Thank you very much Bakasan, that was a very nice explanation The website looks very useful as well, though I haven't looked into it that deeply yet(but I will) I've spent like, a total of 1 or 2 hours in the last week to assign the differently colored materials to the engine and gearboxes, for different types of material/texture pre-sets(ie plastic or metal) that dDO uses. Tomorrow I will bake these colors from the "high poly" to a diffuse map for the low poly(the high poly is just a high poly valve cover, the rest is the same). I will also make normal maps in nDO and put some funky shapes on the flat surfaces(like the intercooler has ridges in real life, obviously, and the tubes have a certain grid-shaped texture to them too, and then many, many other parts need more normal map detailing as well... After that I can start doing all the cool grease and wear and tear stuff, which should hopefully bring this engine mesh to life. The engine will use a seperate 2048x2048 texture, which won't take up any extra RAM memory compared to my other vehicles because I'm not using a 4096x4096 texture for the body, instead I'm using two 2048x2048 textures, 1 for the underbody stuff, and 1 that's skinnable. All the suspension parts and exhaust will go either on a 1024x1024 texture or another 2048x2048 one, depending on the color of my socks, probably I believe on the Cadillac I used one 4k texture for drivetrain and one 4k texture for the body, so.... (2x 2048x2048 for body, 2x2048x2048 for chassis/drivetrain, that's just 1 4k map in total for drivetrain+body combined) this'll actually use less RAM and probably look better because I can tweak the specular maps and normal maps seperately way easier with dDO than I could by hand. That is, of course, unless I find out tomorrow that I want the valve cover to be UV'ed way bigger to make the "2500 Twin Turbo" and "Toyota" writings look decent which means I'd have to refit the UVs somehow
That 1JZ, su purrdy... Also, if you are having trouble making the engine lettering look noce, perhaps an alpha map would be handy, more so I think for the 2500 Twin Turbo badge. For the Toyota on the front, perhaps a conventional normal map would be better.
*sigh* My Maya license is expiring in 5 days... Off to the pirate bay I guess... How do they expect a newly graduated(I'm not graduated yet!) student to pay 5000 dollars for a license? Are they like, braindead? Unless they make a freelance license for under 300 bucks I probably won't ever bother to get a legal Maya version... I already have a legal substitute for Photoshop(a 60 euro substitute for a 3000 dollar or so program when they both do exactly the same thing, yet the cheaper one does it better!) and all my other plugins are legal too, but 5000 for 1 program? Are you kidding me? Just fuck off... Hopefully I'll have a new license running in an hour or so, trying to stick with Maya 2012 so I don't have to update all my plugins again :/ Wish I had never paid for a student license, didn't realise they expired after 4 years... What a huge waste of money, should've just went straight for the illegal versions. And yes, I don't care that I'm publicly saying I don't have money for a legal version of Maya. I don't see how anyone in my situation can afford to spend 5 grand on 1 piece of software, which isn't even worth that. My car and my PC are both WAY more valuable than this piece of shitty crashy software, and yet Mayas price is more than DOUBLE the price of the car and my PC combined! Lol. Just lol. I'll stop my rant now and get back to work, waiting for my download to finish so I won't ever have to bother with this crap again.
Yea, that really sucks.. I had the same problem with Photoshop. If it wasn't that my uncle did digital graphics as a job and "got" me a copy from work then I would be using GIMP or paint.net (although I do know someone in my college who was realy good with PS saved up for almost a year to get the latest version for about £500) I know its way too late now to start thinking of it but Blender is a much better program than Maya imo and has a ton more features, it even has a video editor.. But yea once youve learnt one, others are really difficult to learn. I'm probably in the same boat next year at college when I'll have to learn Maya as part of the course and I'm pretty sure they won't let me use blender even though its just a standard simple 3d modelling course with some really basic animation. From what I've seen from other people in the course they are working on things I could have done 4+ years ago. So unless you get $5000 then just torrent it, no one can reasonably afford that..
wow this is coming along nicely...such amazing attention to detail!!! And screw Maya, I know that my high school (back in 2008) had a copy but t was mostly for the teachers, and they actually sent out a letter to the parents (it was a private school) asking for them to donate so they can basically renew the license or some shit, and that plan fell to pieces. TPB is def the way to go for something like that. The only people in the world that can afford $5000 for a license are the extremely wealthy, or big corporations. They can suck it. I almost want to DL Maya off TPB just for the fuck of it lol I get it bro
Maya has way, way more features than Blender... If you enable all UI buttons by enabling all toolbars in Maya, your viewport is about a 5x7cm area... Maya has a video editor too... It's a rendering editor, all in one. Blender doesn't even have NURBS as far as I know, neither does it have nDynamics afaik, painteffects, fur, ncloth, rigging?... I'm pretty sure Blender can't do most of those, otherwise it would be an industry standard, like Maya, Max and XSI... And many, many people serrrrioussslllyyy hate the UI and camera controls in Blender, me included... Other than that, I agree
Yea the UI is a pain at times and is defiantly a bit of a pain to learn although it was vastly improved in the 2.5 revision and has been ever since. 2.71 is the latest and its now got separate categories for the UI. After spending a lot of time with it the ui becomes quite easy to use. I think a lot of people have problems because they're used to using the mouse for most actions were as Blender is a lot more based around keyboard shortcuts. Which I personally like but there are some awful ones like ctrl+alt+shift+c to centre origin which is a real pain for new comers Blender acctually has all of the features youve mentioned. It has NURBS tools and has had for a while although I don't use them personally. Dynamic fluid, cloth, hard body, soft body among others are all possible in Blender and have been since way back in at least 2.4 although I'm not exactly sure how these compare to Maya's nCloth and nDynamics however they seem to be pretty much identical to what is in Blender its also quite well developed as its one of the most talked about features in Blender. Texture painting is also possible in Blender as well as texture cloning from multiple UV maps, similar to what you can do in Maya. Although Maya does seem to include more pre made brushes but these can be made in Blender. Fur can be made in Blender also through the particle system and can be used in many ways for hair physics, grass as well as even duplicating meshes on a suface. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Physics/Particles/Hair Rigging is also completely possible and is really well fleshed out. http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-to-rigging/#.U-_D-W9wY Blender has come a hell of a long way since 2.4 which is what I learned back when I begun and I feel that's its defiantly a much more professional, well fleshed out program. Especially considering its free.
Thanks! Didn't do as much as I hoped I would today, didn't even get to start on the extra normal map detail I also need to fix a lot of the baked normal map, sadly. I also need to fix a TON of normal map issues which is really freaking annoying. Gonna try to re-bake it with the mesh at 100x bigger, so it won't clip when 2 polygons are close together... But um, yeah... Figured I'd post these pics because they look pretty cool The last pic is one of the normal map things I need to fix...
Target polycount is below 80.000, which I should easily make This is still at resolution that I can put in-game... I can go 1 size lower, but I kinda don't want to anymore... Looks so good at this resolution Still gonna try and add a few more details in the normalmap before I move on to the next stage. This is about... 3-4 hours of work since the last pictures...
