RTS style models project - 18th Century China

Josh Winn

For part of my demo reel I decided to do a set of models that are geared towards being used in an RTS. Namely, a few buildings and sailing ships based on historical reference from around 18th Century China. I am going to be working on improving the quality of my texturing especially. I'll be posting updates in this thread, and appreciate all criticism and comments (I love your honesty polycount ).

Here's the first model that I am about to start texturing. It's based off a watercolor done by a traveling artist in 1800. The planes on the roof tips will be copied to the upper levels, and the paper lanterns will be duplicated around as well.

dom

looking good. first thing i noticed was the scale between the steps and the rest of the model. the steps are really huge compared to the entrances, if you had a human model climb those stairs, he would need to have really really long legs...or an elevator.

RickA

I think it looks great. You could leave the steps as is though I think, although it would depend on what kind of style you're shooting for. If you make the steps to scale, they will barely (if at all) show up on unit like that. The steps as they are now should show up fine, and give the clear impression that there are steps at that point.

Josh Winn

Hmm. Yeah dom you're right about the scale being a little off there. Looking at the reference again, I think the problem is that the doorway is not as high as it should be and that that whole first floor needs to be scaled up a bit.

Ghostscape

The scale between the stairs and the door is off, but if this is for an RTS that might work out - the scale on some things in C&C is skewed to make up for the fact that the infantry models need to be large to be visible. Still you would probably do better to make the stairs smaller.

Master_v12

i think your modeling looks great but you should hit up tilable textures instead of all having all polygons have their own texture space. It will save you some time and your pixel density will increase while keeping your texture space low doing great!

Por@szek

Looks very good, both uv and modelling.
Waiting for textures.

Jacus0

Very Nice...Model Looks great. Can't wait to see the texture

Jeremy Wright

To re-iterate Dom's comment, the stairs are off. I work in a drafting firm and the average door height is just less than 7 ft, the max stair riser height is 7 in. Without having seen your refernce, I think you could probably just double the number of stairs and be ok.

Josh Winn

First pass on the texture (not done). I havn't dirtied it up yet, and the bricks were just started.

Por@szek

Sweet, roof looks very impressive.
I love those tiny rings, haha, great touch.

parasyte7

Looks pretty cool man.

Josh Winn

I'm just about done with the diffuse. Any suggestions on how to improve it?

The bells don't look quite right from certain angles, and I may do something to try and fix that, though when the camera is zoomed out to your usual RTS distance they look fine. Because the stone area under the stairs doesn't have it's own texture space, I may throw a transparent plane in order to have a little shadow under there.

I'm still messing with crazybump to try and give it a decent looking normal map...I have to figure out the best way to render/view it and manually edit the normals so it doesn't look like crap . Is there a way to view the opacity map with the normal map in the Max viewport?





Did anyone notice I had put 2008 on there before? lol

Pedro Amorim

onde word. awesome!

Pavel

yeah..this is awe-some!

Spark

Looking sweet Josh, only comments I have is that I would prefer the roof in a red, but if you stick with blue, maybe taking a few of the details and popping them a bit more. As alot of your colors have the same continuous value throughout. Also the circle icons on the windows feel lonely, so either carry some of that detail down througout ( although this might get to busy ). Great work, but you also might want to look at how you layed out your uv's, you had alot of areas that you could have mirrored, to help you gather some more precious realestate for the larger items ( things that you could have mirrored are the
windows/door/rooftop/sidewalls/fence/and stone doorway trim ) Just something that I go by, is if I start to mirror my texture, I stop and rework the uvs, or make the other side varied enough to make it worth the uv space.
Just had to comment, as this reminded me of how I had to look alot at my uvs and to push them more to help me on some of the buildings I had to do for Age of Empires 3, and Warchiefs. Hope that helps, and seriously..nice piece.

Spark

Josh Winn

Thanks Spark. I really like the stuff you did for Warchiefs. I've actually been looking at your work (no texture sheets?) and Jason Salenbach's from Age of Empires 3 to get a general idea of the texture usage and layout.

In retrospect it was probably unnecessary to have the different colored wooden panels. I also could have inset the dark areas for the open windows. As for the mirroring, I was trying not to chop it up into too many polys, but now that I look at it again, the increase wouldn't have been too much. The door/stone area, fence, and upper walls could have been mirrored. In regards to the circle, are you saying I should have carried the circle shape into more places? I dunno, it was in the reference, maybe it has some kind of religious meaning. I think I may get rid of the orange circles because they are creating too much visual noise. I'll keep those suggestions in mind and mirror more things in the next models for sure. Next up is a sailing barge.

Sage

Looks great.

Alex

Spark

Hey Josh, thanks for the kind words on my work, and yeah got lazy when it came to showing some of the texture sheets:) Usually, it is always better to spend a few more polys to get more out of your texture space ( as texture is usually the heavier hitter to an engine than polys ). If your worried about poly count, make sure you are not connecting poly's to each other where they meet, such as the underside of the roof to the beams, and make them elements passing through each other. That usually gives you way more than enough to mirror what you need. As to the circle, it doesn't feel cohesive to the rest of the design ( even if it was in reference, as it feels more native american in design than asian), so personally I think your piece would be stronger, if you took it out, or found another design. If you need to chat about how you might handle something, just drop me a line and I would be more than happy to help out on some ideas.

Spark

dj snyder

Damn, and I was just starting on a really similar project

Looks beautiful, care to share your info/reference sources?

Por@szek

WOW
I havn't been here for a while and .. wooot. Thats awesome.
I wish to have more time now a days ;/
Very badass stuff. Dig it very much XD

Josh Winn

I'm resurrecting this thread back from the dead. Thanks a lot Spark, dj snyder, and Poraszek.

dj snyder: These were based off two watercolors in a book I found at the library, "Views of 18th Century China: Views: History: Customs". It mostly has a lot of great reference for clothing styles and color (not so much texture). I also scanned in a bunch of full page images from some books I had sent over from other libraries, if you're looking for anything in particular let me know.


Here is a new one I've been meaning to upload. It still needs some touch up on the flags/cloth and the red square part. I'm not sure how I feel about the ropes connected to the sails now that I've added them..functionally it doesn't make sense without them but they seem too visually noisy and a detriment. I feel bad about the blank space on the sails texture, I figure it could be used for other small objects.

I've also included underneath the images from the above posts that disappeared due to my web hosting changing. Seems you can't edit old posts:

seforin

comments harder

parasyte7

Hey Josh, your stuff is looking great man. Looking forward to seeing more of your work.