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May I please get some feedback? (Final Major Project)

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6 comments, last by Robert_Lamp 5 years, 9 months ago

Hello everyone, 

I am currently doing my final major project in games art and animation at university. I would like to gather some sort of feedback on some of the assets that I have modelled by fellow 3D artists and industry professionals. Part of the project is to develop a 3D environment which is set in an american high school on a prom night (which will be hosted in the school's gym). I am currently modelling all the assets that are required for my scene and I will (of course UV, texture, etc) then import them into unreal where I am going to assemble the scene and render from there. Any comments or constructive feedback on the assets is highly appreciated. [I am trying to keep them fairly low poly as these assets are meant to be game ready].

Bell.jpg

Locker.jpg

water_fountain.jpg

Basket.jpg

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1 hour ago, Mr Bramz said:

modelling all the assets that are required for my scene and I will (of course UV, texture, etc)

Take it from a artist who has spend lots of hours modeling scenes, UV map as you go. Texture models when you are done with it, Before making a new model.

If you have to make hundreds of models, then later UV map a 100 models , then texture a 100 models; you will work much slower than you would have if you had UV mapped and textured them while focused on them.

The other advantage of UV mapping as you go is that small repeating parts like door handles can just be copied. If you make the UV maps after the model is done, you will need to delete the repeating parts and replace them with the UV mapped one; this takes much longer.

2 hours ago, Mr Bramz said:

Any comments or constructive feedback on the assets is highly appreciated.

Often at the start of making 3D models for environment art, you want to decide two things: Texel density and poly density.

Your circles here is very inconsistent. For example your bell will be very high poly and look good and round, however the the hoop will look "blockish" with sharp edges showing. It is recommended you make a circle gradient, normally it goes like this: 8 -> 12 -> 16 -> 24 -> 32 -> 48 -> 64 etc.. Basically base 3 followed by base 4 circles. Lower than 8 doesn't look round enough so it is very rarely used.

Here is a example:

UpStep.png.666059104e52beb084dd69807750fd79.png

The lower set shows how you made your bell, it looks nice and smooth but this model uses 1 152 triangles. The set above, I upstep my circles, starting with 64 to get a visual round object, the top circle is 12 and a 8 is used to cap the circle. 344 triangles.

If you zoom the image you will see the above set doesn't look as smooth, but it is because of the normals. This is easy to fix with a normal map or custom normals.

Most importantly it uses less than a 1/3 of the triangles.

It also fixes the problem you have where the bell is rounded than the hoop, because I can use the camera to see what size a circle has to be to look round; so a smaller circle will use less vertices and a larger one will use more. 

Of course this should only be used for low poly models. As only low poly models support the triangles needed to "upstep", using triangles in a high poly model will break your loops.

 

Cube spheres also follow this pattern and are even smoother. The only problem is that cube spheres only support base 4. So models are a bit higher poly.

Great advice! Thanks for sharing. :) 

Programmer and 3D Artist

@Scouting Ninja Thank you very much for the feedback. It is highly appreciated. I will definitely take into consideration your advice when modelling! Thanks again!

To add to what Scouting Ninja said, with spherical objects it also sometimes makes sense to use icosahedrons, rather than the classic quad Sphere.
t4vOJnz.png

The one on the left here has 480 tris, while the one on the right has a mere 160. You don't really lose any strength in silhouette on the right one but lose a lot of polys.

While I totally agree that you'll essentially work faster and get frustrated less if you finish a full asset before going on to the next one, I'd definitely try to block out the full scene with simple primitives, to get a sense of scale, composition and mood. But I think that also comes down to your personal comfortable workflow.
 
 

@Liacart Thank you very much for adding up onto the comment made by Scouting Ninja. All this information was extremely helpful and I highly appreciated it. I will definitely use it when working! 

Hello @Mr Mramz!
You've done a geat job. Keep going!
 

Game design services - https://tsymbals.com/3d-services/game-design/ from Tsymbals Design

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