Hey everyone! I'm a newer member here (and the 3-D modeling world) and I was hoping to get some feedback. I'm modeling Biff's hoverboard from Back to the Future 2 for a modeling class in 3DS Max. This is what I have so far for my high-poly model. Any advice or tips would be awesome!



Here are the reference images:

Your images are not working

Thanks for calling that to my attention. They should be working now.

Hell Yea!. I love Back to the Future more than almost any other movie series in the world. Keep going, it looks great so far.

That looks sweet Justin!! b(~_-)d You picked a really cool prop haha

Haha! Thanks everybody! Here's what I have now. I was planing on using floating pieces above the screws to bake the indents of the screws in the normal maps. I think I'm going to move on to low poly now. Tips? Suggestions? Issues? All are welcome and appreciated.

Hey everyone! So here's an update! I think I've got my low poly done and I've unwrapped it, I just have to pack the UV's now. How does it look?

YES!

This is looking great, however it looks like you forgot to connect a lot of the verts on the bottom side of the board. Just connect those and you should be fine.

This is looking sweeeeeeet! xD

I know! I just saw that after I uploaded it! I can't believe I missed that!
*connecting verts right now*

Great. Can't wait to see it done. What class is it for? For what School?

@brandv3d This is for my Modeling for Games class at Laguna College of Art and Design.

How's my UVW map look?

Hey, here's what the low poly looks like with the normals applied. I've also got the AO on there with some highlights. How's it look? I know there's something weird going on with the footpad from the normals, but I can't seem to figure it out. The weird shadowing appears even when that area is filled in with the flat color (128, 128, 255). I've checked and that area is flat on the model. Any ideas?

To me it looks like a smoothing issue. If you look at your LP it looks like you have a similar gradient affect going on.

I check the smoothing groups and everything checked out the way it was supposed to. My teacher helped figure out it was an issue that arose when I baked my normals. Although the area was planar, I didn't have it flat against the axis, which caused it to bake weird.

Anyway, here's my latest update, textured in screengrabbed from the UDK view port. It doesn't have the re-baked normals applied, because I didn't bake them yet, but you can't really tell anyway.

Oh! And I was playing around with the emissives in the material editor. There's only one screengrab with them turned on though. I hope to get a particle emitter in there eventually to have flames coming out of the rockets. Anyone know of a good site for a tutorial on something for that?

And thanks for all your help and comments, guys!