Hey!
This is my first time posting and I'm quite new to 3D so some feedback would be great

I'm making a low poly ice cream truck for a school assignment. We have a budget of 500 tris and the truck is 428. This is what I've made so far:

Remade my UVs. The diffuse has to be 128x128 and when I scaled them down I realized I had to put some more space between them.

I know its a low poly assignment, but you should really spend thoose 70 tris you have to go. Maybe add windows? Refine the siluette a bit?

If your budgets this tight, I'd recommend deleting the sides of your wheels and replacing them with a single quad each with an alpha channel. You might need to make the wheel texture a little larger on your UV, but you'll be saving yourself 48 tris.

You could make those UV islands much larger. You're wasting a lot of precious pixels there. At that scale every one of them has to count. Your layout is also not particularly efficient. It's worth spending time playing with the UV island arrangement until you have a good balance of efficient use of space and ease of texturing - If you can give yourself straight lines to work on, for example, you'll wind up with a much nicer looking texture.

Consider if there are areas on your UV that will have less detail or importance - the undercarriage for example, allowing you to scale up other parts that have more detail/importance.

Make sure you've stacked all of the mirrored areas of the UV. There are a couple of parts that you could still stack that'll save you a not insignificant amount of UV space.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions, guys. Much appreciated!

I'm now using 495 out of the 500 tris budget. So, I remade the wheels. Just hoping I can get it to match the shape of the rest of the wheel so that it looks good. We're only aloud 1-bit alpha.

I also softened up the silhouette, added handles for the doors on the back, a window frame on one side and lights in the front. The soft shading doesn't look that good though. Looks a bit bumpy.







I have yet to remake the UV mapping and layout, but I'll have your advice in mind.

I like it ! Gl with the assignment

Thanks!

Posting my new UV:

Here's what it looks like with the diffuse so far:

I think you'd be better to turn off the blending so you have nice sharp details. It's come up pretty nicely though. Only thing that really stands out at this point is the shading on the underside of the icecream is a little harsh. I'd reduce the contrast quite a bit and maybe give it a slightly pinkish colour to represent the bounced light from the truck

Maybe I'm seeing this wrong, but are the dies of the tires a flat plane? I might be wrong here, but that would mean you're using an alpha map to give it the round shape, which seems to be less perfomant than just adding these few extra polys.
Again I might be wrong here, but now I'm interested on what would be the better solution in a real world situation. ^^

I really like where this is going. But overall, your Uv's need to be cleaner/tighter. For one, I would suggest working with a neutral background color to your texture. Having pink metal/paint, on a gray background is no good, when it comes to the texture mipping (down sizing due to draw distance/resolution settings)What Jackablade said, is totally on the money. Take his advice into serious consieration, because it will help make this asset better.

Also, look at the bottom of your cone. See how you are painting on an angle? With the limited texture resolution you have, don't paint on angles if you can. Straighten out your uv's and give your self the ability to paint highlights and lowlights on a straight line, rather than an angle.

If you want me to explain further I will Looking great in any case, this will help push it over the top.

Thanks for the responses!

Jackablade - I'm rendering in marmoset so I'm gonna see if I can turn of the blending on the materials in there. And I see what you mean with the shading, thanks for pointing that out I'll try to get some pink tones in there too.

Seirei - I tried to make wheels with a plane and alpha, but it didn't look too good with the 128x128 texture and 1-bit alpha I'm aloud, so i switched back. Think it would work well on a larger texture resolution though

Spug - I see what you mean with the UVs and that I should straighten them out. I won't have time to do that before handing the assignment in, but I'll try to do it before I put this into a portfolio changing the background color should be a quick fix though, I'll do that right away!