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.