Thanks for the tips man, but I'm using maya and mental ray. I just got max, and I'm super new to it. Pretty sure it doesn't ship with vray. I do multiple passes including AO for PS compositing if that's what you're talking about. Cheers for the link, I'm sure one day I'll get to vray

hey kyle, I've tried to send you a message but somehow i get the message that you cannot receive messages :|

np mate, there is also Vray for Maya, to learn it`s super easy, i can give u short tutorial, how to setup some parameters...there also super cool tutorial about Vray from Vizmasters, If u will watch it u will know everything how to use best render plugin

Small update, it has been a while. Was back home for a week or so and school is now started. Just found some time to work on it some more.

Definitely having some normal map baking issues for the first time. The model contains a lot of long skinny triangles are that giving me pains. I originally made the low poly for an object space normal map, but I've been recently trying to go the tangent space way. This is the screen in maya with my normal map, but in marmoset/udk it looks awful. (maya viewport can display its own baked maps best you know :P )



To get tanget space maps to bake properly, I'm having to add many polys that don't define the silhouette and it is really just a waste. I've been doing some research about object space. Cryengine uses it, and many others. I feel like hard surface weapons can benefit from them more, especially if you're not overlaying details in the normal map. Because I am hoping to eventually put this in CryEngine, I'm deciding to go the object space route instead. The bakes I am getting are cleaner, with less polys, which is really important.

So here is some comparisons of tangent vs. object

Tangent:




Object:



(Disregard the seams in the middle, I am just testing out one specific half of the body. And I am leaving out the bolts from the high poly in the bake.)

The only way I have been able to get rid of those nasty burnt skinny triangle errors is by adding many "supporting edges" to ease the smoothing. Which jacks the polycount up.

The best way to fix all if this (what I have done in the past) is split my uv's here:



and make those edges hard. Those would save polys and yield perfect bakes. Unfortunately this would give me a nice seam in texture painting and because this in a rounded single piece of plastic, that seam is going to look way out of place. If it was metal or something, that would be easy to cover up and would look realistic since metal pieces have seams when they meet.

Hope this helps anyone having the same issues I was having

UPDATE!

got the tangent bakes to work well actually, so i'm sticking with those.

in marmo:

finally got some time to work on this. almost done with bakes! working on ao....

in marmo:

Looking good man.
How do you like the Marmoset Engine?
I've got a few things into it so far but nothing too grand.

The bake came out really well! Nice job.

I'm loving Marmoset. Might have to buy a copy when my trial runs out.

thanks guys!! still got a couple tiny edits to do though.

yeah you guys marmo rules. worth the 50 bucks hands down! the new features like the auto texture updating and the fact that it saves out a screenie with an alpha channel mask for PS....that alone is worth 50 bucks i think.

Nice looking model, I can't wait to see it all textured. Any reason to choose marmo over udk?

I could do either, but marmo just looks better for portfolio shots in my opinion. With the new version, you can do a turn table easily and render out targa's with masks in the alpha channel for easy compositing for your portfolio flats. I might eventually do some UDK shots though...I miss that material editor! :P

I'm calling her done! Here are the final hipoly renders, and lowpoly shots, as well as texture flats

I should really add a gloss map, the highlight on the body is way to sharp and shiny....when I turn it down in marmo it looks fine...but the metal parts look bad. Definitely think adding a gloss would help!















didn't even notice the strange artifact in that image above....happened when I downsized it.....oh well




Texture Maps can be viewed .HERE.

It came out fantastic, bro! Great job Might want to throw together another shot with a few wireframes, but besides that, great presentation.

Oh, and fix that weird glowing metal too ;)

Thanks man! Agreed. I should throw some wires in there, now that marmo shows wires!

Very awesome! Definitely one of the best of the ones that were completed.

hey rau! i was admiring your AW rifle (awesome job!) again while taking a break from building all my crazy stuff for the Interior Spaces final. I have an additional 2 guns ive modelled this term and had a few questions about your baking process. I saw that you dumped your stuff into marmoset, have you got any screens from UDK or unity? I had a similar problem with baking in maya when using source engine and UDK with my first gun bake.

Nice Work!

It'd be nice if you write a tutorial or maybe a post sharing us your issues in the making of , I would like to know what you did to fix the Normal Map baking issue that you had

Really nice model!

Great job mate!

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Confusion of butterflies, clamour of bees,
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Light reflected in the ripples,
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