I am currently an art student at the Art Institute of Dallas working on a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Media Arts and Animation. I'm going for the modeling track they offer here and wanting get into the game or movie industry. I'm also interested in previsual concept art and try studying it on the side when I can.

Here is a barrel I did last quarter for class. I'll try to post more things that I have worked on last quarter and throughout this quarter.



Here is my final for previsualzaton class I did last quarter. It is still a WIP.



My current model for class. Textures and maps to be up soon.

Cool stuff man! I really like your previz stuff. of course, everything still could use a little bit more love. Your modeling is very solid too.


Looking forward for more!

Here is the Lo Poly of the Antique Clothes Wringer.

For me, the handle is ruining it. For several reasons:
-the handle as you HPmodeled it is flimsy and would bend way too easily, look at the reference and you'll see that its a lot thicker, and in another direction.
-you have some loops in there that do virtually nothing for the shape.
-it has a really bad silhouette:


Luckily it's just one part that could be redone in relatively little time.


The smooth curvy wooden plates could stand a few extra loops too. If you want to save/free up some polies to smooth out the silhouette, I'd recommend normal mapping the ornate.. screw holder thingies all the way at the bottom. Not the pat that looks like a key, but between the key and the wood.

I agree. You don't even need to re-unwrap or re-texture the handle if you add a few more loops there. It should deform properly. Round that bugger out!

*Edit* It seems you have loops there already. Why aren't they used to round that handle out? Those are wasted polies.

The reason he is doing that handle like that is because, he is fixing to cast it on top of the planes and mask it out with alphas.

Thanks for the feedback. I did have it with more bents to curve it out better but must of not saved it. Gotta pay more attention to details if I wanna be a modeler.

Here are the maps. Had a lot of trouble trying to cast them right and not sure why. Tried cage, tried offset, material IDs made it worse and messed with the cage verts to shape it.



And the Marmoset shot.

What Snader pointed out about the low silhoutte value of the handle....you problably want to use a plane and alpha for that. i figured that's what you were doing earlier. But either u forgot to mask it, or perhaps you werent doing that at all.

the bake doesnt look that bad, what were you having issues with?

What snader means is that the current crank looks nothing like the reference, it's got a different strip orientation, it's flimsy thin, and it's got no decoration. Don't use an alpha plane for the crank. If anything should get alphaplaned, it'd be the heart/doorkey shaped screws on the top, and at the bottom.


You're already using first person weaponry amounts of polies, so the extra 124 wouldn't bother too much. What this does is give you the bulk that's seen in wrought iron stuff, making it look sturdy. The inset should be normalmapped, obviously...

To fix the bake, try to manually retriangulate, and get rid of as many long triangles as possible. Also, don't use concave polygons, it's what causes the weirdness at the second-to-top wooden part.

U've got a lot of problems with your normal map...and that because u didn't used smoothing groups(hard edges in maya....really dunno what software u use). Here is an example how the normals should look like.

Thank you Snader and nimlot26 for the visual examples! They will be very useful on my road to become better. I appreciate the feedback.

Here is the current model for class that will be fully textured and game ready.

Here is the lo poly of the wheelchair.



And the Lo Poly Textured.

Methinks you need to desaturate a bit. Mostly the wood. And have you noticed the pattern isn't nicely centered? Sloppy sloppy.

Your normals always seem to be effed up. You should fix that, cause it's absolutely killing your work.

Originally Posted by nimlot26

U've got a lot of problems with your normal map...and that because u didn't used smoothing groups(hard edges in maya....really dunno what software u use). Here is an example how the normals should look like.

Both of these are bad! Terrible artifacts on every hard edge because the uvs arent split at hard edges.

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

Both of these are bad! Terrible artifacts on every hard edge because the uvs arent split at hard edges.

:P I think its still nice he's giving an example (it does illustrate his point). Maybe add on to it EQ? I'm sure you have a good example of how to setup both smoothing groups + uv setup so that you'll get some good results from the bake.

Thank you all for the feedback. The wheelchair didn't come out as well as I wanted it to. I saw mistakes there at the end I didn't get time to fix. Just gotta keep on going and get better as I continue to learn.

What do you mean you don't have time to fix them? If you post those to your site like they currently are, most next gen leads will realize that you don't know how to work with normal maps.

Originally Posted by dur23

What do you mean you don't have time to fix them? If you post those to your site like they currently are, most next gen leads will realize that you don't know how to work with normal maps.

These are for a class I'm currently taking. We have 2 weeks to complete this from start to finish and then move on to the next prop. Honestly, I'm not planning to use any of these for portfolio pieces and if I did, I'd go back and rebuild them from scratch. This is all practice, I'm still very new to the whole modeling thing.

Here is my 3rd and current prop for class.

Originally Posted by JasonLavoie

:P I think its still nice he's giving an example (it does illustrate his point). Maybe add on to it EQ? I'm sure you have a good example of how to setup both smoothing groups + uv setup so that you'll get some good results from the bake.

I feel i've written on this topic so many times that even i dont understand it anymore. There are quite a few threads around... Basically you only ever want hard edges where your uv islands are, anything else is going to cause artifacts. So if you plan on using a lot of hard edges, you need to plan on spiting up your uvs accordingly.

Here is my final model for class. There are still a few things here and there to be fixed that I will continue to work on.

nice model!