Ok well I'm gonna try this took me a while to get motivated and get over the whole "if I screw up who cares".
Here are my references.
And this is where I'm at. I'm not worried about the polycount at the moment as the simple objects that I have will easily get optimized.
I'm not sure where to break the tiles, whether I should do all 3 windows in one tile or just the one. I think the one will be better but I'm worried about it looking repetitive.
Then theres 3 different trims and maybe a 4th?
I also haven't quite figured out how I'm going to texture this, whether I'm going to go with something like Motives and texture each window piece, or try something like EQ and do the entire wall as a large 2x1024 and then put the windows on top. I guess texturing can come later.
After doing that render the arches sit away from the wall a bit too much, so I'm gonna tighten the depth of everything. And there are too many boxes in the upper trim, I'm going to make them a little smaller and take a few per tile out.
Here are the pieces sofar.
I have no idea how I'm supposed to texture these. I think I'll seperate the arches from the wall pieces and have them as floating pieces? I'm not sure how I'm gonna get the brick texture to rotate around that arch.
I'm still very unclear as to what to do with my window sections as far as the texture goes. They basically consist of floating pieces of the pillar, the archway and then a hole cut into the wall itself for the window. I don't know whether I should insert another window piece for the actual window or not.
Anyways here it is, still have to do a bit of optimizing to reduce the polycount to give me more room to play with the ground level.
More small updates. Added some signage and started to fill out the first floor. Also worked on some high poly for the lower level pillar. Going to finish that off with some flowery stuff tonight.
I also just brought everything down to one tile for now because I'm going to get prepped for texturing.
Anyone have any ideas how to do glass? Technically this is a storefront, but I'm not sure how I'm going to fake see-through glass.
Have to do a couple more modular pieces, a set of doors and a side piece. Depending on texture space and polycount I'd like to add a couple things that fill out the scene. A bike rack thing, some sidewalk stuff, maybe the old-timey light pole and flower buckets.
Looks cool, saidin. The flag is a nice touch. IMO the pillar would be cool with some designs inside the bevels, and on the top trim part. Don't know if you have that planned yet.
Thanks for keeping me motivated Cody hah. I think I'm going to stick with realism for this one. It's in my comfort zone and gives me a chance to get my feet wet with some high poly without too much opportunity to screw it up!
I'm going to skip the top part of the pillar for now, just to keep things rolling. However I did make the circular insert ala the reference. I'd like to make a few more high poly things on the ground level (the door, and maybe some concrete work). Then if I have time I'll come back to the top section of this pillar and see what I can create.
Thats the bake anyways, the high is on the right at around 400,000 (couple steps on turbosmooth) and the low is around 350 tri's. I'm always looking for C&C if anyone has any! I'm wingin it by myself here so I hope I don't make any mistakes.
Well it would appear that I am complete lost on this. Having never textured something modular like this it would seem I'm missing some sort of fundemental logical procedure that would allow me to continue.
I can texture props, I can create tileable textures. But I have no idea how to put a tileable texture on a wall with a window cut into it.
Every time I step up to the plate to learn something I get snagged on something I'm sure shouldn't be taking me this long to figure out. So I'm posting here in the hopes someone is watching and can guide me. I don't need ideas, I don't need inspiration. What I need is instruction.
These are the 3 scenarios I keep hitting:
1. I made my modular wall piece which is ALL one mesh. It's floating but everything is attached. If I unwrap this as one piece not only will I get a lot of repetition throughout my building but I can't use the 1024x1024 brick texture I've made.
2. I detatched the trim pieces because they were already floating, and I can group them with other pieces, like the concrete pillars. I can give them dirt and grime and more detail. But now I have no idea what to do with the back wall. I put on the brick texture and it covers the window. If I use multi-sub object then I can apply another material to the window group, but then I have to eye ball some sort of lining up of the window and then I can't bake any high poly? This type of model (wall with window cut in and then trim added over top as a seperate piece) is what I'm convinced everyone is using but I just don't get it.
3. Lastly If I make everything seperate, I can unwrap the trim, give a tileable texture to the back wall and then break out the window as its own piece I can then make multiple window styles too. But this one boggles my mind as to how I'm supposed to get all these broken pieces into the engine. The window cut-out isn't lined up with the grid. If I lined every vertex with a grid point the whole building wouldn't look right. The window is cut proportionatly to the size of the wall piece, but how do I line everything up afterwards to import it into the engine.
So I'm stuck. Instead I'm unwrapping and texturing props like the flag/sign and crap for this scene which is something I should be doing afterwards. It seems I only know how to do props and things with unique unwraps. And I'm readying my gun to shoot myself because every time I take a step forward I take 5 steps back.
hmmmmm....yeah this contests restrictions force you to be a little creative in how you set up your texture spacing.
Ideally what I would have loved to do was to treat each modular piece as its own asset with its own designated UV space...which as you said would have made life much easier.
Im not exactly sure how to answer all your questions but I can tell you what approach I took and you can see if it works and makes sense to you.
I split up my texture into 4 pieces(multi sub) I went ahead and UVd everything and overlapped any and all modular pieces that needed to share the same uv space. When it came time to bake....I went back to my unwrap and made sure none of the modular pieces were overlapping (if they were, it would have not allowed me to bake). After baking I just went back and arranged my UVs again the way they were with my modular pieces overlapping each other again. Or if needed I just made adjustments to the maps themselves in photoshop.
So no need to make any thing separate. It should be all good if you keep it all as 1 attached piece. If you're worried about repetition just take your modular wall piece and split it into 2 variations on your UV. You will lose some texture space but will have less tiling.
Your last example is the correct approach for texturing, and your first example is the correct approach for modeling.
i.e. There's no reason you can't have multiple textures (multisubobject) on a single object.
Leave all the details, windows, etc. attached in a single object, which you can then move around as you please. But texture each of the components separately. The wall behind everything will use a tiling texture, the other bits will be mapped specifically, you can make like 4 window variations (or more) and just shift the UVs on different pieces.
Alternatley, you can do everything like in your third example, i.e. separate all of the geos from each other, just make sure they all line up with the same pivot point, then it's easy to swap out one window frame, for a broken one, or whatever.
Edit: Eric beat me to it. Though I'm confused why you're saying you can't treat each piece as an individual asset with it's own UV space Eric. The challenge just said you couldn't use more than 2048 of space overall. You can split that into as many individual textures as you want, thus, separate UV space for each piece.
Edit2: Btw Saidin, modeling is looking great, keep truckin.
Edit: Eric beat me to it. Though I'm confused why you're saying you can't treat each piece as an individual asset with it's own UV space Eric. The challenge just said you couldn't use more than 2048 of space overall. You can split that into as many individual textures as you want, thus, separate UV space for each piece.
Edit2: Btw Saidin, modeling is looking great, keep truckin.
ha ..true you CAN but just for the sake of keeping it simple I chose to keep everything attached as 1 object. Just if I split everything up Id be too tempted to go over the overall texture limit if that makes sense and i felt I had too many modular pieces just for 1 2048
Yeah its definitely a lack of confidence with this that's causing me to overthink.
Gonna create my two main base textures (1 concrete and 1 brick) today and stick them on objects and see what it looks like. Try to simplify my thinking a bit.
Thanks for sticking with me guys hopefully the help and reassurance will help produce a good result!
Okie, so small update again. I still feel like I'm walking in the dark.
I've made a couple of textures, they are pretty clean some simple dirt on the tops and bottoms but overall my reference is a generally clean building so I don't mind the lack of dirt. Also, my goal is to include a couple of dirt decals somewhere in my textures to break things up.
I'd love some help on my process.
This is what I've done, I've taken this modular section (which has included 2 floors and the trim between) and assigned 4 material id's. One for bricks, One for concrete then I have the archways set to id 3 and the windows set to id 4.
What I'm not sure about is that I haven't actually pressed the Unwrap UVW modifier. So nothing has "uv space". But I don't understand how to give things their own uv space (by uv space I mean using the Unwrap UVW modifier) as well as a different material id. And then on top of that, instance this object across the face of my building and then attach it all into one building for import into UE3.
I gave the entire object a second UV set (the first is jibberish because I mapped everything manually using the UV map modifier) and flattened it for the light map.
I also then imported just this one object into Unreal to apply a material to the first id to see what it would look like.
It seems as though I'm taking too much time, I want to have my entire building as one object. But then I seem to be manually overlapping UV's for hours on end and nothing lines up perfectly. I thought I simplified my thinking process but it took me a long time to set even this aspect up. :poly142:
Help? Or do I continue with this guerrilla texturing style?
Scanline Max render
UE3 render, 2 directional lights 6 copies of the same static mesh.
nope, you're on the right track. You've got it up to the Material IDs.
So, now you have one building segment, that is all separated into different mat ids. You need to map each of those into UV space, either onto a tiling texture (brick) or a specific painted texture (Windows/Window Trim).
Once you have them all Mapped, in some way (box/sphere/planar/whatever) then hit UVW Unwrap.
It'll look like a garbled mess because all of those different parts will have been mapped to the same space (roughly). But if you look at the bottom of the UV Edit window, there's a drop down. Click that, and it'll show you your 4 material ids, and if you click one, will only show the UVs for poys assigned that ID.
Now, go through those 4 channels, and fix up the UVs however they're supposed to be. This is also where you get a snapshot of your UVs for things like the windows/trims to use as a guide for painting.
Once everything is UVed to your satisfaction, you can duplicate that wall segment all over the place, and then attach them all together again. If you THEN go into the UV Edit window, you'll see that ALL of the bricks, windows, window Trims, etc. have the exact same UVs as you had set for the original piece. So, if you want to make variations, you can move specific pieces uv's around, but you certainly don't have to. It's perfectly fine for multiple pieces to share UV space, especially if they're all the same part.
Is that what you were confused about? or did I miss something?
Is that what you were confused about? or did I miss something?
Looks good, keep going.
Thanks mate! This is actually exactly what I was confused about. I never knew that the process involved using UV Mapping (box plane etc) AND then unwrapping things. I figured once it was mapped it was finished.
Do you collapse the different modifiers at all? Say I map a material id 1, does that get collapsed down before I map material id 2? Or can I go back to edit-poly and select new faces and go back up to the uv map? Although the drop down menu thing hopefully explains that.
It all sounds raw and clinical but this is exactly the stuff that was confusing me heh. The artistic stuff I already get but its the technical process I didn't. On to translate this knowledge on to the model!
some good learning material here, Im not to familiar with these methods either as Ive mainly worked on characters and high poly environments not low poly environments.
well, keep in mind, this is just MY process, I'm sure someone else will show up and tell me how I'm doing everything all wrong LOL
For me, I always collapse, pretty mcuh all the time. I know it's a bad habit, but oh well. If you're mapping something like a plane (your bricks) then doing a planar map may be all that you do to it. But for more complicated things like your window trim, you'll want to map it, and then Unwrap it, and tweak points/relax the UVs so you don't get any stretching. At the top of the UV window is another drop down, with textures. There is always a default checkerboard you can apply to help you figure out where is being stretched on your model, and fix it.
If you are using Max a very easy to edit the uvs provided you have tiling textures is to select a modular bit turn on preserve uvs move the geometry left or right. turn off preserve uvs positon the modular bit back where you wanted it. It's quick dirty way of doing it. That lets you create some variation in the texture.
careful with preserve UVs, I find it often fucks my stuff up (stretches parts of it). It SHOULD be more useful than it is, but it definitely still has some use.
Well, finally an update that doesn't actually involve head spinning haha.
I was working with the above textures and uvs and i was running into some texture depth issues. Basically I wasn't getting the amount of detail I wanted, but more importantly it wasn't consistent as I started adding more textures and the high poly bakes.
HOWEVER, I think I have a bigger grasp on whats going on now so I'll explain a bit what I've done here since it'll look like I've taken a step back.
To help with the texture depth I added a checker material to everything. But what really helped me to figure out how to divide things up was to colour my checkers according to the material ID.
After doing that it was very clear that I shouldn't need much more than 4 material id's (essentially 4 1024s). It seemed so clear after I had things seperated by these checkers. Everything seemed to just fit right once I had coloured checkers on everything. I'm gonna try to remember that for next time!
I then proceeded to realize that I didn't need to go with as many tiling textures as I had originally thought. Based on the building/reference and the model most things on this building were unique enough that they could handle their own texture. The brick doesn't make up much visual space and instead of just mapping a blanket concrete texture to everything else this can allow me to use AO and some different details for each piece.
I also found it much easier to seperate everything now, and I'll attach it later. I spent the time at the begining of modeling to get everything with the correct pivot so no point in wasting that effort. It should be a pinch to put it all together after.
So I unwrapped all 4 material id's and gave everything reletively even UV space for the unique stuff. I'm going to bake AO into most of the objects (3 of 4 textures). I can bake the high poly normal for the one object I've made (no time for more). I'll then go back and overlap a few UVs for some backsides and faces that aren't important or that can be repeated. I think baking the AO will also help accent the lightmap when I put this into UE3.
So longwinded post aside this is the small little update pic of what I'm working with now. So I think I'm learning and I'm building confidence with each new save.
Ok well I didn't get much time to work on this at all today but I put together the final pillar of the only high poly work I did for this. Unfortunately the texture won't hold up close up in Unreal. There's already things I would do differently on this project on the next one. But I'll save it for then. I'm on a roll with what I got and I should have everything finished up in a day or so.
I know its not much, but I'm getting hopeful I'll actually finish this!
(also looking at that wireframe I could have eliminated a ringloop on those circular parts)
Arg, well all the work might be for naught. I won't be able to finish it today. I procrastinated last night with hours of TF2 and I'm paying for it today because I have to go out now.
Hopefully I'll be able to get the last of the textures completed so it can at least be "done". There's still a lot of tweaks to be made to the textures I've already created.
Oh well here it is in the current state right now. This is using that E-light thing Vig mentioned in Tumer's thread.
I should mention that I've learned a ton from this, almost all the learning came in the last few days. I'd do everything over again if I had time. I'm gonna make another just for practice.
thanks for the kick in the arse on this one. I'm still not 100% happy with the final result, but I didn't want it to go to waste when it was at least virtually all textured.
So I just went through touched up the textures a bit, cut a couple spots out created specs and normals for everything and slapped on a directional light so I can at least be satisfied with finishing.
I learned a lot of little simple things I hope to use in the future.
Things that could be worked on more:
Better layout of UVs
More Window Variety
Way Better Door
Figuring out the proper way to import all this into UE3
Upper dormers and trying to create plaster and flat colour materials
Speculars overall, things look a little metallic for my liking
Thanks again to those who helped me get past some insecurities!
First Up is a Hardware viewport grab.
Man, those lower level windows with the lame painted in interiors look REALLY bad. It would be much better to just do a dark diffuse with a really reflective material than do that.
Man, those lower level windows with the lame painted in interiors look REALLY bad. It would be much better to just do a dark diffuse with a really reflective material than do that.
Hmm ok, I'll work on that. They were mainly a quick-fix, looking at GTA 4 mostly and seeing how they easily got away with bad looking shop and store fronts in the downtown core. I figured that was standard practice.
Yeah those drive me nuts in gta4 too, they just look terrible! I cant see how anyone ever thought that was a good idea, the artists that got away with that at rockstar should be shot.
I think having some sort of highly-reflective cubemap on them would be a much better solution. You could also try to model in some real simple geometry, just simple stuff with very basic colors(just some random shapes?) just to have some silhouet inside there. Keep it very dark so you dont have to worry about putting any actual detail in there.
Another good way to break it up might be to throw some of those security bars on that shops put up when they are closed.
How do I handle reflections in max? It's not as simple as turning on the reflection map and adding in something is it? Especially since those windows are on a material that has things I don't want reflected?
I'm gonna try to break things up with some bars, not a bad idea at all. The more I tweak this though the more I'm tempted to scrap it and start a-new (because the texture setup on this beast is a complete mess due to lack of knowledge at the start).
Still lightmapless because I can't find out how to multiply one texture with another texture in a material in max. Every search on lightmaps just gives me definitions of what it is, or stuff with max5 from 4 years ago.
I liked the bars though and they were easy enough to add. I tried using a dark diffuse colour and some very faint "shop front" stuff from the previous version. But I'm still unclear how to make this specific part of the texture reflective, so I just jacked its spec up a bit.
Replies
Here are my references.
And this is where I'm at. I'm not worried about the polycount at the moment as the simple objects that I have will easily get optimized.
I'm not sure where to break the tiles, whether I should do all 3 windows in one tile or just the one. I think the one will be better but I'm worried about it looking repetitive.
Then theres 3 different trims and maybe a 4th?
I also haven't quite figured out how I'm going to texture this, whether I'm going to go with something like Motives and texture each window piece, or try something like EQ and do the entire wall as a large 2x1024 and then put the windows on top. I guess texturing can come later.
After doing that render the arches sit away from the wall a bit too much, so I'm gonna tighten the depth of everything. And there are too many boxes in the upper trim, I'm going to make them a little smaller and take a few per tile out.
Here are the pieces sofar.
I have no idea how I'm supposed to texture these. I think I'll seperate the arches from the wall pieces and have them as floating pieces? I'm not sure how I'm gonna get the brick texture to rotate around that arch.
Anyways.
I'm still very unclear as to what to do with my window sections as far as the texture goes. They basically consist of floating pieces of the pillar, the archway and then a hole cut into the wall itself for the window. I don't know whether I should insert another window piece for the actual window or not.
Anyways here it is, still have to do a bit of optimizing to reduce the polycount to give me more room to play with the ground level.
I also just brought everything down to one tile for now because I'm going to get prepped for texturing.
Anyone have any ideas how to do glass? Technically this is a storefront, but I'm not sure how I'm going to fake see-through glass.
Have to do a couple more modular pieces, a set of doors and a side piece. Depending on texture space and polycount I'd like to add a couple things that fill out the scene. A bike rack thing, some sidewalk stuff, maybe the old-timey light pole and flower buckets.
I'm going to skip the top part of the pillar for now, just to keep things rolling. However I did make the circular insert ala the reference. I'd like to make a few more high poly things on the ground level (the door, and maybe some concrete work). Then if I have time I'll come back to the top section of this pillar and see what I can create.
Thats the bake anyways, the high is on the right at around 400,000 (couple steps on turbosmooth) and the low is around 350 tri's. I'm always looking for C&C if anyone has any! I'm wingin it by myself here so I hope I don't make any mistakes.
I can texture props, I can create tileable textures. But I have no idea how to put a tileable texture on a wall with a window cut into it.
Every time I step up to the plate to learn something I get snagged on something I'm sure shouldn't be taking me this long to figure out. So I'm posting here in the hopes someone is watching and can guide me. I don't need ideas, I don't need inspiration. What I need is instruction.
These are the 3 scenarios I keep hitting:
1. I made my modular wall piece which is ALL one mesh. It's floating but everything is attached. If I unwrap this as one piece not only will I get a lot of repetition throughout my building but I can't use the 1024x1024 brick texture I've made.
2. I detatched the trim pieces because they were already floating, and I can group them with other pieces, like the concrete pillars. I can give them dirt and grime and more detail. But now I have no idea what to do with the back wall. I put on the brick texture and it covers the window. If I use multi-sub object then I can apply another material to the window group, but then I have to eye ball some sort of lining up of the window and then I can't bake any high poly? This type of model (wall with window cut in and then trim added over top as a seperate piece) is what I'm convinced everyone is using but I just don't get it.
3. Lastly If I make everything seperate, I can unwrap the trim, give a tileable texture to the back wall and then break out the window as its own piece I can then make multiple window styles too. But this one boggles my mind as to how I'm supposed to get all these broken pieces into the engine. The window cut-out isn't lined up with the grid. If I lined every vertex with a grid point the whole building wouldn't look right. The window is cut proportionatly to the size of the wall piece, but how do I line everything up afterwards to import it into the engine.
So I'm stuck. Instead I'm unwrapping and texturing props like the flag/sign and crap for this scene which is something I should be doing afterwards. It seems I only know how to do props and things with unique unwraps. And I'm readying my gun to shoot myself because every time I take a step forward I take 5 steps back.
Ideally what I would have loved to do was to treat each modular piece as its own asset with its own designated UV space...which as you said would have made life much easier.
Im not exactly sure how to answer all your questions but I can tell you what approach I took and you can see if it works and makes sense to you.
I split up my texture into 4 pieces(multi sub) I went ahead and UVd everything and overlapped any and all modular pieces that needed to share the same uv space. When it came time to bake....I went back to my unwrap and made sure none of the modular pieces were overlapping (if they were, it would have not allowed me to bake). After baking I just went back and arranged my UVs again the way they were with my modular pieces overlapping each other again. Or if needed I just made adjustments to the maps themselves in photoshop.
So no need to make any thing separate. It should be all good if you keep it all as 1 attached piece. If you're worried about repetition just take your modular wall piece and split it into 2 variations on your UV. You will lose some texture space but will have less tiling.
Hope this helps!
Your last example is the correct approach for texturing, and your first example is the correct approach for modeling.
i.e. There's no reason you can't have multiple textures (multisubobject) on a single object.
Leave all the details, windows, etc. attached in a single object, which you can then move around as you please. But texture each of the components separately. The wall behind everything will use a tiling texture, the other bits will be mapped specifically, you can make like 4 window variations (or more) and just shift the UVs on different pieces.
Alternatley, you can do everything like in your third example, i.e. separate all of the geos from each other, just make sure they all line up with the same pivot point, then it's easy to swap out one window frame, for a broken one, or whatever.
Edit: Eric beat me to it. Though I'm confused why you're saying you can't treat each piece as an individual asset with it's own UV space Eric. The challenge just said you couldn't use more than 2048 of space overall. You can split that into as many individual textures as you want, thus, separate UV space for each piece.
Edit2: Btw Saidin, modeling is looking great, keep truckin.
ha ..true you CAN but just for the sake of keeping it simple I chose to keep everything attached as 1 object. Just if I split everything up Id be too tempted to go over the overall texture limit if that makes sense and i felt I had too many modular pieces just for 1 2048
Gonna create my two main base textures (1 concrete and 1 brick) today and stick them on objects and see what it looks like. Try to simplify my thinking a bit.
Thanks for sticking with me guys hopefully the help and reassurance will help produce a good result!
Alex
I've made a couple of textures, they are pretty clean some simple dirt on the tops and bottoms but overall my reference is a generally clean building so I don't mind the lack of dirt. Also, my goal is to include a couple of dirt decals somewhere in my textures to break things up.
I'd love some help on my process.
This is what I've done, I've taken this modular section (which has included 2 floors and the trim between) and assigned 4 material id's. One for bricks, One for concrete then I have the archways set to id 3 and the windows set to id 4.
What I'm not sure about is that I haven't actually pressed the Unwrap UVW modifier. So nothing has "uv space". But I don't understand how to give things their own uv space (by uv space I mean using the Unwrap UVW modifier) as well as a different material id. And then on top of that, instance this object across the face of my building and then attach it all into one building for import into UE3.
I gave the entire object a second UV set (the first is jibberish because I mapped everything manually using the UV map modifier) and flattened it for the light map.
I also then imported just this one object into Unreal to apply a material to the first id to see what it would look like.
It seems as though I'm taking too much time, I want to have my entire building as one object. But then I seem to be manually overlapping UV's for hours on end and nothing lines up perfectly. I thought I simplified my thinking process but it took me a long time to set even this aspect up. :poly142:
Help? Or do I continue with this guerrilla texturing style?
Scanline Max render
UE3 render, 2 directional lights 6 copies of the same static mesh.
So, now you have one building segment, that is all separated into different mat ids. You need to map each of those into UV space, either onto a tiling texture (brick) or a specific painted texture (Windows/Window Trim).
Once you have them all Mapped, in some way (box/sphere/planar/whatever) then hit UVW Unwrap.
It'll look like a garbled mess because all of those different parts will have been mapped to the same space (roughly). But if you look at the bottom of the UV Edit window, there's a drop down. Click that, and it'll show you your 4 material ids, and if you click one, will only show the UVs for poys assigned that ID.
Now, go through those 4 channels, and fix up the UVs however they're supposed to be. This is also where you get a snapshot of your UVs for things like the windows/trims to use as a guide for painting.
Once everything is UVed to your satisfaction, you can duplicate that wall segment all over the place, and then attach them all together again. If you THEN go into the UV Edit window, you'll see that ALL of the bricks, windows, window Trims, etc. have the exact same UVs as you had set for the original piece. So, if you want to make variations, you can move specific pieces uv's around, but you certainly don't have to. It's perfectly fine for multiple pieces to share UV space, especially if they're all the same part.
Is that what you were confused about? or did I miss something?
Looks good, keep going.
Thanks mate! This is actually exactly what I was confused about. I never knew that the process involved using UV Mapping (box plane etc) AND then unwrapping things. I figured once it was mapped it was finished.
Do you collapse the different modifiers at all? Say I map a material id 1, does that get collapsed down before I map material id 2? Or can I go back to edit-poly and select new faces and go back up to the uv map? Although the drop down menu thing hopefully explains that.
It all sounds raw and clinical but this is exactly the stuff that was confusing me heh. The artistic stuff I already get but its the technical process I didn't. On to translate this knowledge on to the model!
For me, I always collapse, pretty mcuh all the time. I know it's a bad habit, but oh well. If you're mapping something like a plane (your bricks) then doing a planar map may be all that you do to it. But for more complicated things like your window trim, you'll want to map it, and then Unwrap it, and tweak points/relax the UVs so you don't get any stretching. At the top of the UV window is another drop down, with textures. There is always a default checkerboard you can apply to help you figure out where is being stretched on your model, and fix it.
This is looking nice.
Alex
I was working with the above textures and uvs and i was running into some texture depth issues. Basically I wasn't getting the amount of detail I wanted, but more importantly it wasn't consistent as I started adding more textures and the high poly bakes.
HOWEVER, I think I have a bigger grasp on whats going on now so I'll explain a bit what I've done here since it'll look like I've taken a step back.
To help with the texture depth I added a checker material to everything. But what really helped me to figure out how to divide things up was to colour my checkers according to the material ID.
After doing that it was very clear that I shouldn't need much more than 4 material id's (essentially 4 1024s). It seemed so clear after I had things seperated by these checkers. Everything seemed to just fit right once I had coloured checkers on everything. I'm gonna try to remember that for next time!
I then proceeded to realize that I didn't need to go with as many tiling textures as I had originally thought. Based on the building/reference and the model most things on this building were unique enough that they could handle their own texture. The brick doesn't make up much visual space and instead of just mapping a blanket concrete texture to everything else this can allow me to use AO and some different details for each piece.
I also found it much easier to seperate everything now, and I'll attach it later. I spent the time at the begining of modeling to get everything with the correct pivot so no point in wasting that effort. It should be a pinch to put it all together after.
So I unwrapped all 4 material id's and gave everything reletively even UV space for the unique stuff. I'm going to bake AO into most of the objects (3 of 4 textures). I can bake the high poly normal for the one object I've made (no time for more). I'll then go back and overlap a few UVs for some backsides and faces that aren't important or that can be repeated. I think baking the AO will also help accent the lightmap when I put this into UE3.
So longwinded post aside this is the small little update pic of what I'm working with now. So I think I'm learning and I'm building confidence with each new save.
Another good trick is to use a checker with some kind of letters or numbers on them just so you know your faces are facing right direction/not flipped
I know its not much, but I'm getting hopeful I'll actually finish this!
(also looking at that wireframe I could have eliminated a ringloop on those circular parts)
Scanline render, no lights.
Hopefully I'll be able to get the last of the textures completed so it can at least be "done". There's still a lot of tweaks to be made to the textures I've already created.
Oh well here it is in the current state right now. This is using that E-light thing Vig mentioned in Tumer's thread.
I should mention that I've learned a ton from this, almost all the learning came in the last few days. I'd do everything over again if I had time. I'm gonna make another just for practice.
So I just went through touched up the textures a bit, cut a couple spots out created specs and normals for everything and slapped on a directional light so I can at least be satisfied with finishing.
I learned a lot of little simple things I hope to use in the future.
Things that could be worked on more:
Better layout of UVs
More Window Variety
Way Better Door
Figuring out the proper way to import all this into UE3
Upper dormers and trying to create plaster and flat colour materials
Speculars overall, things look a little metallic for my liking
Thanks again to those who helped me get past some insecurities!
First Up is a Hardware viewport grab.
Direction Light Render.
Thanks, I definitely agree but I'm not too sure how to add in a lightmap to the material or model in Max without using something like a skylight.
Hmm ok, I'll work on that. They were mainly a quick-fix, looking at GTA 4 mostly and seeing how they easily got away with bad looking shop and store fronts in the downtown core. I figured that was standard practice.
I think having some sort of highly-reflective cubemap on them would be a much better solution. You could also try to model in some real simple geometry, just simple stuff with very basic colors(just some random shapes?) just to have some silhouet inside there. Keep it very dark so you dont have to worry about putting any actual detail in there.
Another good way to break it up might be to throw some of those security bars on that shops put up when they are closed.
I'm gonna try to break things up with some bars, not a bad idea at all. The more I tweak this though the more I'm tempted to scrap it and start a-new (because the texture setup on this beast is a complete mess due to lack of knowledge at the start).
Still lightmapless because I can't find out how to multiply one texture with another texture in a material in max. Every search on lightmaps just gives me definitions of what it is, or stuff with max5 from 4 years ago.
I liked the bars though and they were easy enough to add. I tried using a dark diffuse colour and some very faint "shop front" stuff from the previous version. But I'm still unclear how to make this specific part of the texture reflective, so I just jacked its spec up a bit.