|CE3] Amir's Arenanet environment test
polycounter lvl 10
Decided to jump on the bandwagon and give it a try.
Currently modeling the house in maya and doing some textures at the same time.
House is being modeled seamlessly (one shell) for vertex colors usage.
Textures (wip) based on highpoly sculpts done in mudbox then put together in maya. I haven't started handpainting some details yet, this is just the bakes all put together in photoshop (AO, curvature,prtP,base color).
Currently modeling the house in maya and doing some textures at the same time.
House is being modeled seamlessly (one shell) for vertex colors usage.
Textures (wip) based on highpoly sculpts done in mudbox then put together in maya. I haven't started handpainting some details yet, this is just the bakes all put together in photoshop (AO, curvature,prtP,base color).
Replies
I'm gonna try the internship. Having the opportunity to work at Arenanet would be a great learning experience.
Day 2 progress :
Almost finished modeling the house. Currently at around 2800 triangles.
Still need to model some foliage, door steps, chimney and maybe later on add some decals if I'm still under the polycount limit.
AO is being handpainted and stored in the vertex colors.
Baking with mentalray didn't give me acceptable results.
Once I'm done laying out the UVs, I'll slightly deform some areas to break-up the straight lines.
im sure you'll kill it
Is there any reason why you modeled the low poly by connecting everything together? Instead of just having the two separate pieces intersect?
Just curious about what kind of benefits you get from that.
When baking colors to verts it is beneficial to 'stitch' the geometry together, this will allow you to get clean shadows(or other effects) where objects meet.
One drawback to vert lighting though is that you need more verts to support it. In this case he might run into issues with the large faces on the walls, since baking something to one of those verts will shade half the face. It is usually a good idea to try and keep the vert density consistent to avoid that.
The model could be like that just for presentation as well I guess
Haha, I was thinking about trying the art test, y'know for a chance to work at ArenaNet, but now there's added incentive knowing you might be there to share some of your landscape knowledge ; )
Anyway, GL!
It's basically a sculpt that he did in mudbox or zbrush, if zbrush he tiled it in 2.5D mode not sure about mudbox, then you get to render out the normal map and AO, you can also colourize it and add texture over it.
I also see some model parts repeating themselves on his roof tiles, so it's a small nitpick, but it won't be visible on the roof.
Madness!
Looking good so far! Just the model needs a little character shaped into it. It's pretty straight up and down looking. Sag some bits, bulge others, squeeze some lines in. Subtle things like that can really show its love.
Yea, its for vertex AO and to avoid light bleeding thought geometry in CE3
Thanks man, I think that we briefly worked together about 2 years ago, I couldn't keep up with the quality that you guys were pushing on Airborn haha.
Like Pix said, all I did was sculpt some damage on 4 or 5 tiles in mudbox using the layer system then export these individual tiles to maya where I placed them together to make a flat texture.
I took advantage of the viewport 2.0 and turned off 2 sided lighting to have the scene working at over 20 fps even when displaying over 15 million polys.
@Pix : thanks for pointing out those tiles, I'll fix that for sure. Wouldn't be too good to have repeating detail in a repeating texture
Thanks man, and yeah I'm planning to break up the straight lines as soon as the UVs are layed-out.
Rhoutermans, Makkon, Funky Bunnies, Selaznog, DavidBrumbley, JustinSlick, Alberto Rdrgz, ikblue : Big Thanks !
Today's progress :
I started sculpting the windows and door in mudbox.
I never sculpted wood before, its always a good thing to learn how to sculpt different surfaces for future assets.
Unfortunately most of the detail will be lost when downsizing the texture outputs from these highpoly sculpts.
I've spent most of the time doing some planning and trying to figure out how I can fit all these textures in 2x 1024x1024.
There is one thing that I'm slightly confused regarding the assignment.
I'm not sure if the texture requirements are :
For example :
2x 1024x1024 : Diffuse
2x 1024x1024 : Normal
2x 1024x1024 : Spec
Or all of it needs to fit in 2x 1024x1024 texture space.
If thats the case then I'll have to use mirroring on some textures which will lower down the final quality of the overall asset.
Good luck with this, looking good so far.
I'm realy just confused about the colorizing part, it has individual shingles, say for example in zbrush, I lay then out in the 2.5d veiw, I use the normal map matcap. So I can bake a normal map, how would I go about baking the AO without baking it from the normal and getting those colors in zbrush and still have the normals in the 2.5d veiw.
Sorry I'm fairly new to zbrush.
Hope that helps!
Choco, nice job on the door. Can't wait to see it textured! Though, I do feel the cracks in the wood are too deep
That's pretty much what I did, I didn't turn out good.
Thanks though.
I've quickly textured the door :
It seems like its all in 2x 1024x1024 texture space. Though I wish they would have made it clearer
It doesn't matter if they are 8x512 32x256 or so.
Sexual stuff.
I made the window textures today :
Need to add some dirt on the bigger window then I can call it done.
I'm planning to use some cubemap reflections once its in the game engine.
I made the chimney for the house, it uses 256x256 texture space, 90 tris and has some vertex coloring to add some color variation.
Also quickly made a smoke particles effect.
In-engine test :
Looks great so far. The metal for the chimney looks super great. Is it largely photosourced, or what? I'd love to hear a bit of your process as you go along making these things.
Thanks Joopson, I try not to rely too much on photosourced textures. I sometimes use them for adding dirt and grunge mostly.
Here is a basic setup that I use in photoshop :
Thanks man, you're stuff is looking pretty damn good so far
I've been doing some tests to see how the woodframe normals will come out in the engine.
I'm surprised about how well cryengine handles normal maps even in extreme situations.
I'm going to make a set of these frames in different sizes and use them for the house.
Ya you got a good point there, I've designed these textures to work well even when normal mapping isn't involved. I would've probably used less shadowing if I were working on UDK tho.
I've started to put togther the wood frame, the texture isn't final. I'll add some color variation once its all stitched together.
I'm using 512x512 texture space for the wood frame.
The set of wood planks is reusable, I'll probably use it again for the buildings that will be placed around the house.