I’ve been striving to improve my (horrible) graphics “abilities”. After what seems like a lifetime, I feel like I’m making some progress, and i’m looking for some feedback.
The image is a Unity rendered “Power Regulator” I did in Cheetah and 3D Coat, the greyed out cylinder is (hopefull) going to be a kind of transparent containment field (soon… at least that’s what i’m telling myself ).
When I look at that, I can’t tell if it’s 50ft tall, or 5cm tall. Consider adding familiar detailing to it. By that I mean things people recognize (even in unrecognizable objects), for example, screw heads, pipes, buttons etc. Whatever is required to help give it scale.
Even when used in an actual scene where the scale is obvious, the little details will help make it interesting.
Consider it’s age and history. Is it really old, or not well looked after? Maybe add some rust, or seeping oil marks. Maybe the paint used during manufacture has long since worn away from the edges, perhaps it’s been bumped into a lot by things. Add scratches, knocks and other damage. The amount of which would depend on how old it is or how well used or how likely it is to come into contact with the elements or other things.
That’s fine for texturing, as for polycount. Again depends on how big it is. You can get away with a lot through clever use of textures, normal maps, detail maps, slight reflections and so on. But don’t be afraid to increase polygons when you think it’s needed. Naturally if that object is small and something the player can pick up as an item, it would be fine. If it’s something the player can walk around, then more polygons.
Also consider -where- the player can get closest to it. If the player or camera will never get near to the top of the object, but spend a lot of time at the bottom, add extra polygons at the bottom, to increase the detail there. The farthest parts would be fine with less and textures will hide it being more simple up there.
Thanks for the feedback! It will make more visual sense in context of the scene, where it will be about 1.5-2 times bigger than the player character. The player will likely only ever see the side views (Possibly looking “straight” at it (facing the transparency tube). Destroying these will be one of the player’s main goals.
It’s low (very low) poly, for possible iPhone target (I agree I need to ramp up the polys for any other platform.
I have considered “aging” it a little, but you have no idea how hard it is for a coder with no artistic talent to get it to this point! I’m working on more details of interest from this point (once i’ve reveled in the moment of finally creating something visual I don’t feel ashamed to show in public! :lol:
Thanks again! I’m not a graphics artist by any means, so all input is helpful.
What you could do, for the aging. If you have Photoshop or anything with layers. All this would be in the shape of your UV map btw.
Place your underlying texture on a background layer
Place a “paint” layer on top of that.
Get an eraser brush that’s a bit grungy looking, and then start erasing your paint layer randomly around where the edges and corners of the models texture would be.
Clean it up a little, merge back to a single texture. It’s a, pardon the pun, “quick n dirty” method that works really well for dirtying things up, and can be used for doing various effects.
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