SinKing
Martin joined
I've been going around as a writer, but started getting drawn into Concept Art and 3D modeling. I'm currently finishing my studies as a 3D artist and will then be let loose on the world. Beware!
med_oven
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Something I made to test the different(color) maps and baking maps. Important to me was to get a clean UDK result... which I will still have to workon. Higher lightmap definition and some cleaning up of the normal map should work. However, I leave it like this for now. Maybe you can see other things I need to improve upon?!
Well, I've been struggling to do the same. Your results are pretty good.
One thing I can add is since UE3 uses AO, connecting vertices all over the model is always a good idea if you want clean results. As far as I can see from the shot you didn't connect the door and the handle to the main model. That breaks the lighting flow (if that's what it's called).
It's time consuming and creates lots of trouble while unwrapping if you don't keep track of it while modeling, but results are always better. So it's good if you're working on an important model.
You say I should make one mesh to improve the lighting? I am not so sure about that. Creating this as one mesh will significantly increase the polycount and add unwanted loops.
The current problems seem to stem more from the lightmap and possibly the way the specular is interpreted than from the geometry. Why I think that is the case, is because in XSI neither the shadows. nor the textures create that kind of problem. I think I will revisit lightmap and normal map, but first I want to finish another model and see how I can improve things on that! I think lightmaps are more important for an accurate display than I first believed.
If you start collapsing some of the existing edges into a series of progressively larger triangles, you can end a lot of the loops early without having to carry the edges all the way around the model. The end result would be only adding a handful of extra triangles to the count, which wont make a difference with the performance.
Aside from SSAO or vertex lighting, it has an advantage of better quality normal and lightmaps through padding (also crank the padding value up high, and make sure the normal map is using the correct normal map compression settings in UDK)
Very nice model... for some reason I thought the normal was converted to grayscale then used as the specular too. I never thought of using the diffuse as a specular map.
From what I've learned the diffuse is the better basis, because the reflections will carry color information in them. So the reflections on my paint will be more red than on the rest, for example. Of course that also means you can influence reflections quite a lot and optimize them for different light conditions.
What I don't get is why I lose some detail and shading info upon importing. I'm gonna sit the same model in CryEngine 2 soon and we'll see the differences. Thanks for comments, even if I disagree everything is helpful and becomes part of how-to-make-it-better! :)
Very good point. I never thought of color reflections. Thanks for the great tip!
...btw - the lighting error in this model were produced due to the import settings. I later followed this tutorial and got clean results (see update of asset):
Udn.epicgames.com