Neptune Man - Megaman Villain Challenge

[Athey]

I'll just post all my WIP images here from the start up to now.

The Concept:



The Process:








Current Status:

[Zcubed]

Very cool, what's the final triangle count?

I knew this was going to be great as soon as you put up the first picture of the boots (Which are still my favorite part ). You also seem to have had no trouble with the shoulders or pelvis, two areas that I had to redo a couple of times. I'm not sure that I like those two big cylinders on his back, but you might be able to sway me if you make a nice texture.

Keep up the good work.

[Cyrenn]

This is a great concept and model, Really pushes the level of the compitition: ) Great work Athey.

[evil-98]

ya i like the model very much, great use of polys.

[Cyrenn]

Do you have a certain method in the way you layout your Uv's?

Just curious what method works best for you: )

[Athey]

Hmm... not totally sure what you mean for method for laying out the uvs...

These are the uv layouts I made -
I've got the head and the body on two seperate maps. The head will probably be a 256x256 and the body will be a 512x512.

Body:



Head:




I guess for the way I do the unwrapping, I go through the model and assign a different material ID to every section of the body that I think will get a diff mapping type. Like the bottom of the boot is mat ID 1 (it gets a planer map cuz it's flat) and then the mass of the show gets matID 2 and I put a planer on the side of it and tweak it in uvw editor later. The leg gets a matID cuz it gets a cylindrical map, and so on and so on. I had 22 diff material IDs on the body.

Each section that has it's own mat ID, I select those polys, and do a UVW Map modifier, moving, scaling, and rotating it to fit best. Then I collapse the stack and do it again with the next mat ID.

Once I've adjusted the UVW Mapping on the whole model, I throw a UVW Unwrap modifier on it and open the editor. the UV Unwrap modifier lets you select stuff by material ID, so I just go through them all, pulling everything out of the 1x1 square so that I can actually see everything. Then I go through each part and fix and adjustin everything, and try to reduce the amount of seams I've got to deal with.

Then I shrink everything down and try to squeeze it all into one sheet without wasteing too much space.

The head layout I've got above actually wastes a lot of space, but I did the best I could ^_^;;

Not sure if that's what you were asking for.

[Zcubed]

Great, this means I'll get to see your texture that much sooner .

Excellent UV space usage on the body, the head sheet is pretty good too. One thing I've always been curious about it how texture artists get started once they've done their UVs. For example, say you wanted a red stripe running across his torso. Would you just paint it and check how it displays in Max? Wouldn't that lead to a lot of trial and error until you know exactly how your flat is going to display on the 3D character?

[Athey]

heh - yeah, loads of trial and error.

I actually throw in all solid colors first. I don't add in a single bit of detail until I've gone back and forth to make sure I'm happy with the placement of all the colors first. And if there is anywhere that I have a seam and I need to line things up, I try to do that first, before I lay in any detail.

[Brodix]

Athey: Nice work. I really like the look. Im not sure about the rocket pack though. I thought he was a underwater kinda guy.

[MonteCristo]

Then they need to have propellers in them like underwater jets. It's funny though Firefly, when I first read your post, I thought you said "Underwear kinda guy", and I was like: "what?!!!"

[Nappa]

rule 6. 1 – 1024 X 1024 or smaller texture map.

[Athey]

Or smaller

1: 512x512 and 1: 256x256 = less then 1: 1024x1024 I'll actually only be using 3/4ths of the alotted space.

For me it's just become... odd, to use a single 1024x1024. I'm not used to it at all anymore. I get to use about 3 or 4 128x128 textures per character at work. PS2 can't handle textures larger then 256x256, and PSP can't handle anything above a 128x128 8-bit texture (and we only get to actually use 4-bits textures w/ our engine - that's 16 Colors per texture people! SIXTEEN COLORS. Thats IT!)

Yeah.... So I'm out of practice with the huge single map and large UV layout thing. This is actually the first character I've been able to do a large UV layout with for months, since I haven't had much time to do any side-project models - just stuff for work.

One of these low-poly mini challenges after the megaman thing should really challenge you guys with some legitimate current-gen console limits.

I'd like to see you guys make a good looking character model with only 750 verticies, and using 3 128x128 4bit textures and 1 64x64 4bit texture and NO Opacities. :P

hehe - but that's PSP crap. And we have this stupid parts system... meh.

Anyways, I'm staying under the 1024x1024 limit, so there's worries there.

[Zcubed]

Originally Posted by Athey

1: 512x512 and 1: 256x256 = less then 1: 1024x1024 I'll actually only be using 3/4ths of the alotted space.

Just a little over one fourth, actually. Doubling the sides of a square quadruples the area, so you can fit four 512 maps into a single 1024 one.

[Nappa]

We meant one texture map Period and the 1024 thing was so we didnt get complaints about resolution

[Athey]

But that's kinda stupid. A lot of engines can't support a single huge map. I mean, in some engines it takes more resources to load multiple files then it does to load a single large one, but in other engines it's the other way around. In order to get a decent res, they have to split it up into several smaller maps. Eats up the same amount of VRAM, just allocating the resources into different areas.
As long as I'm under the res it shouldn't really matter.


Additionally, if a person wanted to have one small area on their model have opacities. Adding an alpha channel to a texture increases the size of it considerably. If you had one huge 1024x1024 map, and just one teeny spot in a corner needed an alpha, you'd be increasing your file size tremendosly for no reason. It's better to just have that area that needs opacity on a seperate, smaller map. Have a different, smaller (like a 128x128 or 256x256) texture assigned just to that part of the geometry. That smaller texture will have an alpha, and the larger, main texture, won't. Reduces size considerably.