Weapon Texturing Tutorials

Whenever I make a new model, I almost alway revert back to this tutorial to help me with texturing models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8oC1HsjOgk&spfreload=10

Results from exploded bake!

Using XNormal, these are the results of the exported bake.

Here is my basic color and normal maps. Using the Diffuse map I can then begin to create the emissive map and specular map.

Exploded bake procedures

Since the highpoly and low poly models intersect a lot at various spots, the best way to deal with this is by doing what is called an "Exploded Bake" to render out all of the ambient occlusion shadows and normals from the normal maps without overlapping.

Simply put, an exploded bake is just an "exploded" version of your model that all of the elements are spread out in the 3D space far away so no overlapping shadows show up on your texture maps

Low Poly Rocket launcher model

Here is the low poly or "in game" model of the rocket launcher. This model took about 7.5 hours to completely model and UV map.

Highpoly Done!

After a mere 20 hours of work, the highpoly model is complete!

The polycount.com references for highpoly workflows come in handy with projects like these

Some High-Poly modeling references!

Here's a great resource for some hipoly subdivision modeling techniques that will save you a lot of headaches.

NOTE: There are almost 200 pages of images, so have patience! Also, a lot of this will help you hipoly modelers in the future

FAQ - How u model rem shapes?

Courtesy of the great minds at Polycount.com!

Maya's UVW tools

When using Maya's default UVW tools, it can be a bit stressful. This is where I turned to custom plugins. In this case I will be using UV Deluxe 1.1. A custom UVW editor Maya Mel Script from Creative Crash. It makes life a little bit easier (hopefully) when unwrapping complex models.

Here's the basic UI. All UVW shells can be rotated, aligned, normalized, matched and scaled with the simple click of a button.

Here are the UVW maps for the rocket launcher. I made this texture map 2048x1024 to accommodate for the many pieces of the model. To suffice for this, in Maya you must shrink the entire UVed faces in the UV editor on the horizontal axis by 50% and center it to the 1024x1024 grid space. Once exported as a 2048x1024 pixel texture map it will stretch to the correct aspect ratio and pixel density.

Great Texture Library!!

CG Textures is an online database of textures and materials that are 100% free to use with any commercial project. This is a great site to bookmark!

www.cgtextures.com

 For this post, I will be modeling a missile launcher type machine for a colleague's 3D animation final presentation. Here are a few images that turned up on a quick google search that I might base my model off of.

Great portfolio web pages from various artists in the industry that I found helpful in creating my portfolio:

http://derrickb.net
http://www.dennisporter3d.com/jakobs.htm
http://crash-3d.com/supershorty/
http://www.marksneddon.net

These are mostly environment artists, which are the part of the game production pipeline responsible for creating levels.

Getting started on a process blog!

Here on this blog I will be posting a run through of some modeling techniques, programs, plugins and actual models. These will either be images, links to outside pages or renders of my work.

Stay tuned!

Here is the link to my online portfolio:

www.tonyd3d.com