This is my thread documenting my progress in the Collab2021 project -- more to come (soon!)
Everything is baked except the ring boards, which need to be completely redone cause they look like hot garbage.
Possibly restack stones, combine and lattice them.
So much to do still.
I hope this looks better with a coat of paint and proper materials. I've always struggled making things look decent in Eevee. Autosmoothing on? Autosmoothing off? I don't know what to do with these normal maps to make them look decent. Hahah
lucky Thanks! I don't feel that great about it still. I really hope paint pulls it together. The struggle is still very real.
I feel like I started to get the hang of sculpting this kind of stuff toward the end.
But as normal maps, none of it looks that great. Eevee's render engine seem to accentuate pixelation that isn't visible in viewport. My lack of experience using normal maps probably has me expecting to pull too much out of them with too little geometry, and too little texture space.
lucky Specifically, all the cracks in the wood look fine as sculpts, but when rendered as normal maps they all seem to pucker.
But you can tell, there's just too few pixels. And my UVs are pretty crammed in.
How large is your texture map? I think I'll go for 4k because of smaller will probably give pour results with baking. I still am organizing my scene before starting baking. Hopefully I can show something tonight.
spikeyxxx Not literally, but certainly in effect. If you're taking an object that is inherantly more smooth because its been sculpted, and applying its normals to a low poly mesh, attempting to hold those low poly edges sharp is going to fight those smoothed details. So that's all I was pondering.
lucky I'm using 2048 cause that's the current permitted size for us. But I should probably rebake everything 4k and reduce the size after the fact.
The puckering isn't terribly surprising when you think about how the maps work, and would probably look better as displacement because you get more control over the level of depth. The cracks I have are inset really far and sharp compared to the other details, so striking a balance is kind of hard with a normal map. Notably, combining the normals with AO attached for height yields noticeably better results.
Still working. Will try to have this properly submitted by Tuesday.
Everything is baked except the outer rings. I need to remodel them, and thus I don't want to move on to painting quite yet. There are two problem areas in the normals that need fussing with still.
I painted one piece to submit as proof of concept.
At 2048 pixelation is still pretty bad on the normal maps, but it hides in the paint pretty well. Using AO in the strength node softens the harshness of the pixels. But then that's a whole extra map being used.
I'm posting this now because I don't think I'll have a chance to finish today, but will update this post when I have the time to finish.
Just finished baking the normal map. I think 2k is acceptable but I'll probably make a 4k for the beauty shot.
lucky It looks amazing! I'm pretty torn with where I'm at. I really want to start all over. I've learned a lot about this entire process and what works and what doesn't.
There's a number of things in my model that have slowly become a mess. I had intended to use some nails, bolts, and brackets in places, but the way i busted the wood up in sculpting makes them not work anymore. I could maybe save myself by retopologizing the sculpted pieces combined with the extra hardware, and bake onto that.
I'm guessing that my bake results are subpar partly because the lowpoly should be retopologized to fit the sculpts better. I think it further suffers from there being more parts taking up real estate in the UVs. Which would also be solved with retopo.
But my work schedule has picked back up, and your model is immaculate. So I really just feel kind of defeated. Will eventually finish just for the sake of finishing. 🤷♂️😭😅
@lexicolopolis Thanks! It was a bit of a struggle because my model was just too high dense. In total my file was almost 5gb. So it was a lot of waiting.
You could just add some nails and bolts on top of your sculpted model add bake them into your normal map. That's what I did. I also retopologized my rocks, you could do that with your model and the bake will improve a lot.
Always finish... the learning experience is what matters 😊👍
Wanted to update so that no one thinks I've given up!
Went back a few steps, but tested my new methodology and it all successfully bakes way better.
Need to resculpt some things, but that should be pretty rapid at this point. I should be all caught up and finished by tonight or tomorrow morning.
Woooooooo pine wood derby!
@theluthier After I take a nap I'm planning on finishing this up and syncing. Sorry that I've avoided it so long, it just feels daunting for some reason.
Still working.
Staining wood, adding grain sculpt, latticing rocks.
Then combining everything to remove all the excess geometry from using duplicates.
More to come soon....
UPDATE: I synced a master file. I'd like to optimize the geometry more but I probably won't have time. The changes I'll get done today will all be in the texture maps. Though I might tweak the rocks more. They look weird in the assembly lighting.
Beautiful, but... it has to turn to the other side. 😁
(The same thing happened to me)
(Struggling to get the lighting decent on there though)
@theluthier
Well, it's been a wild ride everyone.
Files are synced.
It could be optimized a lot more, but I'm generally happy with it's current appearance. If I find time I might go back and rebake everything into an even further optimized mesh. My original thought was that doing things this way would give me more texture space, which it does, but at the cost of a loooot of geometry. It can be instanced from very few parts though.
Special thanks to the wheelheads ( lucky ladymito 
rationalrats ) for all your feedback and support!
If anyone wants to follow me on IG I'll follow you back. I'd love to see whatever y'all work on next! https://www.instagram.com/p/CObE4-KjSB5/?igshid=1llq6vkmgu42v
Looking forward to seeing the end result of the project!
