off before making a vertical cut in the side wall you'd get something that's much easier to work with while texturing.

The same technique was applied to all of those large "flappy bits". Just slice around the sides and cut up as you see fit to get something that's very easy to work with where you can also put detail work on the sides instead of getting ugly stretching along the edges.

Now onto the conical pommel, which was pretty much treated the same way, I just gave it a slice around the thickest part which gave me 2 simple, flat circular shapes to paint on in the UV layout.

 

The final bit I changed is a choice thing, but highly recommended if you do your texturing the "traditional" way in 2d in Gimp or Photoshop instead of painting straight on the model.

I straightened the UVs for the handle piece to get a simple rectangular shape that is insanely easy to paint, as you don't have to warp your lines to properly loop them around the model for things like handle wrapping.

 

And that's it. Here's what the finished UV layout looks like:

 

You could technically sandwich/overlap the left and right sides of a piece to improve texture space usage, but that'd come at the price of having these parts mirrored/symmetrical at all times - which I'm not a huge fan of. But you could do it.

 

and the updated model:

 

and a link to my files for those interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m6i1im07t7arzvu/ArtemisSaber_example.zip?dl=0

 

EDIT:

Besides all of this purely educational stuff, I'd recommend to smooth out some of the larger circular bits, the game can handle a few more sides. 12 sides on the largest round sections of a model will look a lot better than 8 sides while still being relatively lowpoly.

You could also use a reduction technique, as I demonstrated here: https://jkhub.org/topic/10162-some-tricks-for-model-optimization/

that way you can have a really round appeareance on the parts that stick out while keeping the more performance oriented geometry for pieces that don't have to appear quite so rounded.