Here’s the model (unrigged/untextured) for a future 3rd Person Platformer that I have been planning.
I just felt like modeling him. Maybe later I’ll toss him into Unity and do a mouse drag web player to show him off a bit further (and get Unity’s lovely smoothing on him). His name is Lux.
I’m all for simplicity! He reminds me of Sponge Bob Square Pants:) Looking forward to seeing how you texture/animate him.
Spongebob? Not exactly the look I was shooting for, but I suppose it works. 
His texturing will be mostly brushed metal for the body, hands, and feet. His legs and arms will be chrome. His head will also be brushed metal, but with eyes (either glowing blue, or empty holes. Empty definitely looks better on paper, but I don’t know how it’d look on the model).
What are you using to model him? Your 3D app should have a method for smoothing the Vertex/Edge Normals (and then when you import to Unity, that will carry over).
Also, just some suggestions, you could use a cubemap for the chrome parts, unless you really needed it to be accurate, you could fake it with something like this:
Just use PS to cut the image into six images to plug into the cubemap shader. One thing you can do is make all the images greyscale and bump the contrast some to darken it up, then apply a gaussian blur (between 5-10 works best); it will look close enough to chrome that the average person won’t see the difference, especially if you aren’t trying to go for a photoreal look. At Fullsail, my Shading and Lighting teacher told me that not until The Incredibles did you start getting actual ray traced reflections (with a few exceptions, like The Abyss and T2) due to the prolonged render times; they actually used the exact effect I am suggesting to you.
Blender’s smooth button is in the lower-right here:
I know, Jessy. But its results are unbearably bad, so why even tick it? Unity does a much better job with all my models on import.
Just curious, what do you mean by bad? I use Maya, and the smoothing between Maya and Unity is exactly the same. can you maybe post some comparison screens of Blender vs. Unity?
Unfinished cat thing from a while ago…
(Blender Solid, Blender Smooth, Unity; default light settings)
Ahh I see what you mean now…it appears the smoothing angle is rather odd or low in Blender, making the model appear to have weird faceting artifacts; I assume there is no way to change the actual angle? I know that in Maya or Unity, there is an option for this, and that it can really effect the way smoothing appears.
Yeah, I don’t know of any way to change it, and also, I like to be able to see my polys, especially when texturing. So I just leave it set solid in Blender.
Yeah, I understand that…I personally use smoothing with wireframes on shaded in Maya for the same reason…but you know, whatever works for you
The only thing that would irritate me about being unable to set smoothing angles in Blender is that it can be useful when you have objects that have a combination of smooth surfaces as well as hard edges (a simple example is a cylinder object, like a log), where you want some of the surfaces to appear round, and others (like the endcaps in the log example) to have a nice crease; if you could set the smoothing angles on a per edge/vert basis that would propagate to Unity. Other, more complex examples would be things like a sword, where hard edges on the blade would look nice, but smooth ones on the handle would complete the look, that sort of thing. AFAIK, Unity can either take the angles set in your modeler or override them with a universal smoothing angle when you import the object, but there is no way to select edges and set a smooth angle.
You can, of course, set individual polygons in Blender whether you want them smoothed or not. You just do “set smooth” or “set solid” in edit mode with the polygons selected, rather than doing it to the entire model.
–Eric
Personally, Blender’s smoothing looks great to me. It’s not altogether that different from Unity. What’s the big deal?
Blender will smooth like that too if you set your model up that way, instead of just smoothing the whole thing (which is like using Unity’s import settings to set the smoothing angle to 180, which will make the whole model look blobby in the exact same way). It’s frequently better to do the smoothing correctly in your 3D app, because that way you can specifically set what gets smoothed and what doesn’t, instead of relying on Unity’s automatically calculate normals settings. Those are fine sometimes, but other times you need more control, especially with complex models, where you can’t expect that the smoothing angle is always going to look right at 60 (or whatever).
–Eric
Whatever the case, I’ve never needed some parts smooth and others not as of yet (though I can imagine some times when that might be useful).
