organic modular technique
polycounter lvl 6
Hello all
Found a way to do organic modular work that produces an almost unnoticeable seam. At the moment I am just testing it on tunnels but it looks to be a viable solution for creating organic modular pieces. I have been searching for a while now and most of the solutions are stagnant and repetitive, this way you wont lose any detail but your parts will be modular and that was the goal: High detail & Modular
It means I can block out complete cave/tunnel systems, break them down into large segments and sculpt each segment in mudbox. After sculpting I load the high poly into meshlab just as you would for rocks only I flip the faces on both the high poly & low poly. This means you can sculpt on the outside of your tunnel/cave (inverting your stamps) in mudbox which is fast and painless and you can use really large segments.
I then load the highpoly into Meshmixer and cut it into smaller segments and do the same with the low poly. Then you uv map each low poly segment and bake them off the high poly.
The normal maps are very high quality as your using smaller segments of the original high poly sculpt but each part fits perfectly, modular thus !
Below are two 2k segments from a larger 8k tunnel and each segment has a 1k normal map and has 1.854 tris (this can also be reduced further):
and here is the seam (fully zoomed in here):
That seam is, in my opinion very acceptable :poly121:
This opens up possibilities for reducing repetition with organic modular parts as the cuts with Meshmixer are almost perfect. I can tell you that it is a tedious work flow but the end result means you will have unique modular parts for your levels and each tunnel / cave system will look completely different. For example you could export a mesh version of your terrain from your game engine and use meshlab to create a low poly version then use the low poly version in your 3d app to map out unique tunnel / cave systems. This technique also works on bends and the likes and does not have to be power of 2 as long as it snaps in your game engine!!!
When I am finished working it out I might do a quick tutorial as some of you might find a step by step guide useful.
Cheers
Found a way to do organic modular work that produces an almost unnoticeable seam. At the moment I am just testing it on tunnels but it looks to be a viable solution for creating organic modular pieces. I have been searching for a while now and most of the solutions are stagnant and repetitive, this way you wont lose any detail but your parts will be modular and that was the goal: High detail & Modular
It means I can block out complete cave/tunnel systems, break them down into large segments and sculpt each segment in mudbox. After sculpting I load the high poly into meshlab just as you would for rocks only I flip the faces on both the high poly & low poly. This means you can sculpt on the outside of your tunnel/cave (inverting your stamps) in mudbox which is fast and painless and you can use really large segments.
I then load the highpoly into Meshmixer and cut it into smaller segments and do the same with the low poly. Then you uv map each low poly segment and bake them off the high poly.
The normal maps are very high quality as your using smaller segments of the original high poly sculpt but each part fits perfectly, modular thus !
Below are two 2k segments from a larger 8k tunnel and each segment has a 1k normal map and has 1.854 tris (this can also be reduced further):
and here is the seam (fully zoomed in here):
That seam is, in my opinion very acceptable :poly121:
This opens up possibilities for reducing repetition with organic modular parts as the cuts with Meshmixer are almost perfect. I can tell you that it is a tedious work flow but the end result means you will have unique modular parts for your levels and each tunnel / cave system will look completely different. For example you could export a mesh version of your terrain from your game engine and use meshlab to create a low poly version then use the low poly version in your 3d app to map out unique tunnel / cave systems. This technique also works on bends and the likes and does not have to be power of 2 as long as it snaps in your game engine!!!
When I am finished working it out I might do a quick tutorial as some of you might find a step by step guide useful.
Cheers
Replies
I have been treating the highpoly sculpt cuts as "GOD" as this is of course where the normal maps are generated. The actual sculpting of this segment was done in under 3 minutes.
Below are 3 of the same 1k segment in modular formation and as you can see they are tillable, there is a slight seam as you can see in the last pic but you have to zoom right in to notice it. The segment can be pulled right or left and it fits perfectly, not bad for a sculpted tube :poly121: This means you can make different sculpt variations to lessen the repetition as long as you stay away from the edges, just as you would with tillable textures.
The low poly has been causing me a lot of headaches but I am working on the best solution to get the same result as the high poly. Decimated and triangulated low poly meshs are a bastard to work with but I am getting there. I should be recording a tut by the weekend.
Cheers
Pete
I am going to do some more testing on the workflow but cutting the highpoly in meshmixer is almost flawless and is tillable. Will be working on more advanced geometry this week to see how far I can push it but I will be recording as I go along this time.
To get the 1k segment from sculpt to what you see below (3x1k segments) takes less than 20 minutes and it tiles both ways, so it's a fast and effective way to create modular parts.
Cheers :poly121:
This is my first tutorial guys so dont expect anything wonderful but I did my best. Had a hard time talking & doing as I usually just have music on when I work. Some of you might find this work flow useful some may not. Sorry for the sound quality but you should get the drift.
Cheers :poly121:
Intro:
[ame]
Part 1:
[ame]
Part 2:
[ame]
That's too bad, it looks like a very neat worklow.
Going to do the lot from start to finish as there are a few "enhancements" that make the work flow faster. I will just make one vid the next time !!!
So all is not lost
The bend idea is madness as I just spent a day trying to come up with a way to get a high poly "bend" bake. Unless you have access to NASA's computing power you can forget it, even trying to duplicate a 1kseg in modo is just impossible to do without a massive slow down. So I figured I would just go with what I have. Duplicated the 1k high poly ( after the seam fix ) in Meshmixer and created a 2k segment painlessly, exported that back into modo, remember we are not moving or editing the high poly again so modo can handle it without the slowdown, made a simple 2k tube with 8 sides and zero deformation (as you can see in the pic), baked the 2k highpoly onto the 2k lowpoly and then bent the lowpoly copy to 90 degrees and below is the result on two 2k bent segments:
You can see the compression and expansion on the sides but it's acceptable imo and once that lowpoly has had some deformation it will look proper. So you can imagine the possibility's here. Keep in mind that you don't need to cut everything right down the middle, as long as the modular cuts are rotated correctly that's all that matters.
So the solution was very simple thanks to Meshmixer :poly121:
The mic should be in on Saturday and I will redo the tut at the weekend with proper sound this time, I will also cover the "bends".
Cheers
Why not make some tiling sculpts on flat planes, bake those out to normal/diffuse/specular maps, then make your lowpoly tunnel segments using tiled UVs? You can avoid repetition by painting some vertex alpha to blend in different texture sets (rocky wall tile, wet streaky wall tile, sandy floor tile, etc.).
You wouldn't want unique sculpts for the whole tunnel system, that would blow your texture memory budget right? Unless you were using virtual textures.
I know I must be missing something here, sorry for the crit.
No worries on the crit :poly121:
The whole idea is based on the normal map or several variations of normal maps that are modular. You can of course use flat planes and derive the textures from that. If you have a few unique high detail sculpts that are modular that's really all you need, in fact one sculpt is enough as you are just adding and or removing detail as long as you don't go over the modular ends.
So it's really just a way to achieve a high level of detail for your normals. Anyway i will put it together again and you guys can dig in and see what you come up with.
You could call it "flamboyant" normal map creation :poly124:
Really looking forward to V2.