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thepuglife

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Posts posted by thepuglife

  2. Posted

    It’s time for yet another long-winded post…except from me this time.

                  Let me first start by stating this; All of us here at ASTFOR have to endure the struggle of balancing academics, work, family, and our commitment to this mod, resulting in seemingly little progress over the past few months. Yet, with the holiday’s right around the corner, we are finally getting the much-desired time to continue progress with this mod!

    As excited as I am to continue working, I know my to-do list is endless, and the same story goes for all the modelers here at ASTFOR. Currently, we only have 3 active modelers on this team, and thus the 3 of us are forced to tackle multiple projects at the same time in order to meet our goals for the initial release of the mod. However, such circumstances bring various consequences with it. For one, it forces us to have to learn new programs, software, and techniques to reach the desired end result for a given project. While in the big picture this is far from being a bad thing, in the short term in requires us to dedicate a sizable amount of time to simply learning (which you become quite tired of as college students) and no forward progress with the mod. Next, overall quality CAN take a hit as you begin to overlook certain details to get things finished, and despite our desire to avoid this, it happens. Finally, and in my mind, most importantly, it becomes easy to lose motivation when you’re working your ass off but seemingly getting nowhere, which I have no doubt felt in recent months. As much as we would love to avoid this, it is inevitable with a team as small as ours.

                  Thus, I am here to ask the community for assistance. We are currently looking for anyone who has experience with 3D modelling, whether it be with 3DS Max/Maya/Blender/Zbrush/Modo/etc. By no means do you have to be an expert, trust me, I am far from one, we just ask that you have a level of proficiency to where step by step guidance isn’t necessary (for the most part, there are exceptions). However, we do want to emphasize the importance of dedication. Over the course of the 5 years this project has been alive, we have had countless experiences where individuals make promises then fall through, leaving us behind with nothing but wasted time and energy. If you know that this may become an issue, we kindly ask you to disregard this post. Additionally, if you happen to be working with another major project/mod, it would be in the best interest of both projects to not make another commitment, as in the end, we all do this in our free time for free, and thus it becomes to find time to produce results for two projects, which inevitably ends in both projects being left empty handed.

    Speaking from experience, trust me when I say that ASTFOR is an amazing team. The ASTFOR team is a wonderful group of individuals to work with, with a ton of knowledgeable, friendly, and dedicated people that no doubt make you better at what you do. If you are interested in sharing your modeling skills with our team or have any questions, please feel free to PM any of us, we look forward to hearing from you!

     

    • Like 5

  7. Posted

    I've been trying to bake picatinny rails where the teeth of the low poly rails are separate elements from the main body, but cant seem to get a good result. I don't know if I' not setting the projection cage up right or what. 
    I've searched the forums to see if I could get an answer but didn't find anything so if anyone could guide me on the right path for the proper workflow, that would be greatly appreciated.

    Current projection cage:

    LhgmCMh.jpg

     

  11. Posted

    I think the top gas-tube vent holes are worth having.

    But for any of those holes I personally wouldn't want them having more than 10 sides. Maybe up to 16 sides for the larger M-LOK type holes or vents or whatever they are, if 10 or 12 didn't look like it was round enough.

     

    I'd say if you were to get rid of any of the holes and rely solely on normal mapping, it would be for these ones:

     

    Mainly because the barrel occludes looking through those small holes anyway, and there's that countersink bevel around the hole that'd add a lot more polygons if you tried to model the bevel. The countersink would actually probably be the more visible feature of those holes when viewed in first person. More than the bored-out hole in the middle.

    Ill definitely give this a go, thank you!

     

     

    it really depends If you look at most game ready meshs you can see that these cut outs are just done with normal's maps which is a very quick way of adding detail that people will not see that much it also decrease the amount of polygons you need drastically. for instance most models of such as the SVD Dragunov RHS mod, Arma 2 SVD, Ro2 SVT 40, Ro2 MP 44 or what ever they call it will use normal maps to create faux detail which will give the illusion of there being a hole in the rifle. however normal maps will not work well for the rest of the hand guard.  PPSH 41 with low polygon game ready model with barrel gaurd which has real geometry { http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/groups/1/4/3541/thumb_620x2000/PPSh-41.jpeg} SVD with real geometry cutout holes however its not cut all the way through for some reason { https://sketchfab.com/models/141b93cd4611460c93d4352d64066eb7 } and here is a model with bakes normal maps cutouts for the hand guards. { https://sketchfab.com/models/fca62aea034b42739cad10cc624fa948 } as you can see with the model looking in typical first person view you cannot really see that it is real gemetry or a fake. smaller details such as those holes in your model which you pointed out would be better to just bake them on the low poly model with floating geometry... here is a good youtuber which works in 3ds max which can be later used for the much better 3d program also known as blender.    

    Ill leave the holes to the normal maps, thank you!

  13. Posted

    Thank you for your response!

     

    This is just the block out state of the model and therefore the entire thing consists of ngons, all of which will be dealt with when i move to the high poly.

     

    But what is your opinion of the holes I have circled here, you think they are worth even having on the model as I'm contemplating removing them all together.

     

    I am aware that its a civilian rifle and thats honestly why I chose it. Its different from your run of the mill M4/sr25/m110, which already exist in Arma in numerous mods, all of which being high quality with no reason to redo them.

  14. Posted

    I am currently modelling an ADM UIC 10a rifle

     

    I was wondering if someone with experience in weapon modelling could give me their input regarding the level of detail I should go into for the hand guard

     

    pics of hand guard blockout: http://imgur.com/a/k52hp

     

    Currently, I feel as if there is too much geometry wrapped up in the hand guard and was wondering if I should just reduce the geometry of the holes already present or remove the holes that really serve no purpose all together (such as those right below the top picatinny rails).

     

    Any input would be greatly appreciated.

     

    Thanks in advance, 

    ThePugLife

     

     

     

     

     

  16. Posted

    It is a bit too sharp for game engines where textures get mipmapped.

    I tried to fix somethings up, but not to sure how much it helped

     

    Baked the other normal map, its not perfect and needs definite fixing in certain areas. At this point, im thinking of redoing most of the lowpoly model to better optimize it and allow for an easier baking process...but we'll see 

    http://imgur.com/a/YY6zE

     

    For further down the road, I have no idea how to texture and have no access to photoshop, so that in itself will be an even bigger challenge

     

    As always, tell me what you think

  18. Posted

    It's possible but ideally you want to use as few texture panels as possible because each separate texture+material set you apply requires an additional draw call from the GPU. The number of texture+material sets applied to the model is referred to as the "section count", and is displayed in Object Builder along with the polygon and vertex count as in indicator of performance. High section counts and lack of resolution LODs are normally the #1 culprits when an addon model causes frame-rate drops for players.

    Using loads of separate textures is exacerbating performance requirements by the fact that you'll also have a normal map, [specular+gloss] map and ambient occlusion map for each diffuse/abledo/colour texture. So having a model with 2x abledo textures, would in reality require the game to load and render 8 .paa files on the model and having one with 3x textures = 12x .paa files, 4x textures = 16x .paa files etc. etc. Using fewer files is faster over all.

    What you'll usually find on weapons that have more than the 2 standard 2048*2048 textures, is that the additional 3rd, 4th etc. files are smaller ones which only contain UVs for model components that have specific shader requirements that aren't well suited tot the main texture. In particular this applies to alpha textures used on the model (you want to map any parts of your model that require an alpha channel to a separate _ca.paa texture, rather than use a _ca.paa for the whole weapon including the opaque body), or if part of the model requires an extreme change in its specular appearence that can't be delivered by the specular map alone (i.e. if you need a different fresnel value in the .rvmat to make a glass part really shiny where the rest of the model is more matte).

    If you want to make it easier to swap parts in your models my recomendation would be to map the elements that are common to all variants to one of the 2048*2048 textures. Then UV the alternating parts to the other 2048*2048 with a UV layout that makes it easy to cut up, move around and knit the individual texture elements for those parts together fit the UV layout of individual sub-variants of the weapon.

    It's still fiddly to knit averything back together, but it's doable.

    Noted, Thank you

  19. Posted

    1:2/2:1 rectangular textures work. So long as both dimesions are 2^n on any file (512, 1024, 2048 etc. etc.) everything should be okay, but I there is the possibility that odd ratios like a a 512*4096 (1:8) might cause problems.

    Personally I wouldn't bother with 4096*4096. The game can handle them but since the file sizes are appreciably large, they're usually the first texture that gets mipmapped in a scene when Arma decides it needs to use the VRAM for something else. You can end up with something that after a bit of play time, frequently looks worse ingame than if you simply used a couple of 2048*2048 panels to optimise the VRAM requirements.

    Looking at the game's files, most rifles and MGs have 2x 2048*2048 textures.

    Would it be possible to have different maps for the different parts of the model (i.e. handguard, stock) to allow for easier changes to the model?

  20. Posted

    So if you have little experience in modelling, then how did you make the model..

    I meant more in terms of the final steps of baking and low poly creation

     

     

    welcome to arma modding!

     

    that's a nice model for a beginner and i also really dig your avatar :lol:

     

    i think it would be best for you to get skype and join the "model maker" channel from this thread.

     

    https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/125141-skype-groups-other-contact-groups/

     

    lots of nice helpful people there that can help you out with experience, learning the arma specific quirks and stuff.

     

    as far as i remember you should be fine with 2048x2048 textures and double the size is probably fine too. arma does mipmapping so it will down scale based on texture settings per user. if i remember correctly square textures are a must (AxA and not AxB etc). might be outdated here though.

     

    but you can get more accurate info on skype. another benefit is that most of the time someone will be online so there is a always a high chance to get your questions answered somewhat real time. it's a great way to get a grasp of all the arma specific things and speed up the progres of getting stuff working and learning hte basics. documentation tends to be really scattered and often incomplete so imho it's the best way to learn.

     

    if you prefer the forums just go ahead and ask away. try to be a little more specific about what exactly you want to know.

    Thanks so much for the reply, Ill definitely have to check out the Skype channel 

  21. Posted

    Hello,

     

    I am currently attempting to bring my ACR model into Arma 3. As of now, I am trying to learn the basics of normal map baking and texture resolution size.

     

    Pics:

    http://imgur.com/a/zadJ2

     

    I have no experience texturing and only minimal experience modelling, so its gonna take some time.

     

    However, if I can overcome these challenges I plan on expanding this pack. 

     

     

    I do have several questions regarding what size normal/ texture maps I should use, so any tips would be awesome

    • Like 1
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