Sketchbook: Agostinuke

Agostinuke

Hey!
Today I started to work on the Splash Damage's environment art test. I would like to start a sketchbook here by posting the wips, hopefully to get some feedback. I hope to not infringe any copyright by doing this, if so, please tell me and I'll post something else. Also if you people of Splash could give me some pointers it would be wonderful.

I have some experience in mapping for the Unreal Engine 3, but I never created assets to place in the editor, I cooked my dishes using stock ingredients...the fact is that I seem to remember that the models can have n-sided polys but I'm not quite sure, and here comes the question..can I leave those rigid planes/walls with their n-sided polys or it is better to split and reduce them to quads and tris? I searched for an answer but still have to find one so meanwhile I'll leave them as they are. I use XSI 6.5. End of talk.

Kawe

Most engines will triangulate it for you when you import it. The reason you want to triangulate yourself is to make sure everything comes out right, especially for n-gons. However for a flat wall I doubt it matters too much. Maybe if you are going to use vertex lighting and the import really messed it up. but.. if you were going to use vertex lighting I'd suggest rearranging those polys a little since everything is going to end up in the corners of the wall giving you thin slices of polys that will mess up the lights.

Agostinuke

Thanks a lot Kawe. Yes good suggestion for the lighting.
Probably tired and eager to post here I didn't do the first thing I should have tried...to import the stuffs into the ue3 editor...so I did it and I see that the holes in the wall are messed up..tomorrow I will sort that out. night

Agostinuke

Ok. I studied some UT3 models and refreshed my mind.
I understand the Actorx importer does the triangulation by itself, but the holes made the import tricky and the editor showed the mesh with less tris than it should..it reduced them. So I saw it is better in case like this to have much control over the tris topology and I did the triangulation by hand and inside Xsi that is quick and easy I must say. Also, while I know the UE3, I don't know how the triangulation works in other engines hence the extra need to get control over it I think.

So this is the result. Later I'll place some props in it and maybe I will see if I can place a boat in it. It's at 6958 tris right now and the imposed limit is 20k. I've been generous with the tris till now but I saw that the epic guys sometimes are even more generous for stuffs like this. Correct? Then I have to unwrap and texture all of this.

Still I have a question mark about those tris around the holes..

Kawe

uhm.. that's a lot of tris. I guess it'd make sense for vertex lighting but unless you have something more advanced than a material on a flat plane I'd use BSP to shell out the floor. and uhm.. ya.. I'd prolly use lightmapping for it cause you could cut down the tris so much. Most things are just flat planes.

Im not close to being good at making things for UE3 though so you'd want a second opinion on this.

Also I'd probably unwrap and things before triangulating. Kind of messy to do it with all triangles going on.

Agostinuke

Kawe, thx 4 the reply. Well right now I cannot (and don't want) to use bsps since it's a modeling test and I have to submit all the models that make up the scene in 3D format. Also, yes I did some tests in the past, confirmed by some readings, that it's better performance wise to use vertex lighting only for small surfaces and details and use lightmapping for the rest. But...I show you a simple mesh from UT3..think that almost all the walls are similar to this one for the triangulation and sometimes, columns and details are more heavy:

the triangulation I made is still inside a stack operator so I should have no problems to unwrap...

Anyways, I want to see some tests which landed the job LOL!

osman

May I ask why you've added so much tri's that you dont need?

Agostinuke

Hi! It seems to me I already answered above. Regarding flat planes, I had 3 possibilities:
1) using only 2 tris like a default square plane 2) using "a few more" tris (how many?) 3) trying to use about the same usual number of tris you can find inside stock assets of the Unreal Tournament 3 that I'm using as ideal for this work.
In any case, if you see that all considered I have so much tris that I don't need please point to me which one of them should I delete thank you

Agostinuke

Ok.

Without any consideration towards vertex lighting, 4934 tris:


I think I will go this way, until someone don't tell me to go back to the previous tessellated version. Talking about that, I tessellated the floors that much because I was thinking to vertex lighting and the shadows that props could cast on them. It's pretty sad for me to start my Polycount scketchbook with 7 pictures of little variations of the same s..t lol...but I'd like to clarify to me this stuff before to go too much further in environment modelling...
time to add stuffs now I think
c u l8r

Agostinuke

Good!
I'm intrigued with a few (a few lol...) 3D challenges so I'm trying to work on this spare time, I really don't want to hurry with this because I don't think I will submit it to Splash; I see they are looking for more advanced people. It's a pity since I'd pay to work with them in London but since I have no money, only debts, I cannot do that. Shame.
I added a little bit more crap in it. The boat isn't finished by far. But the scene is at 8128 so I see there is some room to work further. comment and critiques and rants are welcome here. Mi casa es su casa.

osman

If you're going to put this into UE3, then you dont need any tesselation, you will use lightmaps for the lighting information so make sure your models have a second uv-channel which has no overlapping uvs.
Also, if your poly limit is 20k, then i'd put alot more polygons into themodels if I were you, to give it extra detail(for your boat for example)

Agostinuke

hey _Oz, thx for your advice

Today I started to work on this thing again, it's about 19000 tris overall now. I think I will add another 1000 tris of garbage and then I'll start the unwrapping and texturing. repeated stuffs are referenced models.

Anyway more than this I would like to participate in the unearthly challenge. If one of you big guys out there would like to adopt a poor dog like me for this challenge so I could grow a little bit it would be really great to me.

pls send me a mail if you want

Saidin311

Looking good.

Curious question, why did you build the portals into the wall?

Incomitatum

Under the lip of the doc you have a large, flat surface.

I, if it were me, might break that up with another horizontal pipe and/or a drain or grating or even some vertical slats, to draw the eye up and help you ignore it.