Tips, tricks and any Help for improving 3d Files.

[Aoiken]

Hey Im just looking around for tips on adding detail from prints or how others have gone about printing their helmets. So far I've messed around in blender and found some tutorials on taking the game assets and slicing them into pieces and stuff to make it printable. However, the model is very rough, and doesn't have a lot of detail. Looking through the game assets I noticed a lot of the detail are in the normal maps, and textures. I talked to some friends with blender expedience and tried to use modifiers to pull the detail out of the normal. However, because the normal map wasn't super hi-res a lot of the detail just kinda garbled the model. Ive tried taken the model and attempted to use the various smoothing modifiers to wrangle it to a decent shape, but without any luck.

So any recommendations? how have you guys made models for this stuff so far? Did you leave it simple and add the detail by hand? Did you design the helmets, armor and props by hand instead of refining the game assets?

Thanks!

 

[macktruck]

Well, there doesn't actually seem to be much unique detail the normal/bump map adds to the helmet. For the most part it only really smoonths over the edges. There are a few rivots and vents , but those may have to be done manually. To make the low polygon models seems less rough a more smooth you need to change as much of the triangles to quads. Try learning about faceloops and edgeloops. Faceloops is essentially a string of quadrolaterals and most game assets are desighned this way at some point. Unfortunately computers only understand triangles, and so those game aseets created using quads are converted to triangles for the game engine. After converting as many of the triangles as possible (ALT J shortcut) try applying the subsurf modifier. If you want specific edges to be sharp, apply an edge crease. Here is a current project I'm working on, you can see the original on the right and my derivative work on the left.

 

[Aoiken]

Hey thanks for the Reply! I'll look into face loops and edge loops. Some of the detail on the Normal map, like the rivets, I didn't really care to put in the model, and would instead prefer to just use real hardware since I think it'd look nicer, but I did want to try and take any of those creases and fold in the model that I could since I wasn't sure id be able to replicate it perfectly myself.I'll give adding in all the detail I can a shot just trying to edit the mesh myself. I wanted to try to save time, and make use of the modifiers since it seemed easier, as well I've got no blender expedience except what I've tried over the past few days. Any good blender tutorials or introductions that you'd recommend?