Russian Airborne Armour Project

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

Hey ppl,

been silently at work and have some more update screens [ HERE ]

Its turning into something along the lines of "Making Of" and I must say its motivating me quite alot. Im trying to lay out some tips along the way but if people have question I think i could answer them too.

Cpt. FrostBite · February 25, 2003

Hey, nice blog!!

Keep up the great work, because it looks very nice! The BMD-1 is a very nice little vehicle. I like the kind of low-intensity missions with light armoured vehicles and these type of light vehicles are perfect for this.

It's also very nice of you to explain your work a bit on your blog. Addon-making has not become easier since OFP. I used to be able to make some nice textures for OFP, but for ArmA I'm completely lost and it takes much more time to create a nice addon.

Edit: Hej, je bent ook nog een mede-kaaskop Tof!

Gedis · February 25, 2003

looking great, how else I can be usefull in terms of data? Â

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

the info u sent me was great gedis. especially the modelling magz. Do you have access maybe to the assembly sheets of plastic model kits? that would be awesome.

@frostbite

Im russian but i live in rotterdam en ik spreek wel nederlands dual nationality baby

Edvri · March 28, 2008

Looks nice keep up the good work and

ga zo door hÃ©

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

Quote[/b] ]the info u sent me was great gedis. especially the modelling magz. Do you have access maybe to the assembly sheets of plastic model kits? that would be awesome.

so Gedis any word?

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

More news and pictures plus an indepth tutorial on how to bake Ambient Occlusion maps in 3dsmax. Have a look:

PICTURES TOO LARGE TO POST HERE

Gedis · February 25, 2003

ironically, i can't provide you with such... i modeled plastic military stuff in ages 12-16...

there goes my weakness, as data/info provider Â

btw, frontal PK MGs should have round outside holes(i think)

MehMan · November 2, 2006

Heh, shows how much I know, I used to bake my textures using a simple skylight and the light tracer.

nephilim · August 22, 2003

@soul_assassin

very nice

2 notes tho

before you bake youre AO, make sure you have the smoothing groups set up correctly. otherwise you might get faulty surface renderings.

also

why dont you bake your AO map with the normal map applied on the low poly.

it adds several details.

+ the cavity map can be simply taken from the normal maps blue channel.

its more or less exactly the same.

aswell, you of course can port it over to zbrush for detailing..

but adding scratches and such is far easier to do in photoshop and most of all alot faster and generates exactly the same results.

trust me iÂ´ve tried it.

cheers

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

thnks for the tips nephilim.

the cavity map plus the low poly AO combined should do the trick baking normal AO.

About the zbrush: it gives a much nicer and more interactive experience to sculpt it and i can argue that it can be just as fast.

nephilim · August 22, 2003

aye

however you just need to take care of the polygons being pretty even and same sized for sculpting + you have to boost up the polycount pretty much upwards to do really fine sculpts as scratches etc.

but sure works good for dents and so on.

cheers

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

aye
however you just need to take care of the polygons being pretty even and same sized for sculpting + you have to boost up the polycount pretty much upwards to do really fine sculpts as scratches etc.

but sure works good for dents and so on.

cheers

Quote[/b] ]polygons being pretty even

right now that is of the main concern. sadly the way its topologised now is giving problems so I might have to rethink it. What I have thought of is sculpting a few detail things on a plane (scratches, welds, hinges and so on), rendering out the normal map and then compositing all the bits and peices.

nephilim · August 22, 2003

yes that would be the best.

specially organic things (eg the welding seams) can be sculpted.

but scratches :P meh

just make sure you set the correct orientation or else youll have to mess around with the normal maps channels

max power · May 18, 2005

For scratches and all that microdetail that may or may not show up properly on your normal or specular maps due to the resolution of the map, generating a 1 billion poly sculpture is probably not worth it. Â Such detail is going to increase the computational complexity of the normal map generation process, and you're running the risk of out of memory errors and having the thing take a lot of time to generate, etc.

Hinges and can be modelled on. Â Hinges are no big deal to model and you can probably get away with just modelling some hinge-like structure and having it hover over the other geo. I, personally, wouldn't try to sculpt that but it's not an unlikely thing that you're a more skilled sculptor than I am! Â I can use Zbrush but I try to do as little as possible in it. Â It is like brain cancer to me.

You can also quickly sculpt some portion of a weld-looking thing in zbrush and generate a displacement or normal map from that portion, then copy and paste bits of weld map around your model's uv in the form of a map and blend them together. Â I suggest displacement maps because they are easier to understand and modify in photoshop. Â Then convert displacement to normal map, and blend that into the rest of your nm and voila.

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

i tested the normal map stencil generation and it is quite accurate but tricky to get the orientation right, so going to try disp -> normalmap

nephilim · August 22, 2003

you might also try to apply a disp or bump map onto the hi poly model and then bake the normals onto the lowpoly.

this gets the orientation right without having to worry about the normals channels.

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

here's a wild idea. i take a square plane object in zbrush, apply the uvlayout or the diffuse map even better on top of it as a texture (its own uv should by default be [0-1][0-1] thus the whole uv space), sculpt and voila, the placement should be in the right places as well as the orientation right? should work i think, basically the same thing as drawing normalmaps in photoshop but with sculpting tools.

what do you think?

max power · May 18, 2005

I don't fully understand what you are attempting to do but I'll do my best to give you thoughts about it.

Last I saw, zbrush's uv layout is not very usable for humans to paint on... and the uv layout will not be correct unless the two objects you are transferring between have the same vertex order. You may be able to take a portion of a pre unwrapped model and delete or mask or hide the portions you're not working on, though, and the uv layout would be preserved. This would be useful if you are encountering problems with mesh density for a large object when working on small details.

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

I don't fully understand what you are attempting to do but I'll do my best to give you thoughts about it.
Last I saw, zbrush's uv layout is not very usable for humans to paint on... and the uv layout will not be correct unless the two objects you are transferring between have the same vertex order. Â You may be able to take a portion of a pre unwrapped model and delete or mask or hide the portions you're not working on, though, and the uv layout would be preserved. Â This would be useful if you are encountering problems with mesh density for a large object when working on small details.

its not the mesh densities thats the problem. its the topology: triangles and quads of different sizes. Let me describe what i ment with my method:

1. create a plane in zbrush. It has one polygon in 1st subdiv which takes up the whole uv.

2. apply the diffuse map as texture to the plane. The square texture should take up the whole plane.

3. sculpt

4. bake the normalmap into the UV of the plane BUT since its layout is 1x1 in UV space then the positions of the displacements should correspond with the diffuse map i overlayed.

Im somehow convinced it will work. Will test it in an hour or so.

nephilim · August 22, 2003

mesh density is very important on sculpting mate.

eg if you have higher densities in some areas than in others you might get very fine scructures in one spot but very sluggish ones in areas where the polys arent dense and even enough, which will might render delicate scratches into really broad valleys.

the topolgy basically goes together with the density.

at this point you would be forced to create a new hipoly model just for the sculpting part, as editing your current low-poly would eat up just as much time.

Quote[/b] ]Last I saw, zbrush's uv layout is not very usable for humans to paint on

depends on your uv

if you unwrap it before sculpting its no prob, but if you let zbrush do the UV its just a plain mess...

anyway go ahead and see what you come up with.

sculpting on hardsurfaces makes sense of course and everyones got a different approach on that matter.

but boosting up the mesh density to be able to sculpt such small details is pretty perfomant.

aside from that, such things are really barely visible in terms of zbrush vs ps.

aside from that.. zbrush sucks hard.. give mudbox a go

rocket · June 11, 2007

Agree here, Mudbox really is the way to go. I use UVLayout for mapping my UV's. Its a great program for getting everything sorted, then I do my painting in Photoshop and Body Paint. Any organic mesh i need to sculpt I do it in Mudbox. Thats how I did my Snow units you see in Spirit's Watkins map.

soul_assassin · May 4, 2002

It worked! a little tweaking in zmapper and the method worked! I'm quite happy . Orientation is right shadowing looks good .

Ill post some screens later and maybe tell about the method i used, but so far I've never heard of anyone doing it this way.

About Zbrush/Mudbox, I've worked in both and I gotta say out-of-the-box like zb better just because of the visualization and some brushes that arnt in mudbox. Also i trained in ZB so its much faster for me. In either case if you know what ur doing then I dont really believe it makes a difference what u use.