[CE3] Italian medieval house

sterne

Hi everyone, I'm Andrea, from Italy, currently working for Ubisoft in the Sofia studio in Bulgaria. Since I'm really a fresh starter in this industry I decided to develop my skills and started learning cryengine 3. Recently I finally found the time to make a new small personal thing inspired by a picture of an Italian medieval house in the north part of Italy which I thought might be interesting to reproduce in CE3. Please let me know what you think and thanks in advance for all your precious comments. Andrea.

Here is my main reference :



and here is what I got:

e-freak

the model looks good! can you post a few different lighting conditions and flat texture maps?

Orangeknight

The thing is it just looks likes you posted cgtextures onto everything. It lacks any customization to where it is like the bricks having edge wear and stuff. Also a Hi-poly bake for this house could massively help it along.

chrisradsby

sterne wrote: »

Hi everyone, I'm Andrea, from Italy, currently working for Ubisoft in the Sofia studio in Bulgaria. Since I'm really a fresh starter in this industry I decided to develop my skills and started learning cryengine 3. Recently I finally found the time to make a new small personal thing inspired by a picture of an Italian medieval house in the north part of Italy which I thought might be interesting to reproduce in CE3. Please let me know what you think and thanks in advance for all your precious comments. Andrea.

Hey! Fellow Ubi-worker , I think it looks good, very much like the concept. I like it! The only thing I can really note is the tiling on the right side there, you can see it tiling quite obviously on the vertical axis.

I think you could do a little bit more for the silhouette especially on that third image of yours, the right hand side there have a straight line while the other side is more crooked and has interesting detail.

I like how rugged it looks, kind of gritty and realistic style to it.

Would you mind telling us how many texture are on there? and how big? It'll make it easier for us to decide if you've been doing a good job technically as well.

Good work so far! :thumbup:

Orangeknight wrote: »

The thing is it just looks likes you posted cgtextures onto everything. It lacks any customization to where it is like the bricks having edge wear and stuff. Also a Hi-poly bake for this house could massively help it along.

A high-poly bake for a house doesn't necessarily help it along at all. Depending on the environment it's usually always better to go for a modular approach with buildings, tilable textures etc. So a unique high-poly bake would just be a waste of texture space if you had a big environment of these types of houses. So yeah, if you're going to give crits like this at least make sure they're constructive.

iniside

Yeah I like to. Looks very realistic and would certainly fit any medieval city environment. Especially if there will be more buildings around.

And I completelty disagree about scultping such structure. Yeah might be nice, if you toss at it 2k+ texture. Otherwise you just loose to much texel density or use to many unique textures or above combined. It's better to create handful tileable sets and mask repetition with decals and vertex painting.

Hope you won't mind if I try to make same building. It looks really interesting for tileable texture only model .

Dazz3r

I'd be tempted to go for a zbrush sculpt and bake a for a single building this small and detailed.

Ravanna

is that some form of bump-offset tesselation going on with the stones on the ground? its affecting shadow height.
This piece is beauuutiful.

Sugus

Hi there, really like what you're doing here. Only crit is that maybe the small window in the front side of the house might be a bit small in comparison with your reference, maybe scale it up a little bit

Nice stuff!

mbischof

This is looking really solid. Are you planning on doing more of the street or just that building?

walklikethis

did you use blend layers? i think it is very effective what ever you did!

@ ravanna, im pretty sure that is POM parallax occlusion mapping, creating a tessellation type effect.

IchII3D

Nice little house, to take it a step further I would recommend making a decal sheet for all those connecting elements such as wood against stone.

Quickel

I do agree that it looks like it just has photos slapped onto it but I think that's really a lack of good normal definition. I don't think a high poly bake is necessary (or efficient), but making your tileable textures in ZBrush and getting your normals from that will make the texture work so much better. The depth between the plaster areas and the broken stone bricks just doesn't have enough depth, IMO.

sipher3325

I really like where this is going. I also think that it looks like textures just slapped on. It works in some areas but you really wanna make sure that each area/piece blends so they look like they belong together. I think the main problem as far as that goes is just that plaster material. There are some tiling issues.

sterne

Thank you everyone for all your comments and precious critics... this house was not intended as a portfolio pieces and I wasn't even thinking of showing it to anyone as it was really an exercise to learn Cryengine 3 asset creation and workflow...I tried to follow more or less the same kind of modeling and texturing that we used in our last project in the studio which means no zbrush at all (absolutely forbidden, we don't even have it installed on our machines)...also I'm trying to push cryengine a little bit, cause my main reason for learning this is to check how it can be used for architectural visualizations with good photorealism... that said I'll try to see if I can keep working on it and make it a decent portfolio piece.

here is the textures used for the house (except a small 128 x 128 fake interior one that I forgot to put here):




@ Orangeknight : yes you're totally right and I already started creating some new custom textures...I kinda rushed the texture creation in photoshop to have more time for the technical aspects of the engine (like how to make a blend layer working properly, how to use POM and displacement maps....)

@ chrisradsby : thanks, I really appreciate your ctitics, always precise and constructive... and you got to the point with the high-poly bake...in our workflow it's something that we cannot afford to do

@ iniside : it would be great to see someone else doing the same asset...please let me know when you have something done, I'm curios eh eh

@ Ravanna : yes I'm using a Parallax Occlusion Map

@ mbischof : no, I have no plans of doing more of the street...as I said it's just a simple exercise

@ walklikethis: yes I'm using blend layers on the brick material...This was actually really difficult cause in the studio I'm used to a different technique...making a proper blend map was kinda painfull...still I'm not that happy of the result but for the moment this is the best I can get

@IchII3D : was thinking about that but I was not sure it would be a good idea...I'll give it a try

@Quickel : thanks for the suggestion...actually it's kinda funny/strange cause I was thinking the opposite...the brick layer has a POM and I toned down both it's effect and the NM depth because I was thinking it was too much...maybe it's beacuse of the screenshoots...the effect is more visible in game... but anyway I'll keep it in mind while reworking the textures...thanks a lot.

Again, thanks so much to everyone.
Andrea