Combat Knife
polycounter lvl 14
So I've been wanting to do a weapon for a while and finally sat down and started the other day. The reference i chose was a Pacific 6 S30V Blade Combat Knife. I started working on the HP and ran into a snag here and there but thanks to some help i'm moving forward. The blade is just about done and the rest is going to be modeled separately and assembled for the HP. The metal part of the handle is giving me some trouble due to the ridges but nothing huge.
c & c welcome
Thanks
c & c welcome
Thanks
Replies
match the thickness and sharpness of the edges in the ref, best you can, and try not to rely on smoothing groups to define edges, you can get the same effect without and you should get better normal maps as a result. looking forward to seeing you deliver, hit me up online if you get anymore snags.
the serrated edges are looking super clean and accurate though, keep it up- moar!!
Come see inside my bones...
It's a very sharp start sir. Let's try and get this one finished, eh?
@ dolemite - Thanks, the metal from the blade actually continues down through the knife into the handle and comes out a bit past the grip part of the handle. This is just the high poly of it so i'm going to build the knife / grip / hardware / rope separate and assemble it before i start on the low.
@ CiscoJavier - this part i'm working on right now is the high poly and the wires are pretty messy... but here it is.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/220214/Combat%20Knife/Renders/knife_07.5.jpg
i'm going to make a pass or two through the mesh and try to clean things up a bit before the bake.
@ d00kie - GO GET YOUR KNIIIIFE, GO GET YOUR KNIIIIIFE! I will do my best to see this one through sir.
@ Pope Adam - Thanks broooo.
@ killingpeople -
Special thanks to kp for showing me the light. will post an update within the next couple hours.
Thanks!
It just hit me that maybe you're doing the other parts of the handle separately instead of just making it one connected mesh. Hmmm ... now i dunno ... anyway carry on
I would like to say sorry collectively for the PC community because people rather just look at pictures and not read in regards to how you are approaching the handle and how the metal runs through it! :poly142:
Thanks!
Here is a pic of the problem and some wires of the base / smoothed model. The error is kinda subtle but it bugs the hell out of me... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
thanks!
Welding the edges together will kill the sharpness of the edge. I think i might have fixed it by teeny tiny adjustments. Hopefully i can play around with the grip a little more then start the low poly.
Thanks.
i think the grip should be thicker with more defined corners/shape
kinda looks flat
can u post a pic from the bottom and top of the grip?
I'm actually working on the three indentations right now, was going to use floating geometry for the bake.
I decided to scratch the floating geometry and just add the indentation to the mesh which is slowly getting where i want it.
Thoughts?
Thanks!
low w/ ao + nm
Also, your tri count seems very high, there are a lot of areas that seam really excessive(all the groves modeled in, with multiple edges per grove). And it seems like you've go so much geometry that it is hurting your bakes in some cases. Are the side "panels" of the knife separate meshes in the low poly? This really should be all one solid chunk.
You need to think about how this asset would actually be viewed, looking at your wires one would think you plan on showcasing this asset, still, at like 1980x1200 resolution. When in reality, this sort of asset would A. be in motion almost constantly and B. be a fairly small object in a first person view, and microscopic object in the world. I think you could honestly remove near every other edge loop on the mesh(the larger shapes should stay the same, more or less, just remove all these teeny-tiny edge loops), and still have the same effect(i wouldn't have even modeled in the serrations on the handle or the blade, or if i did it would be very simple, like 3 edges(one pulled in) to suggest some depth, but you've got 8, 12, more in some places? The edges you have in that wires screenshots are barely representing 2 pixels.
Overall polygon density is something you need to work on as well, one of the biggest examples is the hole in the back, which looks to be about 16 or more edges, way way overkill for something that is only a few MM wide. But, the area surrounding that(the half curve with 5 sides) has significantly less for its size. Which reallly calls out the blockyness of that area, now in reality i think that area is totally ok, perhaps a bit high depending on what sort of poly target you're aiming for, but because of the perfectly smooth, flawless detail right next to it, it makes it really look bad. I think as long as your model is consistant, you can get away with a little blockyness, but as soon as you go crazy overkill rounding everything out in one area, you need to do it on the rest of the model or it will look weird.
Add a few more edges in where you have the bad smoothing errors, the top corner of the "panel" for example. Fixing those sorts of problems goes a longggggg way, and usually you just need to add a few more edges.
You can see in your first bake shots you showed, that all of the little imperfections from the highpoly model are showing through, you can see that the panels still need to be smoothed out a bit, probabbly a case of removing some edges, or un-tightening some edges, to get rid of that sort of faceted look. It looks a little like you're trying to hide this with the newer shots? Or you've improved it i guess, show some screenshots with a darker diffuse(so its not blowing out to bloom city) and direct lighting.
Hope this stuff helps
There seems to be some errors in the bake, missing section or something? In the area where the panels connect to the base of the knife, that is what i was wondering if it was separate chunks. Most of the time a simpliler mesh with result in a cleaner bake, so trying to represent every little knook and crany from the highpoly is not only excessive, but also hurts you when it comes time to bake. What i mean specificaly here is you may want to try removing some edges so that instead of the connection there being like this: |_ that hard 90 degree cut, you remove one of those edges and have a more angled thing like: \ . I find a lot of times people have problems with bakes because they try to model too much in(too little can be a problem too, so you just gotta find a good balance).
Yeah in reality having a first person weapon that is ~3000 polys isnt that bad, but i think when you compare the size and complexity of this asset, to like a larger rifle with all sorts of accessories or what have you, it seems really excessive. Thats what i was saying
this makes me think you have to flip a channel in your normal map.
there are settings for the normal map in xnormal, you maybe have changed them from the default or something, right click the normal map slot in xnormal to see those options.
Also if you want to, upload your obj + textures and i'll take a look at it.
Oh, the base of the knife you're talking about slopes up. you can kinda see it in the knife on the far right of 25.1... i know i checked something in marmoset that fixed some crazy geometry issues when i first loaded up the new mesh, object space somethin or other. When the mesh was imported a few pieces of geometry turned bright white and that fixed it... I'm going to try to get home semi-early today so i can crawl through it and try to identify some problems and repost. Thanks for looking!
Object space is not something you want to turn on, it sounds like you're having exporting issues. Make sure to turn on "normals" when you export from max, and use GW:OBJ or whatever it is.
And again, make sure you have a diffuse AND normals loaded, if you're missing one of those it will grab a random texture and look all fucked up.
I'm going to take another look @ the mesh and make sure something isn't horribly wrong with those polygons then re-export.
@kp - I started creating that slant a while back and ran into problems so i just moved on but now i think i can change it pretty easily. I was getting weird pinching before where the flat sides tapered down but i've changed the original mesh since then so i'll give it another go.
Also, make sure that where you have hard edges, your uvs are split as well. It seems like you have some seams on some of your hard edges? If both edges lay in the same space on the uvs, you'll get some errors there. Otherwise in XNormal, if you want to work with hard edges, you need to set up a cage, go into the 3d view, select all the verts and hit "weld selected" or whatever, and then push the cage out to the correct distance. Make sure you save that file and load it up in the lowpoly section(if you just exit the viewer without saving it will ignore any changes to the cage).