Ditto on both remarks…
Ugac - Prop 102 - Ultimate Crate/barrel - James Kaufeldt
DL - 
James, the yellow middle metal part (wow say that 5 times fast) has the grain going downwards/vertically, I would make it go horizontally… because think if this big hunkin piece of metal was cut from…er… metal, it would probably be done lying down with lasers or a sand/water blaster or something similar which would result in the grain going horizontally (at least i think so…
edit: btw, ya you need to get some glowing lights on that baby! oh and you got a good doom3 vibe going on… I seen this one custom doom3 case mod that reminds me of your model… or perhaps that should be the other way around…
well either way… great job so far!
Geta-Ve - Good point about the grain direction… while I don’t really buy the technical explanation
it still looks better going the other way.
OK, I decided I’ve already spent too much time on this, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible, so I’ve just finished it up… admittedly there could be more work done on the textures, but I think I have learned a few lessons while working on this anyway, so - mission accomplished.
I understand there’s some sort of final submission thread coming up later, but in the meantime I’ll post my deliverables here as an official “I’m-effing-done-now” statement 
First up, the four rendered views:

And next - the wires:

The colourmap:

The normalmap:

Aaaaaaaand, the specmap

.
damm n blast, and ive just entered this too. love this create look very nice indeed.
would love to get my object up to this standard but it wont even be able to lick the boots of this one.
good work.
wow!! good stuff man!! … a real fast worker too… real impressive…
i starting to look real ultimate now all colored…
question… did u paint the normal map or u actually made a higher res model… hmm… i’m kinda new on all these normal mapping stuff… please educate me…
bow
okie… back to work for me!!
Glad you like it - and yes, I actually made a higher res model and rendered it out with a normals shader thingy. I built the high-res version (about 50.000 polys, roughly 100.000 triangles) using the UV-template as a guide, and just rendered it with a frontal camera.
Usually you would make your low res mesh, map some clean UVs on that, then build a high-res copy of it and finally bake the normals using something like Nvidia Melody or the ATI Normalmapper, but I didn’t really plan ahead on that bit, so my UVs were not clean enough (didn’t even try, but since I had a lot of UV overlaps, I was pretty sure that the bake procedure would fail… so I went for the brute force manual labour method
) I’ve attached a perspective view of the high-res stuff here:
thanks man… i really wanna try normal mapping now… sound alittle complicate, but very interesting… and top of all… it look too cool!! ![]()
Excellent work! Between this, Supervlieg’s bio-barrel, and a few of the other ones, I don’t think I stand a chance. Great all-around. ![]()
JamesMK excellent on the normal mapping, and creative technique… I’m going to use it sometime :)…
CROWDS WE HAVE A WINNER! HAHAHA
PS: I think i will join this comp after all, how much time is left? BLAA I go and check my self…
Hi James,
Looks great !
Just have to ask which “normals shader thingy” you used?! And where to get it? Per Anders´, DiTools or ?!
Cheers
I used the NLIN shader to generate the tangent map. According to the readme it should be available @ http://www.franks-planet.de but I’m getting a time-out… A search might reveal alternate locations. For the actual normal-mapping in the render, you’d have to use something like ParaNormal.
hey james, this box is a blast !
i think its most evil suppository i ever saw haha 
perhaps you like to make a small turnaround ani to see the normals and specs in action?

Made a Quicktime object VR movie instead:
http://web.telia.com/~u48040664/crateobject.mov
thx. that was fast. but are also normal maps rendered in this vr movie? seems to be pretty plain, isnt it?
They are, but they end up being pretty subtle with the flat default light, high compression and low resolution… I made another one first which showed them off better, but the file ended up being 15 megs, so I couldn’t be bothered posting that 
Nice movie you got there.
Just a though from looking at the crate. Maybe it could use a contrast color, like some red or blue striping to break up the greyishness.
