Some props

[SM Sith Lord]

This summer, instead of making any maps or coding any mods, I'm making props for a L4D2 campaign that somebody else is working on. The guy needs an insane amount of props to pull the campaign off, so I try to keep a steady pace of about 10 props a week for him. He sends me a description, some reference pics, and a bounding box for scale for each prop he wants.

Tips and criticism about the texturing would be especially appreciated because I am pretty new to drawing them. Nothing is baked onto the textures, they are all hand drawn. Usually the photoshop file has a base layer with the textures, a full color lighting layer I use to colorize the texture, and a black & white lighting layer for painting on specular highlights and stuff.

[Epifire]

Those are some really good props dude. Your work seems to do best with the more wood objects but that is all decent stuff for as many as you are making.

[Sathor]

They look good, but aren't some of them a bit on the high poly side of things? Especially the size of the props, which we can only guess, sometimes doesn't seem to match up with the amount of polygons used.

[SM Sith Lord]

They look good, but aren't some of them a bit on the high poly side of things? Especially the size of the props, which we can only guess, sometimes doesn't seem to match up with the amount of polygons used.

Good point about the variation on detail. Some of the props (even the small ones) are much higher detail than others because they are safe room props. People usually spend a long time in the safe room checking stuff out very closely as they wait for the rest of the players to join, so it seemed like the props used in there should be extra detailed.

As far as having to guess the size of the props from the screenshots, that does seem problematic. Maybe I could try including a humanoid shape in the screenshots for scale or something.

[Gary]

[...] Especially the size of the props, which we can only guess, sometimes doesn't seem to match up with the amount of polygons used.

Haha, this is left for L4D2. It has the fast path rendering. These few thousand poly props won't affect the framerate in the slightest. Maybe if you got an Intel GPU...


Anyways, these look great. Both the textures and meshes.

[MaK]

I'm sure this guy really appreciates your work. Good work on everything, and especially the pacing of 10 props a week. Keep up the good work!

[Jangalomph]

Awesome looking stuff!

[Dives]

I'm sure this guy really appreciates your work. Good work on everything, and especially the pacing of 10 props a week. Keep up the good work!

Hah I bet the guy who is recieving these Disneyland props is totally appreciating the work.

[Kosire]

Nice, 10 props a week is pretty good.

But 1024x1024 for each prop seem a bit excessive don't you think? Also I see a few textures where some faces could have been used the same spot in the UV to save space. Like on the lamp, two white faces for the lamp. They could have used the same face there.

You seem to be best at doing wood texturing, and overall the style of the props look perfect for a cartoon/disney land/team fortress 2 enviroment.


Keep it up!

[Epifire]

I see nothing wrong with 1024x1024 textures as long as you don't mind the increased file size. Honestly I applaud you, because most people like to keep Source in the same sort of constraining box it was limited to years ago.

I think Source works best when you can sort of picture frame things design wise. Basically to where you have a limited amount of the level rendered as much as possible, and fill framed area with some great detail. With some of the recent work in Left 4 Dead maps I really have been wanting to pick that up.

[Howser]

love the character of the models! Textures seem a bit too photoshoppy/hand painted for l4d, working in more localised grime and some photo textures to make the detail frequencies a bit more realistic is all they need. Otherwise great stuff! Get them in game sir.

[brerben]

I see you are a Disney fan

[Garrador]

Nice work indeed!

Here is some feedback;

I see a _lot_ of improvements that can be made to the triangle count. Even if the engine handles it, you should really consider improving your workflow, as this is excessive.
There is a reason for why bumpmapping and shaders alike were invented. Always reduce as much as you can without making it look bad.

Like the monkey's lips (and other parts on him) for instance. Those need not be geometry at all. Two words: bump map.
Not sure about it's size in-game, but from the looks of it, it's not that large, thus less detail is needed.
Consider a few factors:

- If you like small details like that, like I do, create a HP model and bake from that to get nice, accurate normals.
- If the prop is large in size, more detail is needed (depends on the complexity of course)
- If the prop is small in size, less is needed. Then you could do most in the normal map, as it will be hard to tell the difference in game
- If the prop is a typical "fill-space" prop, like a lantern, twig cluster, food can etc, avoid any details at all, really. Normal maps will suffice for the most part, as long as they are really small in size. Larger fill-in props obviously demand more detail to look good.
- Look at your prop's edgeflow and geometry and decide if some edgeloops can be removed whilst still retaining it's basic shape. I see tons of edgeloops that can be removed on every prop, plus rounding off a lot of concave shapes and utilizing normals instead.

All in all, you can greatly reduce the polycount whilst still retaining the shapes you want. Utilize normal mapping and specular highlighting (+phong)!

For the texture maps: Some of them are larger than necessary, but often the diffuse makes up for extra optimization on props. Just make sure the resolution and detail-level is consistent in game, and don't get a ugly contrast between a small "useless" prop, and a larger more dominant one. Have it uniform across the board!

Also, for small props that are almost always used together or in the same area (fill-in details), try mixing the UV's of them all into one, a tad larger texture sheet. Takes the engine less loading by only loading it into memory once, than several pieces for several small props.

The diffuse painting itself is excellent! Love the style of the models and the texture, so quality is not the issue at all. Just consider the more technical parts of it as well.

- Oyvind

[MrDetergent]

I don't exactly like the art style of props, but the props seems very professionally made. They seem like they would belong in a kid game like Donkey kong, Crash bandicoot Course or the Nightmare Before Christmas. Hell they even might fit at home in team fortress 2 if they were lambert shaded only.

All in all, you can greatly reduce the polycount whilst still retaining the shapes you want. Utilize normal mapping and specular highlighting (+phong)!

Did you know in Source engine when normalmaps are used the per-vertex lighting gets disabled? Its pretty much a crippling issue if you're trying to use static props with phong shading and bump mapping.

[kraid]

Some really nice work you got there.

While i have to agree that some of it could be a little more optimized geometry wise, the polycount vs extra texture maps and more expensive shaders isn't always an easy decission.

e.g. if you're doing a console exclusive game, you're very limited in texture memory but they're optimized to render as many polygons as possible. So in fact most of the console exclusive games have a higher polycount on models but use less textures for effects such as normalmaps and less complex shaders.

Even on Pc there are big differences between the engines.
Source for instance has always been a little less focused on normalmaps then lets say UnrealEngine 3.
While it's possible in UE3 to use very low poly characters with a single smoothing group and apply all the details with the normalmap, source needs much more shape definition since it doesn't blend large and smooth transitions very well.

Just look at valves own models, they use a very high polycount and if they have a normalmap at all, it's used for small surface details and structures rather then faking larger geometry details.