need advice about this castle level WIP

TactMasterZero

hey dudes, (and dudettes?)

i'm making this portfolio piece of Neuschwanstein and the surrounding vista with the goal of being as accurate and complete as possible. the finished scene is gonna be large so i'm looking for ways to reduce the polys in the castle piece. I know there are things that can be turned into instanced modules, (windows, doors, trim, stairs, halfed symmetrical stuff??..) but I haven't done any of that yet. i'm just now trying to get my head around how best to optimize it.

i'm contemplating the windows at the moment. can the windows be made into decals that have a displacement applied that gives the illusion of cutting into the surrounding wall?

I guess i'm just looking for ideas...

PHArt

I guess my first go to question would be whether it's going to be a vista or not.. why use polygons to define your details when instead you could resort to normal maps.

Also, it depends on where you want your camera. If you know this you can prioritize the count. For example, if it's going to be an environment in which a player can walk around, you'd derez that entire roof, the windows, the cantels, and... well.. everything that won't be clearly visible from the ground and could be done with texture maps.

TactMasterZero

the plan is to have a path a character can explore that goes from the castle courtyard up to a bridge over a waterfall that you can see the castle from. so ground level detail along the path is important. i also want to do some helicopter style fly overs to show off the statues and completeness of the castle and stuff.

TactMasterZero

here's some mentalray renders

TactMasterZero

i'd like to make this scene with the cryengine sdk but i'm just now learning how to use it. my goal is to make a cinematic.

TactMasterZero

here's a 512x512 displacement map of a window i made in mudbox that i think looks pretty decent when viewed from a distance... i need to learn about parallax maps...

TactMasterZero

so i learned a little about paralax maps from a thread here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=53229&highlight=paralax

i'm still not sure what approach to use for texturing. which is what the approach i'll use for optimizing the geometry depends on i suppose... should i use all tileable textures or one big texture atlas? or both?...

guess i'll just have to figure it out for myself...

TactMasterZero

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QMnMrDyE9VE/UeND-xQprsI/AAAAAAAAA4k/7TA5kSU8xaw/s1600/bogenpavement.jpg

here's this floor tile texture i made, but it's diffuse spec and displacement are 4096x4096 size in order to have that level of detail, wich is pretty big.

ivanzu

Game engine probably wont be able to cope with 20+ 4096X4096 textures.

3dcaspar

I'm pretty sure that a resolution of 1024x1024 will give you the same results in terms of quality.. or even try 512x512 and just have do some comparisons