Working on the high mesh first, then i will merge up the vertexs until i get something around 4 or 5k tri …
Those are really nice. Are they for game cut scenes?
good work
Drew
the model is the high poly version that i will project onto the low poly normal map , however the low poly one will be able 5k so it will have a lot of what this model has …
i guess the more i look at it the more the legs just need to be fully covered with armor … the spindly legs showing up just doesnt give the armor a strong look…
The modeling’s good, but the proportions really unnerve me. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be an alien, though, so I can’t honestly say.
Just wondering. Is that a Space, above and beyond alien? I think they called them “Chiggs”. Just something about the shape of the helmet…
Either way, it’s a great model. Can’t wait for the game!
I like those legs! keep it up…
my opinion: makes the forarms gigantic, like big pummelingfists or whatever, think that would look good.
right now the arms are a bit too short…
so i tried enlarging the proportions of the legs a little … i agree the proportions are off any suggestions ??
also the other option i have is to completely cover it with armor with no exposed arms or legs ?
No, I don’t mean muscle mass, I mean body proportions and structure. Try comparing an ortho to one of those ‘perfect proportions’ diagrams.
Be sure to keep the hi-poly model as well. You can use renderings of it to make textures for the lo-poly version.
The model looks really good but getting this puppy down to low-poly ( 4k to 5k !! ) AND getting a good look using a normal-map won’t be easy. This model has many edges and pits/heights all around.
1 Like
ammusionist: thanks for the comments, i remember that show space above and beyond it was pretty good i cant really remember what those aliens looked like though:)
blackboe: your right the arms are definately shorter, when i get around to it i will fix that also the waist is too skinny … however im still debating on whether i will keep that or not. im also going to fill out the exposed part of the body with armor hopefully that will make the whole fit better together …
odjin:
yes what i will probably do is cut the model up into pieces and render the normal map like that and then reasemble it altogether as final composite normal map 
i wish there were some better ways to generate normal maps so far 3dsmax produces the best looking normal maps and you can also render ao maps for specularity that you can pack into a dds texture which makes the normal map look really good…
No, I referred to the match up of the high resolution to the low resolution mesh. The mesh is very curved with many details standing out a lot from the base line. Normal maps only work good on situations where the height difference of the low resolution triangle to the high resolution mesh are not too huge ( also angle to the normal should be not too huge ). Hence you need there a lot more geometry detail in the low polygon mesh than expected ( most probably from the look of the mesh ) to get a working normal map out of it.
i wish there were some better ways to generate normal maps so far 3dsmax produces the best looking normal maps and you can also render ao maps for specularity that you can pack into a dds texture which makes the normal map look really good…
It depends what you require. There is ORB, the ATI normal mapper, Melody and DENormGen. All should produce good results if your meshes line up the way I mentioned above. Just don’t expect miracles. Somehow people always believe that normal mapping is the holy grail but this is not true. Normal mapping can help to improve lighting on models but the meshes have to be crafted in a special way to make this work ( except for flat world textures where anything works ).
your totally right about this mesh being hard to get a good normal map out of, i know since ive tried most of those programs youve talked about except the one you made (gl with your game btw). So far ive settled on zbrush for useability with creating normal maps and 3dsmax for the best results so far. i was however not talking about using an automatic normal mapping utility as those always produce bad results, i was talking about cutting up the mesh into multiple pieces so that it will be easier to mess around with the ray cage that is created in 3dsmax so that i can reduce the wobblys and missed ray hits that will most certainly result from a mesh such as this. although i will also try zbrush’s zmapper utility have you ever tried it? of the automatic normal mapping utilities it is the best by far.
i personally think normal mapping utilities have a long way to go in terms of useability and results well just have to wait and see what people come up with.
In fact this is wrong. The problem exists with the normal mapping technique itself and not the applications. The generators all work with the same principle of ray-testing with more or less optimizations. The problem though is how your mesh looks like. Like mentioned a normal map is only good for faking “small” perturbations on the surface of the mesh. Go outside of the sane range and everything will fail ( not only generators ) to produce a good result. It really all breaks and takes with how the meshes line up. In general normal map generators ( or geometry normal generators like I call them ) produce very good results with the right meshes thrown at them as they are pure geometric tools.
What goes for the zmapper in zBrush I can’t say much about it as I don’t use proprietary software for development. I guess though that it is on the same level as the others as the generation technique itself is rather simple and you can only diverge by using speedier algorithms, using doubles or doing some post-processing.
Kinda looks like masterchief
you should probably not write off zmapper until you have tried it and have some valid arguments against it 
it consistently produced the most accurate normal maps with the most minimal of effort it worked for better than anything ive used although i still need to try out your normal map utility of which i am very interested.
speaking of which i wanted to ask you a question, what is the possibility of getting certian features added to your normal mapping utility? the 2 features are being able to manipulate the ray cage by hand in blender and also using vertex groups to constrain which polys can be hit by a certain ray … so your low poly and high poly have matching vertex groups and the rays that are cast will only hit the polys that match up based on vertex groups ?
if your interested in this please pm me so we can get a hold of eachother … i would also be very curious from a modeller standpoint what the reason is behind why zmapper works so much better than others (we will work out how you can observe it in pm).
so interested odjin?