A try at modelling - WIP

[HornetMaX]

Seriously nice. Only the triple clamps look sub-par (they look just grey and flat).

[Blackheart]

https://www.youtube.com/v/InmJmso1aB0

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G

[h106frp]

Seriously nice. Only the triple clamps look sub-par (they look just grey and flat).

Noted, i will give it a tweak, maybe add a tiny bit of reflection for more like this

[Napalm Nick]

I have to keep looking at those 'clocks' they are truly awesome 

[matty0l215]

Very impressive mate!

Looking forward to the finished bike

[h106frp]

Seriously nice. Only the triple clamps look sub-par (they look just grey and flat).

New discovery=more work     

Ambient occlusion maps are fairly straightforward in Blender 



Wish i had worked this out earlier but first trial in game and it does look very cool, just need to work out how to get colour back now. I am guessing either multiply it with a coloured image in GIMP or paint an image and use it to generate the AO map in blender. Anybody know the best (easiest) method?

[Hawk]

Have you tried using "CrazyBump"? It's a great piece of kit for easily producing all the type of maps you'll need.

http://www.crazybump.com/

Hawk.

[Blackheart]

Seriously nice. Only the triple clamps look sub-par (they look just grey and flat).

Wish i had worked this out earlier but first trial in game and it does look very cool, just need to work out how to get colour back now. I am guessing either multiply it with a coloured image in GIMP or paint an image and use it to generate the AO map in blender. Anybody know the best (easiest) method?

I think PS or similar and play with fusion methods, multiply maybe will give the result too dark 

[h106frp]

I have been using normalmaponline - its free 

This is a bit different, the AO map is produced by ray-tracing the model surface in the 3D app and baking it to a new texture. The resulting colour gradient map is a key to areas that should have graduated ambient light (shadowing) due to obstruction from other model parts. Its a fixed shading texture (takes quite a bit of time to compute) but combined with the GPB shaders the effect in game is pretty good.

Problem is i am not quite sure how to easily add colour. In an ideal world i should be able to add it as a shader in fbx2edf but i have not seen it documented as a possibility. Other option is to add it as a paint shading effect to a standard texture but i am no digital artist - i guess their must be some way in gimp to multiply 2 textures together.



@matty - thanks, thought their must be a way, i do not have PS but i will see if i can locate an equivalent GIMP plugin

[Blackheart]

If you want send me me the 2 pic (texture and AO map) and do some testing, in Juju tutorial indeed was missing the last step, but I think you can easily get a good result. 

[Reactive]

at work we using Substance painter, 3dMax, Knald and xNormal for baking maps. try xNormal just for interest.

[h106frp]

@Blackheart, thanks, i will need a day or two to make a proper texture as this was just done very quickly trying to work out how to do the AO baking. I though i must be missing something from the Juju tutorial. Did he just apply it to the standard texture map as shading?

@Reactive, i have a reasonable baked AO map from blender render- i just do not know what to do with it next. I have seen some references on the web that it is often mixed with the specular shader to save texture memory but with reduced lighting accuracy. GPB cannot use shaders applied in the 3D app, only the ones processed by fbx2edf from the .shd files.

[Blackheart]

@Blackheart, thanks, i will need a day or two to make a proper texture as this was just done very quickly trying to work out how to do the AO baking. I though i must be missing something from the Juju tutorial. Did he just apply it to the standard texture map as shading?

I think this, maybe it is not the best method but it is certainly very quick 

[Hawk]

If I could just bend your ear for some advice H. 

When I put the .shd text file into the source texture folder; if I then select the parts of the 3D scene I want to export to .fbx format, will the .shd file be exported too? Or do I have to export everything in the scene for that file to be included?
I'm just wondering how the fbx exporter will know to include a .shd text file in the export for the FBX2EDF converter to then have it in the fbx exported file to recognise? 

I ask because the .shd file doesn't seem to be making any difference to the rendered scene so I suspect it's not being applied and therefore isn't being included in the fbx export from Maya? 

Hawk

[h106frp]

I have only used the standalone fbx2edf converter with .fbx export from Blender and the rules i have used are;

a) export the UV mapped model geometry only, do not pack the textures into the .fbx. The reference for the texture files then becomes the original directory & filename you used in the 3D app to map your texture to the geometry.

b)place the .shd file in the same directory as the original texture, the name must be exactly the same as the original texture but .shd (i have only used targa textures). This is how the fbx2edf converter detects the shader 


c)convert file but ensure that you let fbx2edf re-calculate normals to apply the modified normal vectors.

The thing that caught me out at first was the way the .fbx references the texture directory location and is also used by the converter. If you want to be sure for your 3D app, export an fbx in ascii format (i normally convert a binary) just so you can read through. Towards the end of the .fbx file are the locations of where it expects to find the texture files.

I usually start with just the specular shader set to shininess=1 as this has a very obvious effect on the texture in game