[Weapon] Bowie Knife [Updated 01/10/14]

[samjb1992]

this is the first model i have made using blender and sculptris. I would love some feed back about the texture,and in game performance.
-----------------------------
update 01/10/14:
made a new model (change the handle to have a grip look instead of carved handle).
made a new hull that should have better physics.

made new textures for the model:
new color with AO map on it
new sharp map
made a normal map (old version did not have one).
----------------------------
download link 01/10/14:

BowieKnife.zip

(1.94 MiB) Downloaded 225 times

new version pics:

[Endoperez]

Hi there! You've changed programs then?

The blade has a good shape, your previous experience in making blades is easily visible. There are a few things you could do to improve it, but they're technical, the blade looks good already.

The handle isn't as good. The grooves are too deep, the angles too hard. They grooves often look like waves in water (see below). Are the handle and the blade one object, or two separate ones? They can be separated, so you can create a new handle without change that blade.




The textures are actually starting to get good. You know how good metal and wood COLOR maps. To get further, you need to add other stuff - shininess to the metal, a different sort of dull shine to the wood. Normalmaps, specularity maps and so on. You can get all of them done in Blender, using nodes, but it will get a bit technical.
Or do you have a 2D image editing software now? I could tell you how to edit the maps in 2D if you want to.

I know Blender extremely well and I can give you lots of detailed explanations when I get the time. Perhaps next weekend, perhaps later during my Christmas break.



Here are the things I could talk about, which one(s) you want to learn most?
If there's someone else reading this and wants me to show something specific, feel free to speak up.


1) Ambient Occlusion - the 3D software adds shadows into the shape:

[+] AO

2) Specularity = shininess
It gets your models from this:

[+] spec

to this:

3) UV Unwrapping in Blender. It doesn't affect the quality or the result of your models, but it lets you use smaller images to get higher quality.

[+] UV

4) Normalmapping. This lets you put in more Sculptris details into Overgrowth. In the image below, the only thing that changes is the texture, the model stays identaical.

[+] normalmaps

5) Polygon modeling, topology, loops. This will make your models a bit better, unwrapping a bit easier, texturing a bit easier, but the end result won't change much. It's very important if you ever want to do characters, and you can use Subsurf modeling to get high-quality models that can look realistic.

[+] topology

[+] Subsurface modeling results

[samjb1992]

endo, anything you have time to share is welcomed. i would like to learn as much about each topic as you are willing to share.

on a side note the handle and blade are two different objects so i can change the handle to look better.

yes i did change 3d programs. i did so because i find that c4d is limited in modeling and texturing areas compared to blender and sculptris.

i have photoshop but i would like to use blender and sculptris as much as possible.

[Thomason1005]

nice knife, i really like the look of the blade

if you want to improve, here are some things:
- bake a normal map to have the lighning working, you can use your existing uv map for this, otherwise u -> smart uv project brings good results, for weapons you have to use object-space normal maps and invert the green and blue color.
- use a highpoly and a lowpoly model: your model has ~3000verts, you should reduce this for performance. then a uv map is easier too. i always bake normal maps etc. with the 'selected to active' feature from my highpoly model to my lowpoly model to keep all the details.
p.e. my katana has a 199 vert lowpoly (ingame) model and a 100k high detail model

its best to redo the model for the lowpoly or making the lowpoly first and then create the highpoly out of it, but you can also use the decimate modifier. you can even use bmeshs on the highpoly, thats very nice for blades etc
- make the blade shiny by giving the color map there less transparency and / or making it darker
- your hull is only a cube, i have an 8verts model for this, it makes collisions far more precise without making physics go too slow

your textures are good & i cant tell u anything there, i only use baked ambient occlusion as color maps yet.

[Endoperez]

nice knife, i really like the look of the blade

your textures are good & i cant tell u anything there, i only use baked ambient occlusion as color maps yet.

Good job there Samjb. You've come a long way.

I'm going to do as many of those as I have time for. What would you like to learn first? I was thinking of showing you some tweaks to the textures, so the knife will look better really cool in Overgrowth.



Thomason, do you have a good method of making the hull mesh? Whenever I try to do them by hand, I find my weapons falling through the terrain randomly.

[Thomason1005]

Thomason, do you have a good method of making the hull mesh? Whenever I try to do them by hand, I find my weapons falling through the terrain randomly.

erm well i used a cube, moved the verts to fit the model good (snap to vertex) and added two more by subdividing. You should have a closed hull object. Maybe recalculate normals outside or remove doubles? Also, pay attention that you have no faces with over 4 verts (if you run blender 2.6+), those cant be exported to .obj
and you have to check the export selected only thing when exporting or it will put everything in your .obj

[Endoperez]

My problem is that I always leave a concave angle somewhere in my convex hull.

[Thomason1005]

My problem is that I always leave a concave angle somewhere in my convex hull.

is that a problem for the engine? Hmm idk maybe you make them too complicated, the stock weapons all have under 10 verts on the hull

[Endoperez]

My problem is that I always leave a concave angle somewhere in my convex hull.

is that a problem for the engine? Hmm idk maybe you make them too complicated, the stock weapons all have under 10 verts on the hull

Well, as I said my weapons sometimes fall through the ground. I think it's a problem in the hull, and about the only problem I could think of is the concave thing.

[samjb1992]

endo, if you could do ambient ocultion mapping that would be great. I have made one for the knife but don't know how to combine it with the color map.

[Endoperez]

There is a way of using Blender to combine several maps, but it's more complicated. I'll explain the easy way for now, it uses Photoshop.

In short, you:

1) Put the AO layer
2) exactly on top of the color layer
3) and set the AO layer to Multiply

Multiply means that the AO layer darkens the color layer. A white color, which is RGB (1,1,1) for this, doesn't change the other layer at all because 1*x = x. The darker the multiplying color, the darker the end result. Black is always black, because black is RGB (0,0,0) and whatever you multiply by 0 becomes 0.


Here's the detailed explanation:

First make sure that the Ambient Occlusion map uses the full color range from 0 to 1. It should be white to black, not gray to gray. To create a normalmap like this, you have to enable a "normalized" setting in Blender. The pictures are quite low-res here, sorry.
The relevant menu is in the Buttons window, in the Render panel, in the Baking menu, the Normalized-checkbox.

You can improve the quality of the AO map a lot by enabling certain settings inside Blender. Go to Buttons window, the World panel, enable Ambient Occlusion checkbox, then scroll down to Gather menu. Increasing the number of Samples from 5 increases the quality, but makes the rendering take much longer.

Once you have the normalmap, you can go to Photoshop to combine this with the color map.

First, you have to copy the AO map over the color map so that they match each other's positions exactly. They should also be in separate layers. You can just drag and drop one over the other, or copy and paste. However, they will usually not be in the same positions.
There is a way to easily match their positions, as long as the AO map and color map images have the same width and height. Right-click on the only Layer of the image you opened, choose "Duplicate Layer", and in the menu that opens up choose as the Destination the Document into which you want to duplicate the layer.

The image above has the wrong, gray-to-gray AO map. I rebaked a new, normalized AO map to get the results in the image below.

Now you just choose the AO layer on the top, and set the layer's Blend mode to "Multiply".

[samjb1992]

how does this AO map look?

[Endoperez]

It looks like it's working, but the AO map makes such a subtle difference that it's hard to know how well it's working. It looks alright, although the whole knife is much darker than it was earlier.

Could you post the AO map that you got from Blender, before combining?

[samjb1992]

here is some updated pics with AO map used:

[Thomason1005]

The ao map makes the objects pretty dark, I would adjust it so that it has pure white on bright areas and pitch black on dark areas. You can do the adjustment with contrast / brightness, but the curve editor works better i think. But its working, the grip now looks better imo