Gas Station - Texture Update

During further development of the Gas Station scene I have corrected most of the issues with the normal maps by using cages when baking. Apparently if you use hard edges on the low-poly model, only baking normal maps with cages will produce nice results in xNormal.

The texturing is 99% done in Substance Painter, with some Photoshop involved in areas where it made more sense to use it.

I plan to use Substance Designer in this scene as well, which I will start to properly learn soon.

Gas Station Update

This is just a quick update on the Gas Station project. I may add a roof and some more items, but otherwise, the main part of it is done. I have fully modelled the high-res meshes and the low-res meshed now, and xNormal has created normal maps from each of them. The results can be seen below.

On closer inspection however, you can see that the normal maps are far from finished, and this is the main part of conducting this project; to learn how to correctly bake normal maps on hard-surface models.

You can clearly see in this surface that there is a black line striking through the normal map where it should look smooth like the high-res version.

This error is all over the model in different areas, though not everywhere in what appears to be the same situation, so I am looking into this.

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Update:

http://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1

This covers everything I needed to know. :)

Soma Yukihira - Finished Model

So I managed to finish this model by the end of the weekend. Fixing the issues from the last post didn't take too long, and it fixed all the distortion I had on the characters face too, which was handy, so it was all related. 

The model is complete, along with a little kitchen knife that will be involved in his future posing. The next stage is to rig and pose him, just like I still need to do with my previous Lord Beritra project!

Soma Yukihira - 3D Model. Character: 3872 Tris. Kitchen Knife: 190 Tris. A single Diffuse texture map each.

Soma Yukihira - 3D Model Wireframe.

Lord Beritra Progress

Still working on him. Still not managing to finish it in the few hours I have after work each night -.-

His textures are coming along, though still more work is needed. This is his final mesh at least now though.

Lord Beritra Update

Was hoping to get this model finished today, but not quite there yet. Some of his textures need work doing inside ZBrush to make sure things line up on the UV maps. I thought I had planned for this while unwrapping, but apparently I hadn't thought of everything. Thus, the paint-to-model approach will be needed!

Here is the progress so far. All done inside Marmoset Toolbag.

Yeah I know he probably doesn't have florescent blue eyes, but you never get to see them in-game, so I took some create liberties. If you move the camera to look at him straight-on, he has much the same appearance as he does in-game at least.... meaning you can't see his eyes at all behind his hood. :)

Lord Beritra - AION 4.0: Dark Betrayal

So naturally while I'm supposed to be working on this months art challenge set by Polycount forums, I decided to veer off track today with a strange urge to create a model of 'Lord Beritra', the 'Forth Dragon Lord' from the MMORPG, Aion. Probably because I was listening to the games' soundtrack. 

Considering I started it today, I have gotten quite far with it. It already has most of its normal maps from ZBrush as a first-pass. They haven't been detailed or cleaned up at all yet. I actually built the model over Xiahou Ba's body, retopologising the hands and face once the rest of the body was built to match the lower polycount.

Here is my progress so far. This render is done in Marmoset Toolbag 2, as this is my goal for this project I think.