Advanced Hard Surface Modeling Assignment – Finish the Model

Last week consisted of me trying to figure out how to build the mech and what I needed to change in the concept to make it work. This week has been all about finishing the model, construction wise. By the end of last week I was basically finished with the model but I knew that I had made a ton of mistakes regarding clean up, since I’m used to make models for product rendering and not for games. The difference when I model for product rendering is that I can hide my crimes with the use of the camera and shaders, while the game model needs to work in 360 degrees without problems. 

The render I did for Trazie Inventions

This image above might look good and well done, but I have managed to hide a lot of mistakes with some simple trickery. For example, the keys in the background might not hold a matching resolution a (in both textures and polycount) as the things in the foreground. But no one will notice that since I used a depth of field effect. The sides of the objects that are not visible may not be textured or might even be missing! 

This kind of cheating cannot be used for games since the model could be seen from every angle, in every kind of lighting with all kinds of in-game cameras. So I sent the model to our teacher Nataska so that she could help me spot the mistakes.

What I mainly had problems with was n-gons, leftover geometry from beveling/chamfering edges and not using the ability to harden or soften certain edges. 

An n-gon is a polygon with more than 4 sides and can often cause problems when the mesh is triangulated or subdivided since the surface of an n-gon might have trouble looking smooth and it complicates the edgeflow of the model.

A Quad, a Tri and an N-gon

I suspect that the leftover geometry can be a product from beveling an edge adjacent to an n-gon since the new edge(s) created from beveling is connecting to nearby edges. In the picture below we see that the lower corner of the beveled edge has tried to connect the two adjacent edges, while the upper corner has none. This is not really something that renders the model useless in game engines but, as Nataska pointed out, this mech is made from a factory where everything should be unison and techniques should be similar. Why would a machine in the factory use different techniques when creating this indent? 

Fortunately Maya has a feature called “Clean Up” which can be found under the Mesh menu. This will mark and help you find n-gons and other things that might cause problems with your model. This is a feature I never used before until recently and it helps so much! 

So after spending a few hours trying to clean up the model, using some smoothing and hardening of edges and UV-mapping it, this is the result! I exported an .fbx file to unreal 4 to see how it looks.

If I could change anything it would be to add more detail to the underside of the legs to make it more believable and realistic. But I’m up to 14 000 tris now and 1000 polys for some wiring for 4 legs is not that much, so I’ll try to calm my perfectionist mind and settle for what I have and save the last polys for improving the model if something comes up!

Next time I will start texturing! This will also be exciting since I’m used to deal with larger sized textures and now will have to learn how to create some believability with limited resources!