Civ: Seleucids

[nifa]

On 31/12/2023 at 3:08 PM, Stan` said:

Remesh will give you millions of polygons

I'm pretty sure the remesh modifier could also be used for retopology. Using low numbers in the settings will give you a mesh with less geometry than the original

On 31/12/2023 at 3:08 PM, Stan` said:

3000 tris isn't that bad considering it won't be displayed often, but given the above screenshots I'm feeling like there might be some places where you don't need the details.

 

19 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

@Stan` is correct here. Just 1 fully-propped animated cavalry unit can be 3000 tris. So, a stationary, non-boned mesh like this, which will take up the same screen space of 7 or 8 such cavalry units, doesn't need to be super low-poly. It's nice to reduce as many tris as possible, but it's a smaller concern than with an animated object such as a unit. 

that's a relief, I was a bit worried by the 2k tris in the original post

On 31/12/2023 at 3:08 PM, Stan` said:

I suppose the clothing wrinkles could be part of the normal map, and using an aomap the details could be put in the diffuse (for the people playing with material quality 1.0)

 

19 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I can see that the cloth hanging from his left arm can be reduced in complexity, much of the folding can be created with the normal map and subtle baked shadows in the diffuse map.

Well, there are only a couple of wrinkles that I modelled, out of like a million other. The problem for me seems to be that a lot of them aren't just subtle elevated, but are really 3D, so over- and underlapping and forming holes etc and it's screwing up the normal map baking.

 

19 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

But also, the penis doesn't need to be super high poly either (lol)

It's only 5 quads = 10 tris right now, luckily it's so small. I could spare some geometry at the balls though

[nifa]

high-poly thumb (508 tris)

low-poly thumb using remesh modifier (192 tris)

If someone with a high end machine would use these modifiers on the whole body and provide the blend data would be nice

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Hmm, thumb should maybe by like 30 tris. lol. I know it's hard to reduce a 290,000 triangle mesh down to a few thousand though. You're doing better than I would. 

[nifa]

haha thanks. That was just to demonstrate the possibilities. The thumb was a part that my computer could handle

[nifa]

original high-poly:

low-poly with baked normal:

current state of the art of normal map baking. Triangulate and shrinkwrap would make the waist fit better. I will see what to do about the errors

[nifa]

I finished the mesh, added a bow and managed to bake a good normal from highpoly from lowpoly.

I created this procedural bronze material, that adds green and different shades of bronze colours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89d4jXYTvN0

Diffuse baking also worked more or less.

I'm unsure about the spec map though, how do I bake that?

[Stan`]

It's inverted roughness (more or less). You can also try to combine the metallic but it won't have much added value. Spec map can have some color but not sure how long it will be supported (currently is)

[nifa]

what is left to do, is getting rid of those leftovers from the treestump and bake again. Some sharps are too much and they left bad marks in the diffuse (via ao). Will do the spec map then too.

I'm also not sure about the colours. Might be overall too dark, the green might be too strong in some parts. Athena in DE has some green shining which seems nice

What should I do with the platform? Leave or get rid of?

What's the desired scale? Same as Athena?

You can find it in the added mod in atlas under actors, sele/cult_statue.xml

 

apollo.zip

Edited January 7 by nifa

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Nice. I'd say get rid of the round platform (save some tris) and I'll use the pedestal I linked earlier. 

Using the Athena statue's diffuse map as an inspiration would be good. It looks pretty nice, so attempting to replicate that look would be very nice.

Desired scale is the same as Athena, yeah.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I can scale it however we need it myself, honestly. I'll probably use one scale for the DE cult statue and another to replace the statue in the Seleucid Wonder in the base game:

[nifa]

17 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Nice. I'd say get rid of the round platform (save some tris) and I'll use the pedestal I linked earlier. 

Using the Athena statue's diffuse map as an inspiration would be good. It looks pretty nice, so attempting to replicate that look would be very nice.

Desired scale is the same as Athena, yeah.

alright, will do. Athena looks nice, but I think I might go another way and give different parts of the body different shades of golden/brown/black. It seems that new researches are saying that even bronze statues were coloured by using different combinations of metals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riace_bronzes#/media/File:Experimental_Reconstruction_of_Riace_Bronzes.jpg

https://www.ronhenggeler.com/Newsletters/2017/11.6/Newsletter.html

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunte_Götter_–_Die_Farbigkeit_antiker_Skulptur#/media/Datei:Bronze_head_(Glyptothek_Munich_457)_with_and_without_patina_Bunte_Götter_exhibition_revised.jpg

I'll try not to make it too colourful, just a few nuances. Let me know what you think

17 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I can scale it however we need it myself, honestly. I'll probably use one scale for the DE cult statue and another to replace the statue in the Seleucid Wonder in the base game:

good call, I didn't even see that there is an apollo as well

[nifa]

painted Apollo of Belvedere:

https://antiquipop.hypotheses.org/eng/12501eng

[nifa]

While the model looks perfectly smooth in blender, I keep having little dirt and visible edges in atlas. I wonder what could be the reason? My normal and diffuse seem to be clean. Might have something to do with the smooth shading. What is the right material to use?

Edited January 11 by nifa

[nifa]

Apart from that, I'm almost done. Just playing around with the colours and might do some texture paint after the final diffuse bake.

I added a quiver with arrows, got rid of the tree stump and the platform, made a cage to bake the normal, did the baking of AO to use for the materials and baked the first diffuse.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Maybe gold for hair?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

12 hours ago, nifa said:

While the model looks perfectly smooth in blender, I keep having little dirt and visible edges in atlas. I wonder what could be the reason? My normal and diffuse seem to be clean. Might have something to do with the smooth shading. What is the right material to use?

@Stan` made a video for baking AOs

 

Though, as you indicated, face smoothing may possibly cause issues. I don't know. Maybe Stan can have some insight. 

[nifa]

like this?

I choose a different approach and used CC0 textures (from here: https://ambientcg.com/view?id=MetalSubstance008) instead of procedural materials.

Same problem though, looks fine in blender but bad in atlas. I'll have to wait for Stan. Also I'm struggeling with bringing the metalness/roughness to atlas, I didn't really get how to bake the spec map. Just baking a roughness map doesn't seem to work.

apollo-0_27.1.zip

Edited January 12 by nifa
added zip file

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Spec map we can use one of those Ambient CG textures and will look fine, in-game. I was meaning to replace the "generic" spec textures with new ones anyway. For the gold hair, I think the diffuse needs to be darker, similar to this (without the highlights):

Spoiler

Spec maps can have color, so the spec map in the hair area can be yellow, while the rest of the body is gray. So, you get a yellow shininess on a rich brownish diffuse (the hair), for a faux metal look, and the rest is just a normal light white highlight as if painted. 

[Stan`]

Can you show me the generated ao and the second uv map layout. Not sure i'll be able to access blender.

Also if you export the roughness map you need to invert colors. That's what I meant by 1-roughness.

[nifa]

7 hours ago, Stan` said:

Can you show me the generated ao and the second uv map layout. Not sure i'll be able to access blender.

I used the same UV map for both the diffuse and the AO. Should I not do that? Then put the AO as an image texture in node for the diffuse. Maybe I should use a larger margin when baking?

Edited January 13 by nifa

[Stan`]

Okay few things from looking at the DAE in that zip.

You need two UVs in order to be able to use AO. The fact it doesn't crash for you makes me think that either you got an error message, or that you might not have set the material quality to 10.

Second is wasted UV space, you want to have as little black spots as possible, you can probably rearange things so that those curved pieces take less space And yeah you can boost the margin a bit.

 

[hyperion]

1.) Smooth shading interpolates geometry during render, which isn't free and so the game engine doesn't do it as far as I'm aware, at least I never stumbled over code that would indicate otherwise. What you get is basically the same as flat shading in blender.

2.) While baking you have to set metallic to 0 from what I remember when experimenting a year or two ago, don't know why tho. Could well have been a bug in blender.

[Stan`]

6 hours ago, hyperion said:

Smooth shading interpolates geometry during render, which isn't free and so the game engine doesn't do it as far as I'm aware, at least I never stumbled over code that would indicate otherwise. What you get is basically the same as flat shading in blender.

Of course we have smooth shading Oo. Else barrels would look much worse. Units too.

 

[hyperion]

2 hours ago, Stan` said:

Of course we have smooth shading Oo. Else barrels would look much worse. Units too.

What would I have to change to make it work as this doesn't look like smooth shading at all.