I haven’t modeled much in the past year so I thought I would give it a whirl today and see how well I could do. I chose a simple yet slightly complex object, a pumpkin. The goal was to make a low polygon object that could be used as an asset to my current project that is only in the paper design phase.
I thought I would upload a screenshot to see what others thought. In your opinion how did I do? Too many polygons? Too few? Does this look professional in your eyes? Constructive criticism welcome. Don’t be afraid to say it sucks. I am not a professional 3D artist and have learned everything I know from playing around in trueSpace for 5 years. I might post some other art I have done to see how well it holds up in the public’s eye. I personally can’t judge my own work, as once I create something I think that there is another better way I could have done it.
No texture for it yet, that will be coming soon.
Modeling time: ~10-15 minutes including trueSpace crashing on me multiple times.
I think it looks well, you could even use your wireframe for textural reference, the way you set it up (using the lines for where the grooves of the pumpkin are). The low-poly seems reasonable for any game engine.
It looks good. I have to recommend you try to harden the edges that go into the pumpkin, and soften the edges that curve out. Though, you may have already tried that and it just doesn’t work because of the low-polyness. In that case I’m sure the texture will go far to achieve it anyway.
Maybe it would be interesting if you tried to make the surface flattened out and then create your detail with a normal-map.
It might make it look better that way.
It would likely look better with lighting, but it would probably increase the vertex count by half or so, which isn’t worth doing if you want the count this low. I agree on faking it with the texture; paint in some nice ambient occlusion in the indentations.
Did you know most pumpkins are very round and have small grooves? For some reason when modeling them people tend to exaggerate their features, which is good. It makes them more interesting. Case in point:
Your pumpkin looks almost identical to the Ordon pumpkin.
I got a basic texture, I think it works for my art style for my game. I am not going for HD graphics, just enough to get the point across.
The pic uses the toon/basic outline and and plane diffuse. I am trying to figure out how I want the object to look in game. Which is better toon, or regular?
In the second pic, the right has a bumpmap the left one does not.
Playing with the scale in Unity. The model stretches nicely. Aside from being able to cut out about 10 triangles per top, I am satisfied with my pumpkins so far.
EDIT: Uploaded another of the pumpkins with bump-mapping.
I personally like the “toon” pumpkin better. I also think the bumped version looks better than the one on the left.
Either way, I believe you need to pull those ridges of the pumpkin in a bit to give them more depth, OR use some light, painted shadows or lines in your texture to give the illusion that it goes in further. Right now, it’s looking a bit flat.
The model is good but you need to work on the texture.
I think you should paint the form and shading in much more. I always do my texturing with 100 percent emmissive. If it reads like the object I want in that state i know its gonna work. Otherwise you end up with just surface detail and siluette.
Well I am using a toon shader on the object witch does cut down on some of the detail. I fleshed out a basic test map showing a tentative graphical style for my project.
Edit: My graphical style will end up being similar to TF2. Very gestural and colorful.
I love the TF2 artstyle good choice! As you said textures are quite low in surfacedetail in TF2 (not alot of grunge and dirt but kinda clean) but the models express the form very well from texturing, baked ambient occlusion shading techniques and so on
I didn’t mean to add more surface detail but rather paint out the shading to express the form abit better. Of course one could do that with more polygons or a normalmap but often it is not the best choice. Using the texture to paint in the polygons you can’t afford is a way of looking at it I guess be it small details or a smoothly curved surface.
Ah ok, I better understand now. I will see what I can do. I’ll have to throw the texture on my desktop with its Intous3 6x11 and play around with that. possibly tonight I may add some more subtle detail to flesh out the object a little more. I would adjust the polygons but if I bring the ribs in on the pumpkin anymore Unity ends up shading it improperly.
The skybox is the default Unity one with three filters - Dry Brush->Posterize->Fresco I forget what levels it was for each. The filters in Photoshop are all powerful. It’s how I made the skin for the pumpkin as well. I let the filters do the brunt work by combining them then I tweak here or there as I see fit with my Wacom tablet.
And the colors are so much more faded here at home on my 23" HD monitor with my GT240 1GB graphics card. I will make those textures pop more for the pumpkin! My laptop showed much deeper tones which looked nice. My next post should contain my last revision of the pumpkin. If I spend this much time on a pumpkin, how on earth will I ever finish this game project lol
lol