Topic: 3D Modeling WIP Topic

[kat]

Yes, it was the same problem we discussed here. You have to do some fiddling about in your photoeditor to fix this issue.. or... hide the seam using another asset or in a deep crack or something like that (which is what Bethesda did with the caves in Oblivion).

[dersaidin]

Yeah, merging it perfectly isn't worth the effort when you can just as effectively cover it or disguise it some how.

[ratty redemption]

thanks guys, and kat I now remember your previous posts. did you ever turn those into a tutorial?

in this case I don't want to tweak the textures as several of them are intended to be used on different models, so I think your suggestion of hiding the seams in cracks is the best solution. I have used that technique before with single rocks so it should be reasonably straight forward.

edit: although it was quite easily to model a deep crack in the meshes to hide the texture seam, I didn't realise the shared spec map would look wrong. as shown in the image below. I don't want to make unique spec maps so I'm going back to the previous version of the mesh and see what else I can do.

@ dersaidin, don't worry I won't spend long on the seam, and I intend to start work on the 3rd section over the next couple of days, if real life doesn't get in the way too much.

[kat]

That doesn't look too bad, you might be able to 'hide' it a bit more by pulling some of the rocks out a bit so it doesn't look like a deliberate join.

I finally managed to get some time to myself to continue on with a model that I've been working on for a long time, it was going to be made for a Wolfenstein mod but as they don't look to be releasing the tools I guess I'll have to make my own game! hehe. Anywho, it's part of the suspension from WWII Bren carrier and has been the cause of mush frustration because it's such an awkward shape - the real things are cast iron iirc and the design varies depending on where and when the item was manufactured, although they all use the same cantilevered design. I still need to build the springs (the bar that runs along the top between the two arms) and some bits are fudged but it looks like it's supposed to ;o) Oh and the image below are for the highres to bake normal maps from.

[ratty redemption]

@ kat, thanks for the tips. I'm trying the tweaked uv's and image approach and getting much better results, so I don't think I'll be using those types of cracks to hide seams.

and impressive mesh work there, was it poly/box modeled or did you use curves?

[ratty redemption]

I haven't had much time over the last few days to work in blender but the 2nd image below shows the progress I've made with the seam. still wip though.

[kat]

This is what the suspension started out as, 'box' modeled, sort of. This is just the main section though but the whole arm started out like this.

[ratty redemption]

@ kat, understood and cool

[ratty redemption]

while I'm working on the mesh for the 3rd cliff section, here's an image of the seam between the first two sections. the results turned out better then I thought they would, with only really the smooth group shading indicating where the seam is, and from a distance it's barely noticeable

[kat]

Seam? What seam. I can't see any seam.  Nice job there, it is actually quite difficult to make out where it might be, and that's all you really need for those sorts of objects.

[ratty redemption]

@ kat, hehe, thanks and this was mainly done with stretching the uv's around the seam which was quite easy once I developed the workflow. I also baked the two sections at the same time, with a 2048x1024 normalmap then split it in psp8, so on the low frequency bake there is no seam at all.

[kat]

Rivets.. lots of them (over 450 and still counting). I have to question the effort involved in adding this sort of detail to a model when the normal maps these will generate will have these things occupy just a few pixels - it's taken me the best part of a week to add these (in between other things). This sort of thing seems to be to be better off done mucking about with 2D height templates and normal map programs like CrazyBump.

[ratty redemption]

@ kat, were you placing these by hand?

you could use particle objects and spawn them along vertex groups following certain edges or vertices. that would be very quick in comparison.

[kat]

Yeah, I thought there might be a quick way not sure how using an automated approach would allow for these things being slightly off-kilter as they don't exactly line up on the real thing (being hand placed rivets) and are slightly different sizes. I don't mind so much though as it's oddly therapeutic!

[ratty redemption]

@ kat understood and we can enter a few random variables with the spawning of particle objects.