I think you need a good fundamental understanding of design if you wanna make some good mods. Try your best to understand how the original artists created, well, whatever it is you're creating. With this, you'd also want a pretty good understanding of painting, as you'll be painting quite a bit.
You can also get fancy with zBrush and sculpt high poly models for things like clothes and intricate armour. You'd use these models to "bake" it's lighting into your low poly model. This makes texturing a breeze, relative to hand painting anyway (unless you're Pik)
Go check out Arrimus 3D. He has hundreds of tutorial videos on YT that are very applicable to Brawl modding.
As for why I think the community is [censored]? Well, multiple reasons. One, Smash 4 came out (which will be amazing when back-porting is finished), and two, no one takes criticism seriously. Honestly, I've critiqued quite a few members in WIP Workshop and largely have been ignored. I know I'm not particularly active in the community when compared to others, but I have been lurking since the beginning of Brawl hacking; I know a thing or two despite not having anything to show for it.
Some times people can be mean about their critique. When I was younger, I made really [censored]ty guns in CS. Like, combining random things and uploading them. You can actually still find them on gamebanana. Anyway, criticism was really harsh on that site back then. CS: Source had just come out and 1.6 was slowly dying, though it still had players, and dedicated modders making very crisp, beautiful models. I wanted to join, but I knew basically nothing, and just fiddled around in Milkshape, attaching things in different places and seeing what it looked like. If I thought it looked okay, I'd release it.
Problem was, people were relentless with their critique. Some were nice about it, but others were pretty terrible. All of my bad skins are gone now (just checked) but there was one guy who told me to dunk my eyes in acid if I thought my skin looked good. Honestly, that's when I called it quits on CS modding. Granted, he did have a point because my model was absolutely terrible. His error, however, was not taking the time to actually correct me. He was one of the creators of one of the models I had used, and thus had a great opportunity to teach a random noob. Instead, he flamed me hard.
But, on the other hand, I took good criticism seriously, as it's your best learning tool. So long as you seek out the proper information and apply it correctly, you'll get better. Be it modelling, texturing, animating, what have you.
Tldr, always seek out criticism, whether it's light or harsh.
Thanks, I still haven't fully taken in that our stuff is used in other places either...
As for teaching, we'd love to teach you some stuff, considering you're the reason we even began rendering in the first place!
In general though, we've switched to Blender (with Cycles) since the first time we started. It renders nicer lighting compared to Max (at least for Smash-style stuff) and renders much quicker thanks to it utilizing CUDA cores.
For lighting, we use a 3-point lighting setup, we find that it lights models the way we want it to and generally works great for every character!
As for recolouring, what do you mean exactly? How we manage to come up with the original colour schemes?
Thanks for the info! It will come in handy whenever I start rendering again. 3-point lighting is what I orginially used when I first started, but it didn't give me the results I desired. This was in MAX though, so that's likely my problem!
Have you guys fiddled around with Marmoset for renders at all? Afaik it's a dedicated rendering program. I'm sure you could get some fancy results with it, though to be honest, your results so far hardly need improvement to begin with!
And yeah, I'm referring to how you guys come up with colour schemes. I have no problem with actually making recolours, at least the technical aspect of it. I just can't make a good colour scheme to save my life. I've used a variety of programs to assist me, I just can't get results I'm happy with a lot of the time. Part of the reason is that I rarely have time nowadays to fine-tune anything I make, so I haven't experimented enough with designing palettes.
Taiko and co, please teach me your recolouring and rendering ways. They're so good. I find myself just examining your recent renders nowadays. You guys have come so far with them that they're frequently used in media outside of the Brawl hacking scene... That still blows my mind.
This will help with your work, jokekid. It allows you to bake HW Ganon's original texture into your new model's UVs. Keep that cage tight and it will look good.
The problem is that you're not going to find tutorials on how to delete edge loops, or how to guess how a model is built and having the knowledge to reverse engineer it. These ideas come from having an understanding on how models are made.
It's not out of your league. Not gonna give you any links, but I hear there's a bay out there where you can find interesting modelling tutorials. I'd check there if you're truly interested in building a solid foundation for understanding how to approach projects like this (optimizing).
Basic summary on manually optimizing a model: build a new model underneath. Perhaps YouTube has some good tutorials on modelling a low poly silhouette from a high poly one. But as stated previously, they're probably going to be using a lot of tools and terminology taught in fundamental modelling classes. If you wanna model mucho bueno, start with the fundamentals.
You're probably not going to find a whole lot of edge loops. Models are heavily optimized when they're put in-engine, usually using a lot of triangles (which mess up edge loops). You'd have to figure out how the model was built by examining the mesh and figuring out where the original edge loops were prior to triangulation. You can then optimize from there. You can also do the reverse to upscale older models, like from GC games.
What you're doing sounds fine, tbh. If you cut the tri count in half then you should be good. If you still want other optimization methods try checking out Polycount: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount
Not the one I found, works perfectly fine, I've imported higher poly before. 12,000 polys is hardly ridiculous or the limit for Brawl. Rather this than another Shadow hack. FP? And I have no idea how to properly optimize them. Princess Ruto is only 12,000, the Great Fairy is roughly 25,000, which is insane. FP, as in, a thread on here that talks about it?
Welded vertices, managed to get the Great Fairy down to 10,000 polys with 8,100 vertices. Still looks fine.
Exactly. I'm willing to bet most playable characters in HW are fairly high poly, because Ruto's model is simple in shape in comparison to most of them. Take Ganon for example:
He has a lot of polygons.
FP is Facepunch. You linked to it earlier in the thread.
Problem with HW models is that they're incredibly high poly. Haven't checked them myself but screens of Ganon in Max I've seen look ridiculous, especially his gauntlets. Ports will likely have to be heavily optimized.
Check out the Model section of FP if you want to learn how to port em.
Amazing how I'm not bothered by the mapping, maybe because I thought there was no way for me to fix it, which is usually the case for me to become used to something that looks a little wrong when it comes to model imports. Anyways I'm going to try what you said to do, Gravity. Post Merge: October 05, 2014, 09:04:50 PMWell I can edit it, problem is trying to make it look good. *Messed UVs* Honestly I prefer the other mapping because it doesn't look like it was added on. If I go this route, that section of the nose looks like it was added on or a separate object. Does someone want to see if they do a better job at this?
Look up some tutorials on the UVW Relax tool on YouTube. It's used to evenly distribute UV topology. You'll need to create new textures, though (I hope you planned this regardless.)
I'd throw some money your way, sure. It just depends on what you're working on.
I say you should make a list of larger projects with monetary goals that we as a community can strive to meet. That way the more desired features can be completed before less desired features.
Personally, I'd be willing to pay a fairly large amount (~$100 or so) for an unrestricted costume engine. I know you can't do this though, as it requires modding Brawl directly...
You seem to have a solid base understanding of form, which is great. Unfortunately, your topology knowledge seems limited. I recommend looking up some tutorials on the subject, they will greatly help improve your modeling skills.
For example, his left arm does not need that many vertical edges. You can keep some where his arm will bend (otherwise he will look odd when animated, study some Brawl default models to see how the designers handled topology around the joints if you'd like some reference material) but other than that, you're wasting a ton of polygons. Same with the arm cannon, the rightmost vertical edgeloop is unnecessary. If you're using Max you can quickly delete these unneeded loops by selecting a single edge and clicking Loop under the edges sub-modifier of the Edit Poly/Mesh modifier. Use the Remove tool to delete them. (Note: the vertices will still be present, so you'll have to remove them as well.)
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