Walls!

Elodin

Hi,

I got a question about meshes, that consists of several smaller parts.

Every time I built a wall out of many different bricks (or floor or whatever) I get a weird result during lighting process.

Low poly mesh -> high poly, detailing in Zbrush -> baking the details onto the low-poly mesh. And then I get weird results.

Like take a look at the back wall tiles. They lighted up horribly.

Should I weld them together somehow, before exporting? (The lightmap is done according to rules)

Goat Justice

Did you post an image? For some reason I can't see it..

Bruno Afonseca

Can we see the separate asset for the bricks, on max or maya? My guess is smoothing groups, the front face of the brick is smoothing out with the sides, since it's a very low poly object you get weird gradients. See if this makes sense to you:

Elodin

Ok say this. The floor looks weird. It's supposed to be lighted up as a single mesh, it consists of smaller parts, merged together. I broke it down to show. It shouldn't be like this.

Now, in the lower example in UDK it looks uniform. What am I doing wrong here?

sprunghunt

the floor in the image you posted is a flat plane with a normal mapped texture on it. It's not made out of individual bricks.

Elodin

So what Im supposed to do with my mesh? Weld it all together or..?

Eric Chadwick

Use a normal map (and maybe a parallax map) instead of all that geo. Make an occasional distinct tile/brick model, to break the pattern. But most of it could be very simple geo.

Or if you must use individual bricks, use method #4 in fonfa's image.

Elodin

So make a flat plane with normal map?

Okay then, how do I add cracks in there. I mean a big piece of floor is destroyed and there's sand underneath. How would you do that?

Eric Chadwick

Start from the flat plane with your tiling texture on it, and start to model the cracks and holes to match the texture features. For example:

http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_rocks/modular_rocks.html

http://wiki.polycount.com/ModelingRubbleIntoAPath

Elodin

So if I get it right - you create two textures, mix them and then just apply on a flat plane? I didn't quite get the first piece.

Eric Chadwick

Yes, except you need to model in details here and there to make it "pop" and not be so damn flat.

Philip K's tutorial is more about how to create low-resolution geometry from an existing texture. How to cut in edges, extrude, simplify, create ambient occlusion, etc.

Edit... Joshua Stubbles' tutorial is using two tiling textures, but they don't mix. There is no blending between them. It just uses carefully-positioned polygonal edges to make it look like they are seamless. But there is definitely a seam between the two textures.

Elodin

All right, I get it. I guess.

So you don't need to make separate pieces for the floor, which saves lot's of time.