11 réponses à ce sujet

[Happycrow]

I don't yet have a screenshot like the owlbear guys... but I have FINALLY managed to do the uvw map for this sucker.  It's very, VERY late here now, but I'll work over the .dds tomorrow and create a screenshot.  Figuring out the uvw process was psycho hard for me; for some reason, I couldn't make heads or tails of any of the tutorials out there, until I stumbled onto one this year that somehow said it in a way that made it through my thick skull.

This isn't pushing verts like my glovework and PW stuff, but from-the-ground-up, so I'll still need to go back and look over all the other stuff that's gotta be done, like making bones, rigging, etcetera.  I don't actually *know* how to do any of that...but there's a start-to-finish tutorial out there, so I'll stumble along as best I can to get it into y'alls hands.

Here's the naked version; texture job tomorrow.

http://tinyurl.com/bfdywgb[/b]

[IAmDeathComeForThee]

Grats! I know it's too little too late for UV mapping, but there's Hellfires tutorial as well using the LSCM Unwrap plugin which I found quite easy to follow.  www.rwscreations.com/RWSForum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=722

In case you havent found it, this is a really useful blog for creating NWN2 creatures. http://nwn2faithless...on-and-max.html  It doesn't cover skinning and wheighting the mesh, but i found the 3ds Tutorials that come with 3ds itself to be really good.

[Happycrow]

Death; It's Elsidius' way of saying it that finally broke the mental block. Poor Hellfire went back and forth with me on this for something like five weeks and I eventually threw in the towel at the time. I'm texturing now and then will hit his editorial on making the bones, etcetera.

[Hellfire_RWS]

I have ZBrush and just a heads up, If you can get it, it does one click UVW Unwrap. You can tweak it by hand but its awesome for a quick job

[Happycrow]

Yeah, me and the wifey have been looking at that and mooning...

[Happycrow]

Quickie rough draft of the texture is done, roughly working along the lines of nwn2's spiders. I'm a bit worried about the model, though -- it's as low poly-count as I could make, and unfortunately, once the texture's on, it shows. I may have to check my 3ds manual and try to remember how to smooth it up some.

http://tinyurl.com/bgflnol

Modifié par Happycrow, 01 janvier 2013 - 08:27 .

[Dann-J]

Happycrow wrote...

Quickie rough draft of the texture is done, roughly working along the lines of nwn2's spiders. I'm a bit worried about the model, though -- it's as low poly-count as I could make, and unfortunately, once the texture's on, it shows. I may have to check my 3ds manual and try to remember how to smooth it up some.

http://tinyurl.com/bgflnol

An aggressive normal map can hide a multitude of sins...

[IAmDeathComeForThee]

Use the smooth modifier in 3ds, set it to auto smooth at a value of 65.  It'll hide those poly's like magic. 
Click the images to see the modifier settings better.

0 auto smooth


30 auto smooth


65 auto smooth

[Happycrow]

Thanks; I'll try that -- should hopefully result in a lower poly count than going to the next NURBS level (it's 0 now, could take it to 1 but at the cost of making a lean model not-so-lean -- since Ettercaps are typically found in groups, I'm trying to be as spare as possible).

[Happycrow]

Yeah, couldn't get it to work on my imported module, but worked like a charm on the version that was still 3ds-native: while it'd be more elegant going the NURBS route, 1070 vs 4190 is a huge poly difference. Thanks.

[IAmDeathComeForThee]

This happens to me to sometimes. Try adding the "Edit Poly" modifier on first, without adjusting anything in that modifier, then add "Smooth." I have to do that sometimes to get it to work, just a weird bug with 3ds I suppose.

[BigfootNZ]

Happycrow wrote...

Thanks; I'll try that -- should hopefully result in a lower poly count than going to the next NURBS level (it's 0 now, could take it to 1 but at the cost of making a lean model not-so-lean -- since Ettercaps are typically found in groups, I'm trying to be as spare as possible).

It actually doesnt reduce polygons by the way. there all there still just the lighting is calculated across them as a group or some such heh.

I wouldnt use the nurm/subd (I think its nurms not nurbs, since nurbs are actually a differnt type of mesh ) on your mesh especially one that is going to be put ingame (id only use it for padding up my high poly base mesh before sticking it into ZBrush) since its a very inefficient way of smoothing out your model which you should do by hand by adding edge loops and extra polys where you need em (with meshsmooth or suddividing, all its doing is dividing quads and tris by adding edge loops along concurrent edges resulting in up to 4 times as many polygons, ie a quad which is normally made of 2 polys suddenly gets divided into 4 quads resulting in 8 polys, take a cube jam a level 1 mesh smooth on it and the quads go from 6 to 24, ie 48 polys compared to only 12... oh and your cube turns into a ball thanks to the vertex averaging heh).

Also regarding smoothing groups exporters for 3d games and the games themselves dont use smoothing groups, its simply a 3dsmax thing, there are no such things as smoothing groups outside of a 3d modeling package. What this means is when you export something like say a cube the exporter breaks your mesh into 6 indirvidual poly groups to acheive the same effect inside the game engine... which also means where say your cube with a single smoothing group across all its faces will have 8 vertexs... with smoothing groups it suddenly has 24 vertexs when exported (it has in max but the programme simply hides that fact and shows you 8), and while its hardly that intensive, its vertex count that often matters more than face count since faces arent stored as data in a file, only the verts that make them up are (Export a sphere mesh through expotron once with a single smoothing group then with all its polys faceted with with unique smoothing groups assigned, then compared the two resultant meshs file size). So keep your smoothing groups to a minimum and let your normal map do the work, but with some things like a cube or extreme changes in angles between surfaces a break will work best, you could camfer the edge so your normal map backs and works on it but you basicly have the same number of verts and a few extra faces anyway... its simply up to authors preference in those situations, which ever works best.

This also brings up the idea of UV islands, your UV map and how youve set it up also acts like smoothing groups ie UV island (a UV island is a concurrent group of UV's) seams act as breaks in the mesh when it comes to vertex count, not so much at export time, but ingame when the engine is rendering your model, yes, and it can stuff up your normal mapping as well (so keep your UV seams along smoothing group seams). So a mesh exported with a single smoothing group but with each of its polys as a unique UV space is just as bad at render time as a mesh with each poly exported with a unique smoothing group.

Kinda complex, theres an old but good thread about it on Polycount forumns and its all good stuff to know... if link it if i was on my other PC.

Boy havent been on here in a long time, good to see people are still making stuff for NWN2.