Week 2: Heavy Vehicle

This week has been a rather slow one, my flu has gotten worse and so has my production speed, i did however managed to finish the high poly model of the vehicle. I feel as thought i should have reached the unwrapping stage by now but i came across a number of problems in the high poly modelling such as the front roller connect on the side. This was a tricky shape to make both in high poly in low poly.

Secondly the cables on the roller were another tricky part. I was approaching them as though i was modelling a tree from the first year. in hindsight and also after talking to some of my colleagues the use of an FFD 3x3x3 modifier would have made this process a whole lot smoother. It's been a mental block.

Anyway i made changes to the wheel by reducing the height of the tread as it was previously very exagerated. The cabin and the interior is now all complete and the extra trimmings such as headlights, wing mirrors and window wipers really bring the model together and it's looking more and more like the end product.

I did some test baking on some simple cubes just to make sure I have the process down right. I have been trying Xnormal as a new method of Baking normals and ambient occlusion. I've watched many tutorials on it but i still get a wierd fish lip effect on my edges.

Low Poly, Low poly with Normals, High poly desired result.

The only way i found to resolve that is to put one smoothing group on the object and edit the normals by hand as demonstrated in Mike Pickton's edit normals video, as you can expect it's a laborious task just for a cube and I don't see a way of doing so with such a complex object like the roller.

Next week I plan to get the low poly model finished as it should be just simply taking off the turbosmooth and getting rid of the control edges. I hope to be unwrapping by end of monday and I should have it ready for texturing on wednesday.

It's getting close to the deadline.