"Mod Facade" Challenge - EQ -Building Facade
mod
So, as i said in the other post, this is what i'll be tackling. Its nothing fancy, but i think its a perfect candidate for a nice modular asset.
I did a little brainstorming here, the first thing i like to do when starting a modular piece is plan out my uvs. Usually i have a pretty strick limit on how to use my textures(generally putting everything on one, gasp!) so its very very important to have a good mental image of how you want everything layed you before you do any work at all, to keep from having to redo things because you didn't plan for enough space etc. I'm actually going to split these textures up into a couple sheets, probably one large on for my main tiles, then one for the door/windows, and one for more misc props and such. I drew up a quick little sketch(i prefer to do this on paper or whiteboard! so excuse the shity quality).
The next step from here would be to block out very simple geometry, just to nail down the proportions, and do some test uv's to make sure i havent done anything stupid, giving to much or too little space to anything. Generally i like to get around 1024 pixels per story, or per 12-15 feet(4-5 meters?) or so.
After i've got everything blocked out, test it out in game to make sure the scale isnt totally off i'll start creating any highpoly geometry that i'll need. I try to force myself to do ALL of the highpoly assets first. If you get caught up doing one section highpoly, then low, then uv, then bake, and repeating that process a number of times it can REALLY slow you down. You want to try and set it up so you do all the highpoly assets, and then all the low, and then just one bake, etc. That will save a lot of time and i wish i could actually force myself to always do this, because it can be a bad habit to get antsy and want to start on your lows etc too early.
I'll try to post more shots along the way and go a little more in-depth at each step.
I did a little brainstorming here, the first thing i like to do when starting a modular piece is plan out my uvs. Usually i have a pretty strick limit on how to use my textures(generally putting everything on one, gasp!) so its very very important to have a good mental image of how you want everything layed you before you do any work at all, to keep from having to redo things because you didn't plan for enough space etc. I'm actually going to split these textures up into a couple sheets, probably one large on for my main tiles, then one for the door/windows, and one for more misc props and such. I drew up a quick little sketch(i prefer to do this on paper or whiteboard! so excuse the shity quality).
The next step from here would be to block out very simple geometry, just to nail down the proportions, and do some test uv's to make sure i havent done anything stupid, giving to much or too little space to anything. Generally i like to get around 1024 pixels per story, or per 12-15 feet(4-5 meters?) or so.
After i've got everything blocked out, test it out in game to make sure the scale isnt totally off i'll start creating any highpoly geometry that i'll need. I try to force myself to do ALL of the highpoly assets first. If you get caught up doing one section highpoly, then low, then uv, then bake, and repeating that process a number of times it can REALLY slow you down. You want to try and set it up so you do all the highpoly assets, and then all the low, and then just one bake, etc. That will save a lot of time and i wish i could actually force myself to always do this, because it can be a bad habit to get antsy and want to start on your lows etc too early.
I'll try to post more shots along the way and go a little more in-depth at each step.
Replies
I like the way you have the piece brainstormed.
So the left squares on the drawing are one big texture, right? 1024 width X 2048 height. Yes? and they all tile horzontaly? Im getting this right yes?
The other part is 2 1024 textures, yes?
Makes perfect sense.
Also, the workflow tip on making all the hipoly parts first makes sense. Im hooping to learn more from this thread.
Yep that sounds about right. I'll be trying something a little different here than i usually do at work, i tend to make my base texture only about as wide as 1 unit(in this case i would call the window width a unit, the space between windows 1 unit, etc). But as that can result in some pretty poor tiling, or lack of detail, i'm going to be using basicly double that, so halfway between each window(the window + .5 units on each side) will be my basis for my tiling pieces here. Normally this would be a bit of a concern, because it would limit you to only having very thick pieces, but since i don't plan on anything but that in this case it should be fine.
Heres an image that shows this a little better, the reason why i would normally use a smaller unit is so the set could have more flexibility in where you place things, the larger your base unit is, the less variation you can get out of placement.
[20:47] EarthQuake: so that you dont get the same detail tiling in the same place
[20:47] bitmap: like. under the same storie?
[20:47] EarthQuake: like, for the 2nd story ther eyou know
[20:47] bitmap: yes
[20:48] EarthQuake: i'll take those uvs for the base tile texture, and offset them all like .25 to the right
[20:48] bitmap: yeah
[20:48] EarthQuake: and the detail that would be hidden behind the windows on the lower story will be visible then
[20:48] bitmap: so they start tiling on a diferent position of the X axix
[20:48] bitmap: axis
[20:48] EarthQuake: also i'll probabbly make the tile a little taller than 1 unit
[20:49] EarthQuake: so that i can have a small amount of unique deail on the very bottom, that i'll use only for the 1st story
[20:49] bitmap: fuck
[20:49] bitmap: so many tipsssss
[20:49] bitmap: TIPS
[20:49] bitmap: w8
[20:49] EarthQuake: since i'm seperating everything with trims, i can do a lot of cool things here
[20:49] bitmap: must be with a z
[20:49] bitmap: TIPZZ
[20:49] EarthQuake: lulz
[20:50] bitmap: i wanna put a straw in yo' brainzz
[20:50] bitmap: and suck it like there's no tomorrow
[20:50] EarthQuake: DONT YOU DARE TRY AND DRINK MY MILKSHAKE
[20:50] bitmap: kekekekekeke
EQ, less chat more splat!
i knew this would come and bite me in the ass.. azz lul
Alex
-caseyjones
I blocked out the basic proportions that i'll need for my base materials, made sure uvs worked with everything i wanted to do etc. Got a good start on the texture, next up i'll probabbly model out the highres trims, and bake them down, then start blocking out all the features, windows, doors, props etc and then start making the final set of highpoly assets that i'll need.
lotek: I'll be adding more geometry to a few parts, the top trim will get some more love when i have the highpoly worked out, the curbs will get some curve to them and i'll probabbly extrude some white lower trim area a tiny bit as well. I may add in some slight imperfections etc as a final pass as well, just cut in a little more geometry and wiggle it around a bit
cigano: Oh i dont know, about 90% sourced? With lots of work going into blending multiple sources together, editing out tiling artifacts ect, and a small amount of hand painting. gogo www.cgtextures.com !
Ezekiel 2:13
j/k
seriously though, they're too amazing to go without them, once made.
how'd you get them done though?
like, i just wanna see / know what gets em lookin so great.
what are we seeing tho....is this a progression of the work or the different layers or somthin?
Most of the work is done using this awesome free app: http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ I generated a few variations here and exported them, and then did the following:
1. Arranged each variation in a single file for easy baking
2. Modifidied the normal map that comes with the base content a little, otherwise i used the textures you can download on that website.
3. Set up a scene in max, with the alpha applied and the normal map applied(to get the small details to bake. I added sub-division to the branch geometry because it comes out a little jagged.
4. Followed the tutorial here: http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps11.shtml for setting up a special scene to render normals, red/green/blue light thing. That turned out to provide a pretty good normals map from just doing a standard scanline render with an ortho camera.
I used the method because i was having problems getting the alphas to work correctly using render to texture.
5. Applied the diffuse textures and set the materials to self-illum, and deleted the lights so i could render out just the diffuse textures with no lighting. And then also did a render with the leaves white and the branches black to get a mask, to make for easily editing the different materials later.
6. Set up a scene using lighttracer in the same way you would if you were doing RTT for ambocc.
7. Composited all the diffuse/ao etc stuff in ps, tweaking/color correcting and adding color variation.
Heres a pic showing the final diffuse map, and then the various textures that were baked.
This was a pretty good experiment, it ended up a bit flatter than i would like, i think it would be cool to maybe do a few layers of this stuff, maybe a branch layer, and then a few variations of a 3-4 leaves that i pile on top to build up some depth, so i may try to do that sometime too. As it is now i added a simple hieght map and threw on some parrallax to give it a little bit more depth, that seems to have worked. Gotta see how it looks from player perspective on monday =D
looks nice tho. have u tried running them through crazybump overlayin that nm to what u got now? might give some interesting results in the category "random normal noise"
I was experimenting with the same appplication about 1 1/2 years ago and got pretty decent results with it.
I set up the generator to make few but bigger leaves and made 2 custom textures with several leaves on them instead of one. Then I used the branches to bake the normal- and alphamap.
After that I exported the leaves (at around 2,5k tris) and optimized them by hand down to 1k tris,
looking like that:
The whole thing looked pretty decent imho even with doom3's crap lighting and could have a lot more life and depth in it, if you'd give the leaves some motion...
So with a better engine and probably a little more love this technique could make pretty convincing ivy I guess....
redish is branches geo, greenish stuff leaves
I think one of the main advantages of this app is definitely, that you can import your whole building geometry and let the ivy grow along it, around the edges etc, which gives it a much more dynamic feel than just plain flat along a plain wall...
http://www.guruware.at/main/index.html
I was just curious if you found the standalone better for your purposes, maybe it's more stable or further developed?
Thanks for taking the time to do the break down and including the links to resources and info, really helpful.