Addon Developer Workshop

[Cabbagebasher!]

looking solid. not much to see modelling-wise (no wireframe no smoothing). although i'm a fan of putting a lot of detail into the model rather then the texture to give it a good silhouette myself, i'd suggest u bake those badges into the normal map. alone the contours of them take up so many polies. i don't think it's worth the effort considering the effect it will have.
what i would do is continue modelling them and even model every tiny detail. then bake it into a normalmap and use that on the model of the beret/cap or whatever u'll put them on. that way u'll get more detail and much less polies. baking flat stuff is fairly easy. check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFSXt...eature=related

P.S.: hope my english makes sense

thanks Bad Benson yep that make sence as i looked into a few videos my self,

well i decided to go with a Royal Fusiliers capbadge and hackle, making slow but good progress so hopefully have some thing to show at least soon

[Mach2Infinity]

I apologise for the quality. I've only started the previous evening and it's only to get the rough shape of the head:

Front



Side



Reference material:

(unidentifiedenemy.co.uk)


(from the Konami game)

Blender has been mentioned as a possible alternative/supplement programme. Is it worth it?

I've included additional photos merely for point of reference as not everyone would be familiar with them. I'm not sure how to proceed with the head. Whether I need a lot more points just to give a nice and rounded curve to the head? Or whether I need to use a feature/function which I haven't yet used?

[PuFu]

I apologise for the quality. I've only started the previous evening and it's only to get the rough shape of the head:

Front

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/555...admodel.th.jpg

Side

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2...dmodel1.th.jpg

Sorry to say mate, but at this very moment that is not a head, it is a blob...

Blender has been mentioned as a possible alternative/supplement programme. Is it worth it?

It's free....so sort of yeah, it is, that is a proper modelling software opposed to O2...(no pun intended, you will still need O2...)

I've included additional photos merely for point of reference as not everyone would be familiar with them. I'm not sure how to proceed with the head. Whether I need a lot more points just to give a nice and rounded curve to the head? Or whether I need to use a feature/function which I haven't yet used?

Quite a few more. Especially if you are gonna use it as a proxy (have a look over BIS human head first).

[Max Power]

O2 can be quite difficult to work with. If you keep at it, though, it's capable of producing some pretty neat stuff. I would look into blender, however.

[PuFu]

O2 can be quite difficult to work with. If you keep at it, though, it's capable of producing some pretty neat stuff. I would look into blender, however.

I really think that using O2 for organic shapes, such as the body of that alien, is like cutting your own and sticking them very close to the source of the said cut...
That said, for this sort of geometry, i would make a HP first, then retopo the LP. It should be a lot easier to get a proper high quality and detailed mesh

[Mach2Infinity]

Thank you guys. All constructive opinions are welcome, no need to apologise. I don't want to dilute the thread further, so I shall only post here next when I have something of a sufficient quality and standard.

[Rocket]

Most of the "look" of your model will come from the shader, i.e. the combination of the normal, specular, and fresnel. You need to give careful thought as to how you will create these. For most models, the appropriate way to generate this is to make a high resolution (in the order of 100k - 1000k polygons) model and then "bake" it onto your low resolution model. This helps with generating the diffuse, ambient, specular, and normal maps - essentially leaving you with touching up the textures once baked.

You're blob would then be exported into something like Mudbox, with the details carved out into a million polygon model. This is then baked into the normal map, and the ambient map.

In OFP times, you could get away with generating the model directly and painting the diffuse/normal yourself - but with the modern shaders it becomes increasingly obvious and can result in a very problematic look. Your 3D object essentially just provides the basic shape, with the actual detail being provided through the normal/spec/fresnel combination. Once you get this high -> (bake) -> low workflow working, the whole process becomes quite straightforward and it is a good way to model, even for low-poly simple objects.

Your high-poly model is generated any way you want, with no regard to UV space or polygon limits. You make the object "look how it does" in real life. This then allows you an excellent starting point as to where/how to generate your low-poly model. You can then assign you polygon budget more effectively, as you can see where you need to commit polygons. The further benefit is consolidating your textures and materials. You can lay your UV's out all at once, get the scale correctly assigned, and split parts out into appropriate materials, balance and adjust it all, THEN generate the textures. This efficiency really helps when assigning UV space.

Oxygen is then your "final step" in the addon development process, where you configure the parts, assign materials, test-and-adjust as necessary - bring it all together into your final addon.

[Alwarren]

Blender has been mentioned as a possible alternative/supplement programme. Is it worth it?

I use Blender myself. It works reasonably well, I use subsurfaces for modelling and then snap-to-object to remodel the low poly variant.

The most important thing is to use an external program (in my case xNormal) to bake the normal maps. If you do it with blender, export to O2, and press F5 to readjust the normals (since the export somehow messes them up), a blender-baked normal map doesn't work correctly, but xNormal's do.

[Max Power]

xNormal is a wonderful program.

[CameronMcDonald]

xNormal is a wonderful program.

+1. Also very good if you are just starting out and would like to easily make AO maps.