3D - Finishing the mech

Hello, I've been horrible at updating the blog lately so I'll try to catch up. If you've read my previous posts you'll know that I've been working on a mech. The tools I used for this was 3DS MAX for modeling and Photoshop with DDO plugin for texturing. I've actually completed it so I'll show you a little of what I did and how I did it. Here below is the concept art I was following for this model.

Last post I had just started fleshing out the shape and not much was really done. After that I started working on a high poly model since the plan was to use my high poly in the creation of the final low poly. By using the light and shadow information from the high poly you can transfer the details into the texture of the final low poly model. I actually started with the legs for the high poly instead of the main body. I really wanted to capture that mechanical feel of it all so I focused a lot on the details of the leg.

The next step was the main body and it proved to be a much bigger challenge than I originally had anticipated. Trying to translate the concept art to 3D space was a tedious and hard work. The concept art doesn't tell everything about the object so you have to fill in the blanks. Luckily I had gathered good references which helped me in the process. Here below you can see two screenshots of the high poly model, the first one is the high poly nearing its completion and the second and third is the final high poly.

This was about two weeks in or something in the project and I unfortunately got sick. This resulted in me not working on the mech for a week and falling behind schedule. After this pause in production I had to pick up my pace and I was already behind. The next task at hand was to model the low poly and that was not an easy task because I had to have it around 15000 tris. It was a real tough job to reduce my mesh to 15000. The legs especially ended up taking up too much polygons so I worked on reducing them a lot. Below is the finished low poly which I made in haste due to being behind schedule.

The next part was UV mapping, baking and texturing. I hadn't put much time into the low poly which made the UV mapping harder. The wireframe was confusing and rough that gave me a lot more work to be done. After the UV mapping was done I started rendering out lighting maps for texturing from the high poly. There were so many small parts in the mesh which complicated the baking process a lot. I rendered out atleast 200 bad 4096x4096 resolution lighting textures that were scrapped due to me having some technical issues. I also used a color map to help with the texturing, it really helps when you have different materials on your mesh. The first picture below is the lighting map followed by a set of the final textures and a color map.

The textures ended up okay but they would be better if the mesh and UV map was better. The UV map is very inefficient so it doesn't look to good close up. You have to work with what resources and time you have sometimes though. And lastly the thing that you all have been waiting for, the final model. I added in a few neat screenshots I took during the process also, first two are in UDK, middle in max with wireframe and last two are rendered in Marmoset.

My final thoughts on the mech? Oh I don't know... I think the high poly looks great and the low poly is okay but the UV map is what I'm most dissatisfied with. I had to rush a lot of things with this model which ended up biting me in the ass but considering the time I put down I did an okay job. This mech deserves a lot more polish than it got and I might even go back and redo the lowpoly and the UV map but as for now it's complete. When I got back on track after being sick and rushed the process I was a self-loathing piece of shit because I knew every step of the way from the low poly to the UV map that I was doing it wrongly and poorly but I really wanted to have something finished in time.

I believe I captured the concept art pretty well. As it is now it looks good from an RTS perspective but not up close. This was intended to fit in a Battlefield 2142 type game so it needs to look good up close. I hope to revisit this model in the near future and give it the love and care it deserves. It's been a learning experience and great joy to work on. Thanks for reading!