Recent model. Suggestions? Crits?

**Xezor1324** · August 15th, 2008, 03:57 PM

I'm trying to learn 3d modeling in 3ds max and this is the latest model I did. I guess it's low-poly? Not a lot of detail, but I don't really know what that term means

I'd love to hear what you guys think. What I did wrong/right or should change.

Some info:
4 hours total
texures painted in photoshop
stone texture from picture (I took)
no interior
The second pic is rendered in bryce. I tried rendering it in 3ds max but the edges where really blurry. Not sure why.

This was really just practise. No real goal in mind :/

**krisCrash** · August 16th, 2008, 05:35 AM

Push 7 in the viewport, that should count the polys for you? I don't know where the line between high and low poly goes though :3

I like the model, very idyllic. But your textures look a little too repetitive in the tiling. If you want it as a backdrop for something, you might even want to make the texture larger and softer. A thing you might want to look into for more realism is bump maps for the rocks (so you don't have to model individual rocks in the fence) and straw roof (did you experiment with the Hair plugin for that? Might be fun!). Most straw roofs I've seen were far thicker, but if you followed a reference I'll shut up

Nice work

**melviso** · August 16th, 2008, 06:31 AM

First of all,Nice work.

Everything looks good but the shape of the roof seems unusual in the second pic.At first I thought it was made of cloth but looking at it now its straw.I would suggest you try using an aluminium,abestos or tile roofing sheet.I think it will look way better.Just use bump maps on the roof material to give it that corrugated aluminium look if you decide to use an aluminium texture for the roof.

**krisCrash** · August 20th, 2008, 03:02 PM

Good suggestion, a likely replacement while still following the theme would be a slate roof.

**oalexis** · August 21st, 2008, 03:08 AM

major problem i think is with the thatch roof, just get some refrences for that and it should be good. the texture is very yellow for a real thatch roof, and thatch roofed houses don't have gutters like you have modelled. heres 2 quick picks to illustrate

**S!R** · August 21st, 2008, 05:52 PM

Nice work.

I am new to 3dmax as well, you might look into using alpha planes to make the edges of the roof jagged and such. That's what I did to this roof...
If you have any questions as to what they are or how to us eem, PM me Id be happy to explain.

Just an idea. Keep going, keep progressing, keep asking questions..
Cheers

S!R

**S!R** · August 21st, 2008, 05:55 PM

Can we see your texture maps too?

**CouchPotato** · August 22nd, 2008, 01:19 PM

Hello!

To Xezor1324:

What low poly means is that you generally try to achieve your model with as little poly count as you can. Well, you generally want to do that in all cases, but a low poly model is usually meant for use in special circumstances, such as the model being in the background, and not very noticeable, or that it's to be used in some kind of game environment.

A low poly model is not built with subdivision modeling in mind. Meaning you do not add the extra edge loops for caging. Hopefully you know what subdivision modeling is (In max, you add a turbo smooth modifier). You also have to think hard about what this model is meant for. A good rule of thumb is to keep examining your silhouette, and keep asking yourself if whatever detail you have in the model is noticeable at whatever distance this model is going to be used at.

So, what's leaping out at me for being really wrong would be the roof. I don't know what the concept for this house is coming from, or what reference you are using, so I can't comment on the shape or the look. But definitely, the topology of your roof is quite messy. From your screen, it looks like you got a lot of n-gons going. N-gons are the faces that makes up your model that has more than 4 sides. You always want to try and keep everything in quads. If you really really REALLY have no choice, you settle for a triangle, but you never ever have anything more than 4 sides. It messes up the smoothing badly, and can cause all sorts of problems later in the pipeline.

In your case, I would go back and re-topologize the roof and make it all quads. It should not be too hard, it's all flat surface and nary a curve on it! No smoothing to worry about either haha. Just remove all the additional and unwanted sides or merging vertices.

Just hazarding a guess here, since you didn't show your texture sheets, but feels like you just stuck a planar mapping onto whatever surface and slapped a texture onto it, probably tiling it when it comes to the roof and the walls too. Before you start texturing, you should put a checker map onto your model and try to tweak the UVs so that all the checkers on the checker map is squarish. It doesn't have to be an exact square, and not every square has to be the same size as the next, but you should try to get as close as it is possible to a square and as similiar a size as you can get it.

The reason for this is so that you don't get weird stretching of your textures like you have there in the stone....thing. Like the chimney. Dunno what those are called lol, we don't get houses like that where I live. And you want the squares to be as close in size to each other as possible because you want your textures to stay in the same scale as each other. You probably don't have bump and spec maps either, but that's like another story for another time lol.

To S!R:

Seems like a good start! I should just say, it feels to me like it might be possible to squeeze all your UVs into 1 whole texture sheet. You have a lot of empty space in that sheet, and you can squeeze a lot more into the layout. There's also this circle thing in your texture sheet that I don't see anywhere on your model. If it's not doing anything for your map, remove it lol.

My last comment is, and I'm saying this blind, because I don't know what your ref is, but the straw texture you have on then roof? The straw bits feel like it's a tad big. I think the scale of your textures for the straw roof is maybe bigger than the rest of the house. But again I could be wrong about that because I don't know your ref.

Till next time!

CP