Week #6 - Tom's Bike - Low Poly

[Tom-3DT]

Hi All,

Didn't have to travel to far to photograph this one, and I hope we have a detailed set as possible for you guys.

Just the bike is required, not 'set' is necessary but you can put it on a flat plane for presentation if you want to cast shadows etc

The limits for this week are 1,000 tris and 512 texture sheet, so its going to be a real challenge with such tight limits and such details to cover, where are you going to spend those valuable polys? - any textures are cool, normals, specs etc to make it look as near to the photo as possible! As this is how they will be judged

Here is the photo set

Please post your wire, clay, texture sheets and final render in this thread, wip and on topic chat is also fine here too, these challenges are supposed to be fun and we are not too strict on the rules. The only prizes are a gold, silver and bronze awards handed out each week.

Deadlines as always Midday GMT 1 week away, so this will be Thursday 22nd July

Also please note that one of the reasons for these challenges is to help grow our free resource libraries, so the model donations at some point in the future when our system is ready would make us very happy and give a new dimension to the free image library we are building up every week.

[Tom-3DT]

Maybe the final renders could be a bit of a montage too, showing some close up sections of your model, this will help us judge them.

Thanks

[Hairyburger]

Oh this will be a hard one i will finally get to present my stuff i always miss out on the challenge but not this time. Has anyone got any tips on how they might do their wheel's as iv never done low poly wheel's before. Iv seen low poly images were a cyliner is used and then a plane in front is that a good way to do this? and do i cutout the cylinder outer faces and texture the outer plan that was added?

Thx guys best of luck in advance.

[Ojah]

@ hairyburger: I used a 5 sided torus myself. Cylinder + planes will give you some problems with normal maps, shading and it will take up a lot of texturespace. If you're going for an unshaded look with diffuse only you might be able to shave a few polies that way.

Heres my model in progress, 950 tris at the moment. Made a tiling normalmap + ao as diffuse for the wheels, atm at 64x128.

[Tom-3DT]

that's a great start

[Hairyburger]

Wicked Ojah thanks for the tip your bike i cool, for the wheels here i used a pipe ant the collapsed the inner edges but also addes another edge to give it more roundness. Full mesh only 805 at monent few bits to add but 200 tri's im sure there is loads i can do with it :P

[Hairyburger]

Well here is the bike before texturing just hit 997 tri's but i think i used the extra tri's to put in some extra detail's hope you like it so far now to start the texturing :P

[Tom-3DT]

great job so far, texturing sure is gonna be a challenge for this one! Maybe the tubes could be a little bit fatter? and slightly more of a curve on the top tube?

[timberwo7ves]

nice start guys :]

this'll be my first challenge, I'm doing it in max though and it's reached 500 already and noway near half complete

what are those planes splitting the wheels for? are they there for a technical reason?

[Ojah]

Thanks for the kind words!
Looks great hairy, like tom said the tubes may be a bit bigger but apart from that Im just curious to your texturejob.

@ timber, those planes are for the spokes, if you would model them all it would take up quite a lot of tri's, this way its only 4 (or 2 in hairyburgers case).

And heres my little update, made the tubes fatter (its a common thing i guess) and made normal maps for the saddle and the pedals. Also some slight optimizing, at 900 tris now, time to add detail again

[Ojah]

Another update, normal maps on almost everything except the tubes now. Also added some basic colours. 977 tris btw, so still some left to play with

[timberwo7ves]

thanks for the reply Ojah

bringin' up the rear.. :P

[Ojah]

Hey timber, heres some optimization suggestions, they might help you finish the bike in 1000 tri's.

First, try to turn the bars 45 degrees, that way they will look more round tube-like.
Second, dont create all the bars as 1 object, just use intersecting geometry and delete the ends.
And third, as shown at the handle picture, detaching the wider part and collapsing the ends to save triangles.

[timberwo7ves]

whoa thanks dude! for the bars are they four-sided or more? and when I intersect the geometry, do I not join them to one another at the end (or is this the opposite to the point of not doing it as one object?)

what's the benefit of detaching to element instead of detaching to a separate object, or is it a matter of preference?

I tried detaching and stuff, and it messed up (e.g. selecting multiple verts and translating them in X direction, and they all went in different directions :S) so I'm going to start again later.. even if I don't finish in time, it's all learning I guess; hopefully by the 10th challenge I'll be able to complete

[Ojah]

Glad it helped!

well, i made the bars 4 sided myself, more would cost too much i guess (personal preference though of course, if you have the tri's to spare, more-sided is always prettier).
The whole idea of detaching and intersecting is to not join them to save the geometry used to fuse them(element or separate object is a personal choice, in case of bars separate may be easier for unwrapping later)
When you moved the verts the coordinate system was problably set as local (top of the screen, next to the move/rotate/scale buttons, usually it says view)

Heres another update from me, still some normals to create and some geometry to add but getting there