Results 1 to 1 of 1
  1. #1
    slugheady's Avatar ୧༼***༽୨

    Join Date
    May 2009
    Posts
    5,703
    Thanked
    219
    Thanks
    1,414
    I'm going to give some basic information on how to judge a 3D model. I'm going to take some examples of my own, and other peoples work that was submitted to the "Create a weapon" challenge.

    Generally, there are 2 main things you need to look for when rating a model. 1: The edgeflow of a model 2: the texture of a model. Outside of those two points, there is also polycount and texture size but these are different in certain situations.

    First off, let me talk about edgeflow, the word itself explains what it is about. A 3D model is build out of vertices, edges and polygons. These are 3DS max terms, some may call them different. Edges are basically lines that connect every polygon to one another. the "flow" of these edges must be correct in order to get a good looking model:


    Thats a basic 3DS max teapot, in the wireframe you can see everything is connected nicely.

    In this scenario you can see the edge flow gets interrupted and causes strange lines.

    You can also see the polygons (the squares) are no longer smooth and disrupt the geometry.

    I'm going to show you my model that I submit for the challenge, and as you can see in there (most of) the polygons / edgeflow is correct:


    Now I asked Google if it would be alright for me to point some mistakes out in his model, in order to show where mistakes are made.

    As you can see in this screenshot (sadly there is no wireframe), you notice that the object is build out of "flat boxes". This technique is very simple, however he disrupts the edge flow by moving edges / vertices into wrong positions, and that results in the polygons being moved into positions that makes it looks weird.

    Here you can see an example of a polygon that is incorrect (1st) and correct (2nd). You can see that the first one isn't having the line into the centre, but they both make the ^ shape. As much as it looks alright, its not.

    The second important part is the texture, I'm going to take mine as an example and Google's as well.

    Here you can see that google applied a texture on each polygon. It also shows a bit of the edgeflow mistakes as well. You can see the polygons don't connect, which makes it looks... well yeah, not too pretty.
    There are several techniques to texture a model, the most used one is to unfold a 3D model into a 2D picture. This process is very tedious and not a favorite of most designers. However, I always say that 50% of the model comes from the texture.

    Here you can see my "unwrap" from my spear:

    Here is the texture:


    As you can see, I painted everything manually (except for the logo). You can also just use bitmaps, that doesn't really matter. Designers should always try to apply a decent texture to their model, this should also be accounted into a vote.

    I made this thread to help you choose a winner on the next challenge. This wasn't made to undermine Google's work, nor was it made to brag about my spear. If you have any questions / suggestions regarding this subject, let me know.

  2. The following 3 users say thank you to slugheady for this useful post:

    GeorgeGFX (09-24-2013), Izzat (09-24-2013), Mike (09-24-2013)

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)