The power of photos

Microman171 · Post by **Microman171** » Sat Sep 24, 2005 5:49 am

Compare the two images:

The top one took approx. 15 - 30 min
The lower image took approx. 2 - 5 min

And by this post you can see the power of reference images

BTW: The colours a random in Gmax that is why the look a little weird

Lost · Post by **Lost** » Sat Sep 24, 2005 9:02 am

Well use the freehand one

Microman171 · Post by **Microman171** » Sat Sep 24, 2005 9:36 pm

No offence or anything but why??

SithMaster · Post by **SithMaster** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 1:17 am

The top one is the better choice. however the trigger should be narrower than the guard and the guard should be narrower than the rest of the gun. are these made by you?

ZenBudha · Post by **ZenBudha** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 1:28 am

Err had you never seen a handgun photo before your freehand attempt?

Anyways congratulations you have now traced a spline around a photo and extruded it. Typically it results in a ok 3rd person weapon with a photo texture.

However for 3rd person some poly saving tips are in order. Tip #1 lose the sights because they're too small to notice when the bad guy is pointing it at you, and just add poly's. Tip #2 lose the trigger, and make the trigger guard more blocky. Since because it will be in a bad guys hand you will neither see the trigger nor the trigger guard in any detail. So save the poly's.

Also don't use a big image to photo texture it with. Close crop the weapon from it's image to a smaller image and scale it down. Unless you stand over the body and look right at it you'll never notice any lack of detail.

Of course personnaly I've gotten to where I avoid creating low poly weapons for 3rd person use. Instead I just start with a high poly 1st person weapon, and set up LOD's for it.

That way 90% of the time it's just a low poly weapon but you can't tell. Yet when a bad guy dies and you walk up on him he's not holding a lego block in his hands.
With a photo texture you should be able to achieve a fairly convincing model well under 800 poly's. But I still tend to push mine upwards of 1000 poly's. I mean to me in a FPS game the guns are stars too.

Microman171 · Post by **Microman171** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 2:06 am

SithMaster Yes I did make both of them

ZenBudha Lol I know what you mean by the look

I will make the gun again and make it less detailed

Microman171 · Post by **Microman171** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:20 am

Done all textured and modeled (with no trigger

)

Lost · Post by **Lost** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 3:34 am

Looks great Microman171
Well done

ZenBudha · Post by **ZenBudha** » Sun Sep 25, 2005 4:07 am

Bingo you got it. You won't even be able to tell it's low poly in game unless you stop and stare at it.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:40 pm

I can hardly tell its low poly by staring at the picture. Great job, nice texture.

Spyrewolf · Post by **Spyrewolf** » Thu Nov 10, 2005 3:05 am

Yes you hit it on the head!

for all models i use references of some kind, not as a definitive guide, but as a start point

references are good for nearly all aspect of modelling especially for vehicle, as you can get plans on for most views of some kind

nice work there dude i agree with the above comment i can't tell it's lo-poly netheir it looks great keep up the good work!!!

ZenBudha · Post by **ZenBudha** » Thu Nov 10, 2005 3:29 am

The only part I can tell is low poly is the trigger guard which is no biggie.

However if you wanted to fix it the simple way would be to sinple load the texture in you favorite photo editing package, and the simply color pick you primary light and dark in the texture. Then select a square swath that doesn't protrude onto the orginal texture, and apply a gradient.

Then you can adjust the UVW map in you modelling package to place the trigger guard faces over the gradient block. This will make it blend better with the rest of the texture and not look so flat.