Possibly another GRAW2 model

[SnowFella]

Yup, I've possibly got another model in the works that I could think of tossing into GRAW2.

It's something I started not long ago as speedmodeling practice, giving me 2.5 hour to finish the lowpoly mesh. Now I didn't fully get there in that timeframe but since I've finished the model, mapped it and stared working on a highpoly mesh to use for normal map generation.

It's a Smith&Wesson M&P 45 handgun and here's the original look after 2.5 hours of modeling

Wireframe

And the finished mesh

And lastly the current progress on the highpoly

Snow

[Nutlink]

Sexy! The more pistols the better!

[Rocky]

Impressive work, as always.

[SnowFella]

Thanks guys.

It's fun practice but I'm really starting to wonder if I'm going overboard with the modeled detail on the highpoly, it's right now pushing the 1 million poly mark during renders.

Got a tad bit more time in on it this morning, afternoon spent on "other" models

Highpoly "pre-smoothing"

Highpoly wires "pre-smoothing"

Just one more detail left on the frame and then it's just trigger, takedown lever, magazine and safety's left to do.

[deleyt]

2,5 hours! That's fast.

Nice model Snow.

[SnowFella]

Well, 2.5 hours form scatch to the very top render. That was missing the obvious parts like trigger, safety and takedown lever but also a fair bit of the internal work.

I used to be pretty slow when it came to modeling but after doing that Firebird model my pace has picked up quite a bit, probably because I've changed the way I model in. Instead of starting alot of my shapes as extruded splines and having to spend forever cleaning up messy areas I now use boxmodeling for just about everything. That way every vert/edge/face put into the model gets placed where I want it to start off with.

Plus I "cheat" madly nowadays and only do half a model using symmetry, once happy with the overall look I just merge the 2 parts and cut in any non-symmetrical detail.

[jonjacob34]

snow your high and low poly models never stop amazing me, why arn't you in the games industry?

oh and i think alot of moddeler do this whole cheating thing,

Edited October 29, 2007 by jonjacob34

[EricJ]

He is in the games industry, just that he doesn't brag that's all

[Whisper_44]

He is in the games industry

I'll just ad, that it'll be nice when he's actually getting paid for his hard work.

[jonjacob34]

well where did i get the impression he wasn't. weird

[SnowFella]

hehe...can't say I'm really in the games industry fully though as I've "only" got an informal arrangement with Blackfoot Studios....in effect I work for them free of charge untill they get funding together either in the form of a signed publisher or a paying self-released game.

So the reason you got the impression I'm not is likely because just like everyone else I have a booring, mindless dayjob where I spend all to much of my time

Progress on the highpoly has been kinda slow in the last few days, mainly as I have other models I also need to do but also because my computer just can't keep up with the temperatures we are getting here downunder. Had the same problem last summer and it's again causing my computer to reach near overheat temperatures everytime I hit the render button.

Here's atleast what I managed late last night, now there's just some smaller details of the frame left to add in and then I can start rendering out my projected normalmap and lightingmap.

Can't really see it in those renders but even the tritium inserts in the sights are modeled in

[jonjacob34]

i had same problems with temps on my machine, 70c is the highest it will reach and thats with water cooling units on me north bridge and CPU when rendering or gaming. but i supose you get it much worse being down under. but still nice work on the 45!

[EricJ]

Nice, hell I may reinstall GRAW2 just to utilize that

[SnowFella]

Here's a first result of my highpoly to lowpoly bake of normalmap, some errors here and there that I either will have to rebake or paint out in photoshop.

[JTF-2]

snow, how do you "bake" normal maps like that?

I've been looking around, and there are so many ways to do normal maps, different plugins, exporters, stand-alone stuff.

I've got max 7 and 2008.

All that practice has certainly paid off. WOW.

[Scubaman3D]

JTF-2. I like your EBR for ArmA.

Check out out xNormal. Thats what I used for the SCARs that are in the 6th sense mod. You can generate normals, height maps, and AO maps. Its pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

[JTF-2]

JTF-2. I like your EBR for ArmA.

Check out out xNormal. Thats what I used for the SCARs that are in the 6th sense mod. You can generate normals, height maps, and AO maps. Its pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Thanks Scubaman! M14 was almost a part of the 6th sense mod.

Back to Snow and his normal baking: how in the name of !! I've been using CrazyBump to generate normals from 2d textures, but I'd like to be able to do high poly-->low poly bake.

[Scubaman3D]

snow, how do you "bake" normal maps like that?

I've been looking around, and there are so many ways to do normal maps, different plugins, exporters, stand-alone stuff.

I've got max 7 and 2008.

All that practice has certainly paid off. WOW.

JTF-2. I like your EBR for ArmA.

Check out out xNormal. Thats what I used for the SCARs that are in the 6th sense mod. You can generate normals, height maps, and AO maps. Its pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Thanks Scubaman! M14 was almost a part of the 6th sense mod.

Back to Snow and his normal baking: how in the name of !! I've been using CrazyBump to generate normals from 2d textures, but I'd like to be able to do high poly-->low poly bake.

Read my post about xNormal...thats exactly what you have to do with that program. You first select a high poly model and then a low. Choose your settings and then generate a normal map or whatever kind of map you want.

[JTF-2]

Ahh, sorry. I thought from the way you talked about xNormal, it was a program like CrazyBump, for 2d stuff. (I'm trying it out now). But isn't there a way to do this in Max?

I'm curious about Snow's workflow regarding normal maps.

[SnowFella]

It's acctually pretty simple in 3dsm, it's all I use apart from the Nvidia plugin for photoshop and very occationally crazybump.

Did acctually write a smaller tutorial about it a few months ago that I posted up in a thread somewhere here, it wasn't a really good one though as I messed one thing up in it.

Simple normal mapping tutorial in .pdf form

Now the thing I screwed up in that tutorial was the step where I assigned one single smoothing group to the whole mesh. 3dsm might be able to handle and display the resulting normal map correctly but most games will not manage that. So smooth things out like you normally would using smoothing groups, bake an initial normalmap and check where you get artifacts from hard edges and then start changing your smoothing untill you get a result you are happy with.

For example on the M&P 45 I initially had the narrower part of the slide as a unique smoothinggroup, giving a hard edge there to the rest of the slide. That caused some artifacts in the normal map so I tried giving that part of the slide the same smoothgroup as the rest of the slide and it instantly looked alot better.

[JTF-2]

Thanks for the answer Snow.

I actually had a look at that tutorial last night. It's better than any of the others I've glanced at, even with your mistake. Basically, what you're saying about smooth groups is that I can use 'em how I like as long as it looks good in the end? The ArmA engine does so funky things with textures so it'll just be trial and error probably. I'll give your method a go on my next model.

About the NVIDIA plugin, does it matter if I use it or the ATI one? I heard they have inverse colour values for top/bottom. Had any trouble with this?

[SnowFella]

Here's a little "show and tell" when it comes to the smoothing issues mentioned, will likely explain it alot better than what I possibly could do with words.

Now these are simple screengrabs from 3dsm, not renders with fancy lighting.

Here's how I had the smoothing set up originally, the top slide is flatshaded and the lower has the normal map applied. Far right in the shot is a pasted in view of the normals themselves for that part of the slide.

(Click for bigger view)

See how I'm getting some artifacts around the edges of the narrower part...that's exactly what a hard edge in your smoothing will generate when you bake a normalmap.

On the other hand though...here's my revisited smoothing and it's normal map.

(Click for bigger view)

Looks worse in the flatshaded image but lots better when the normal map gets applied. No artifacts around the edge as the normal map is the only thing guiding how sharp the edges are supposed to be displayed. Sure you can't fully get away from these kinda artifacts, anything with a hard edge will generate them, but you can with alittle bit of practice learn to avoid them or possibly paint out the problems from the normal map.

Edit: Just spotted your EBR over at the OFP/ArmA forums and it does indeed look good mate, will look even better with a good normal map on it.

One thing I did notice though is the boolean mess on the holes in the handguard...give me a few hours here and I'll do another quick .pdf tutorial showing how you can do those kinda holes quick, easy, clean and without booleans

[SnowFella]

Alrighty, here's the quick tutorial for you JTF.

Hole without boolean tutorial .pdf file

Hopefully it's be clear enough for anyone to understand. It's how I generally make all my holes, indents and extruded parts of a mesh. Simply just connect edges untill I have a base to start from and then either just delete for a hole or extrude (inwards or outwards) for a indent or extrusion.

Snow

[JTF-2]

Excellent Snow! thanks!

I got what you were saying about the smoothing groups. But those pictures do make the case pretty well.

The non-boolean tutorial is very elegant. I was just lazy in this case, I cleaned up the boolean as much as I could and then just left it. Max 2008 has something called a ProBoolean, I haven't tired it out yet (EBR was made in max7), but Autodesk says it is supposed to work much better. We'll see.

Here's how it came out. Ugly as hell eh?

(click here for bigger image)

But it did the trick, and it came in at 2230polys for the basic gun which isn't so bad (in my book). I shoulda just not been lazy and poly modelled the holes properly, although I must say, your solution is much more elegant that mine would have been.

Thanks for taking the time to help me out Snow. I appreciate it.

[SnowFella]

It's not to messy, but you do have some of those long/skinny triangles in there that could possibly end up lighting odd. Plus there's a few other spots with odd edgeflow that I personally would of changed.

And I'm still running max 8 here as I haven't seen a reason to upgrade yet, I tried the max 9 demo but it dind't have enough new tools that I'd use to warrant upgrading.

Sure that polygon count really is accurate though? It does look like 2230 polygons and not 2230 tri's and gameart is ALL about tri's. Take the M&P 45 I'm working on, it's 2048 tris but gets reported as 1263 polygons.