@ islipaway- You're totally right on this. I noticed it too.
If this is an ancient structure, there were only two types of stone arch or entryway systems available- keystone arches or posts (like Stonehenge). Also, without mortar holding the rocks together like bricks, there is no way stones like these could be used as a column- especially weight bearing.
Also, if you want to get into it- stone statues can't really extend their arms out like that. The first thing that is going to fall off with the decay of time is that arm!
And if this structure is in a cave and it's clear that there was some sort of roof or top to the monument that has fallen off, what was the original lighting system for the ceremonies that took place there? This one is knit-picky, but whatever.
What I like about this concept art though is that it's making me think of these things. As modelers, we need to push the original concept art out, make changes were they need to change and make the piece our own. I have a hard time with this a lot of the time, so this is a good project for me.
The arches would never hold themselves up with the bricks placed in that way.
Yeah, most stone arches I've seen seem to have some kind of framing, like this:
I'll probably go ahead and add that in if I get that far.
@ChaosWWW To me, it seems like stones of that shape would not work well with a pillar because they wouldn't fit together as well as rectangular pieces which would probably mean that it would be less stable. If anything, the organic pattern might draw the eye more than you want.
If you do decide to keep that pattern I would suggest having the stones closer together so they look like they're compacted together and more stable. More like the middle image here:
Didnt have much time to do stuff this weekend but wanted to drop something down, doodled it out in zbrush is a lil bit. No where near as clean as the rest of you guys stuff but it helped with some stuff.
Just putting it up for prosperity.
@MalloryW Yeah that started really bugging me today as well. Thanks for pointing it out, went back and not only reduced the gaps but also made the stones more square and more aligned to feel more structurally sound. I also hear you on the noise, I think once when everything is textured I'll go back and check the visual noise of the scene and adjust appropriately, but for now I'll leave it on my list of things to do. Thanks a bunch for the input!
Here's my day 2 progress. New texture and adjusted the previous texture. Also sharpened the pillar meshes a bit to make them a bit more square, but overall I feel like the pillars are basically round in the concept. Look at the contour of the knocked over pillar on the right to see what I mean.
Scene:
Texure Breakdown:
Right now the diffuse is literally a solid color, gonna fix that eventually but as mentioned in my previous post, just getting the baseline of texturing down for colors, scale, etc, not details.
Unfortunately things are probably going to slow down for me during the week . Gonna have classes and schoolwork is probably going to catch up to me eventually, but I want to work on this as much as I can despite these factors. Might have enough time tomorrow to start another texture.
@ChaosWWW Thanks for that link, I remember seeing that vertex pdf a while back but forgot all about it. Will certainly come in handy! thanks.
@MalloryW Some good reference there. Cheers for posting that.
Anyway here's my block-out in its current stage.
I think that my approach to this will be to create two tiling textures. One for the floor around the structure, and the other for the floor segments of the structure base. The pillars and the arches themselves I think might be best to build out of individual stone blocks, sculpt then bake.
@HGH block out looks good. Only sizing issue (and this maybe personal preference) is that the main base is a little short.
@ChaosWWW Liking your block out with some simple textures on there already.
After last months challenge my main concern was building in 3ds max so that it fits together on the grid in udk. So I actually built my block out in udk, imported to 3ds and used it as a rough guide line for my static mesh creation. Not much to show in 3ds atm but here is my block out in udk.
Has anyone got any different and/or better approaches to the scene?
I would rather try to use tieling textures only. Columns are perfect fit for tileable texture.
Arches as well. You need to add supporting arch anyway, and it should nicely fit into tileable trim texture.
Thanks for the fine new challenge! I'm in!
Started off a bit late maybe... Here is what I did on Sunday:
Thats my setup.
- ground materials will be tileable of course
- blue will be horizontally tileable I think.
- Rest will be "unique" mostly... I re-use a lot anyways.
My biggest concern: The re-use of textures might make it a bit boring and monochrimatic. We will see. You guys do pretty much the same thing, so I felt quite comf'ty with it.
Whiteboxing:
lets see what the week brings. I'm a bit behind all of you. Game is on
Just out of curiosity, as I'm a little confused. I understand the need for generic Units and UU units so modular parts can snap... but what happens in instances like this when its quite rounded? i.e. going to be difficult to snap together.
Just out of curiosity, as I'm a little confused. I understand the need for generic Units and UU units so modular parts can snap... but what happens in instances like this when its quite rounded? i.e. going to be difficult to snap together.
I think that a misconception has spread on the "modularity" of environments.
All the speaking of grid and snapping has got people thinkg that every module should be a square or of similar shape to move on the XYZ axes and be done with it like it was some sort of board game.
And even more people think that this has to be done in engine only.
Remember that modularity is a concept of building things by breaking them into multiple and repeatable pieces. None is forbidding to assemble those pieces in engine and then export a single mesh out if there's the need to do so.
This comes in handy on circular shapes such as those of this concept. You could model a section made of a pillar and his arch and the snap the pivot to the center of the platfrom and duplicate it by rotating the mesh.
Modularity is used to get the most mileage off a single piece of mesh or texture and it must not be limited by the grid, but you should be a good problem solver to make your mesh work with it.
At eurogamer expo i got to talk with some darn good artist about game art and the topic of modularity came in pretty often.
They all love it but they all know that a modular environment needs to look like it's not made of modules or it'll eventually look boring.
And we don't want boring environments, do we?
Hope i can get my point on this through and not sound like a douche
Then I'm currently sculpting quite a lot of bricks in zbrush which I'll use to make a tiling texture for the top cylindrical shape and 2 or 3 variations of uniquely mapped pillars.
The geo i got in my blockout was made clean enough to be used as final geo with the tiling texture and with some blending and by adding random moss and vegetation it won't (hopefully) even show as being a tiled texture.
I've been looking to join in for a while now, so this looks like fun!
Early observations from the concept art:
Temple is a dodecagon with a front point removed to create an entrance; rotation angle snaps should be at 30 degrees. Base and pillar arrangement is faceted (ie flat sides) but the base for the upper roof section is not and is curved (maybe it used to be a dome...?)
Tools I'll be using: UDK (Sept. 2012), Max 2011, 3D Coat (I have ZBrush as well but 3DCoat is more intuitive for me) and Photoshop CS6 (with CrazyBump and nDo2 though I doubt they'll be much use here)
I've not really done a lot of organic / sculpt modelling, so this is going to be an interesting learning experience...
Regarding the statue, would it be valid to use an existing base mesh you have lying around as a starting point?
I've been looking to join in for a while now, so this looks like fun!
Early observations from the concept art:
Temple is a dodecagon with a front point removed to create an entrance; rotation angle snaps should be at 30 degrees. Base and pillar arrangement is faceted (ie flat sides) but the base for the upper roof section is not and is curved (maybe it used to be a dome...?)
Tools I'll be using: UDK (Sept. 2012), Max 2011, 3D Coat (I have ZBrush as well but 3DCoat is more intuitive for me) and Photoshop CS6 (with CrazyBump and nDo2 though I doubt they'll be much use here)
I've not really done a lot of organic / sculpt modelling, so this is going to be an interesting learning experience...
Regarding the statue, would it be valid to use an existing base mesh you have lying around as a starting point?
I've used Gir's Base Mesh from the polycount Wiki...
ok. my plan is to semi enter this.. for this challenge i plan to make the SCULPTURE!!!!.. i think if i tackle it in parts i am more likely to succeed in some way
ok. my plan is to semi enter this.. for this challenge i plan to make the SCULPTURE!!!!.. i think if i tackle it in parts i am more likely to succeed in some way
Am I right in thinking that although its a 30 degree angle for the circle, the top few drawings suggests otherwise? I've snapped modular parts in Max together following the grid, and its slightly differed to the concept.
Am I right in thinking that although its a 30 degree angle for the circle, the top few drawings suggests otherwise? I've snapped modular parts in Max together following the grid, and its slightly differed to the concept.
It is 30 degrees yes. The temple is a dodecagon with the front point removed for the double-sized entry arch.
So heres my blockout so far. I wasn't able to finish the last challenge because of other work im doing, but will finish this one. Anyway here it is let me know how the scale is, Im just using the polycount basemeshes for now, and goodluck to everyone!
colours are grouped by instances (ie so two objects with the same colour = instances of each other... except for that platform under the statue that I've only just noticed. That's a coincidence... <_<)
Hey guys, this is my first post which means its my first Noob Challenge as well. I've always wanted to participate in these challenges, but never had time until now.
This is how I plan on breaking it down to model. The blue bits are unique parts, and the top arches will be one solid mesh for the most part
I want to try to reuse textures as much as possible. Tiling floor texture, and a texture atlas for the pillars, the arches, and the smooth stone trim around the base.
@Shuaws
For me it looks like your pillars are a bit too thick. Also if you look closely at the concept you can see that thesockets of the pillars extend a bit over the floor structure.
@L3XICON:
Thank you very much for the detailed advice! As you and PyrZern suggested I made the pillars a bit smaller.
I went on with my first texture, the one for the base floor. (I made one of those fancy 3 in 1 displays for the first time )
Is it to dark maybe? Also it feels a bit too smoth and not very rock like, how could I change that?
Here is the texture on the model, everything still in Blender, Unity comes later.
The texture comes from a non tiling photosource from cgtextures.com. Is there any fast way or tool to make such a texture tiling? I made it by hand which took quite a while and I'm wondering if I'm missing an easy way maybe?
Seeing some nice blockouts so far. Good job everyone!
So far, I only have the blockout and putting together the enviro around it. I'm planning on having a pond/body of water surround it and get some lighting going from below the water, but I'm not really sure on where I want to take it.
The texture comes from a non tiling photosource from cgtextures.com. Is there any fast way or tool to make such a texture tiling? I made it by hand which took quite a while and I'm wondering if I'm missing an easy way maybe?
There isn't, really. There's a few tricks you can use but any 'automatic' tiler is never going to give you good results. I cheated with the UVs on mine so I didn't need to make the texture tile.
Regarding your stone floor texture, short answer is that it'll look smooth because you've got smooth(ish) normals in the normalmap. I'm guessing that's straight out of CrazyBump? :'D
For sharp, pointy rocks you want sharp, pointy normals; this means sharp contrasts and larger, flatter areas. A good trick is to desaturate the image you're getting the cracks out of and adjust the levels so you have black where the cracks are and white everywhere else (I'd recommend using an adjustment layer to do this; you'll likely have to dodge/burn areas on the underlying layer to get them into the right value ranges).
This you can use to get an additional 'sharp' normalmap out of crazybump (turn all the sliders save Fine/Very Fine detail down to zero) to overlay on top of another extracted from a rock texture or somesuch. In the diffuse, you can also use the crackmap as an alpha to blend in another texture (ie dirt) for in the seams.
Trick to using CrazyBump is not to use it to get a whole normal map at once. Use it to get various 'elements' of detail, ie large-scale noise, cracks, fine detail etc and then blend all this together in photoshop, where you can fiddle around with the opacities to your heart's content.
Which looks like this ingame:
(admittedly it's come out kind of weak because I haven't done anything with the lighting much / at all).
Thank you for the tipps with the sharper normalmaps. I got some better results now by sharpening the map but it will me take me some time and practice to get results I want.
It's not CrazyBump, it's Bitmap2Material but in regards of normalmap generation it is quite similar I guess.
Thank you for the tipps with the sharper normalmaps. I got some better results now by sharpening the map but it will me take me some time and practice to get results I want.
It's not CrazyBump, it's Bitmap2Material but in regards of normalmap generation it is quite similar I guess.
Ok so i'm stuck. I'm trying to make my blockout modular and to the power of 2 for Unreal Units. My issue is my dodecagon. In that, I make a 12 sided cylinder, scale it to the size of the dodecagon, use a cap sub of 2 to make it a trim. I then split these segments off so I have 11 edges perfectly alligned at the required angle..... however when I make this match the grid it either overlaps or falls short.... how can I make this match and the grid, and be modular?
Don't make it modular and power of 2.
If it doesn't fit a design, just don't do it.
It is no holy grail to split everything in the way it must fit to the grid. Split in the way it is convinient and fast to work with.
I think that advice about modularity from first post should be really removed. It brings more confusion than good ;p.
@Shuaws
For me it looks like your pillars are a bit too thick. Also if you look closely at the concept you can see that thesockets of the pillars extend a bit over the floor structure.
Thanks for the feedback ill fix those up im gonna start the textures soon
Don't make it modular and power of 2.
If it doesn't fit a design, just don't do it.
It is no holy grail to split everything in the way it must fit to the grid. Split in the way it is convinient and fast to work with.
I think that advice about modularity from first post should be really removed. It brings more confusion than good ;p.
Fair enough, it just confuses me that it clearly is possible as someone has done it already using UDK static meshes... whether or not this matches the concept is a different matter.... just ideally wanted to learn how to make the most of this grid business...
Fair enough, it just confuses me that it clearly is possible as someone has done it already using UDK static meshes... whether or not this matches the concept is a different matter.... just ideally wanted to learn how to make the most of this grid business...
Grid really fits, only griddy things (pun intended). Like perfect squares, rectangles, cylinders, 45, 90, 180 angles etc.
But once you get something more organic/asymetric the entire grid buisness is gone. You can still make modules, but you must approach them diffrently.
That 10 sided +1, platform will never perfectly fit power of 2 grid, but it perfectly fit into metric system.
I have been treating the scale as tho the center box was a coffin of some sort (skull on box), it helps explain the pretty surrounding, the cave location and the skulls on the box. The lady becomes a kind of guardian .
Going to be putting this into cry engine, decided to go with the rickety kind of look because piling stones ontop of eachother in a manner where they would probably straight up fall down is awesome XD.
Doodled a few rocks in Zb then duplicated them up, did some modifications, combined the chunk then dublicated it again and filled in the holes.
Mostly hard polish and trim dynamic brush.
Tesselated column in marmo, base column is a 1k cylinder, going fairly high res because my last project was looowwwww (I also want to play with cry engines tesselation!)
Texture res is currently stupid and will be lowered. Will probably just lose a little bit of noise as a result.
finally made some progress on the texturing with the first tiling texture and some unrwapping...painful unrwapping i hate that
the platform has the wrong material assigned for the time being as it was used in testing the material setup : D
anyway here's a screeny:
I'll probably get the moss in there soon and start working for the statue and the altar in the next days... will probably take breaks doing some vegetation and some setting for the cave.
I've been fiddling with some texture blend for the moss. Not entirely happy with the moss texture yet and i'll probably remake it from scratch again later on, but for now it'll do.
Also what do you guys think of the lighting compared to the last update?
Next I'll start on the altar first and the other tilings after. Guess i'll keep the statue last as it'll be quite a lot of work
Quick block out done in Maya. Need to go back and fix the scale of the archways and tidy up the base as I kinda got a bit messy and lazy with that.
Right now I've started on my first rock texture which will go on the pillars and archways. I blocked out the rough base to check that it tiles okay, and have now moved it to mudbox to start sculpting the details.
My progress so far:
I'm working mainly on lighting, effects (perticles etc), and general atmopshere right now. The object on it's own is not that important, beside statue and sarcophagus.
Since it's mainly learning experience, I'm trying to get good lighting by using only the lights that are logical and have their place (no corrective lights put over level).
@Hannah
Nice blockout, but those stones are to rectungular. If you look at concept there is pretty much no rectangular stones over it.
Here's my blockout. Not totally happy with some of the shapes, but the scale seems about right.
My next step is to start working on the textures
@Fnitrox
I think your new lighting set up looks better, but the moss in the hot spot of the light almost seems overexposed a bit, but that might just be the texture.
Also, try using a height map in the blend texture for the moss. It will blend in the cracks first instead of blending uniformly.
Hey guys noobie here. I saw the concept art this month and thought I had to join in. My base mesh for the most part is done just a few tweeks left.
Now I know that it doesn't look 100% like the concept but I found some parts too difficult to match it exactly with the concept. Also It looks pretty clean and perfect atm, I plan on adding lots of the damage and wear with zbrush. I also plan on only sculpting 1 or 2 pieces ( like the pillars for example ) and then just re using them. If anyone's got some critiques that be great before I move on to sculpting it.
So a little update im trying to finish a tileable stone wall that im gonna use for the pillars heres a screenshot of how it looks, still need to finish sculpting ill have an update later tonight
Replies
If this is an ancient structure, there were only two types of stone arch or entryway systems available- keystone arches or posts (like Stonehenge). Also, without mortar holding the rocks together like bricks, there is no way stones like these could be used as a column- especially weight bearing.
Also, if you want to get into it- stone statues can't really extend their arms out like that. The first thing that is going to fall off with the decay of time is that arm!
And if this structure is in a cave and it's clear that there was some sort of roof or top to the monument that has fallen off, what was the original lighting system for the ceremonies that took place there? This one is knit-picky, but whatever.
What I like about this concept art though is that it's making me think of these things. As modelers, we need to push the original concept art out, make changes were they need to change and make the piece our own. I have a hard time with this a lot of the time, so this is a good project for me.
Yeah, most stone arches I've seen seem to have some kind of framing, like this:
I'll probably go ahead and add that in if I get that far.
@ChaosWWW To me, it seems like stones of that shape would not work well with a pillar because they wouldn't fit together as well as rectangular pieces which would probably mean that it would be less stable. If anything, the organic pattern might draw the eye more than you want.
If you do decide to keep that pattern I would suggest having the stones closer together so they look like they're compacted together and more stable. More like the middle image here:
I would also suggest reducing the noise a bit.
Just my 2 cents.
Just putting it up for prosperity.
I am in. Good luck to you all and I am very interested to see how guys approach this one. My block-out.
Here's my day 2 progress. New texture and adjusted the previous texture. Also sharpened the pillar meshes a bit to make them a bit more square, but overall I feel like the pillars are basically round in the concept. Look at the contour of the knocked over pillar on the right to see what I mean.
Scene:
Texure Breakdown:
Right now the diffuse is literally a solid color, gonna fix that eventually but as mentioned in my previous post, just getting the baseline of texturing down for colors, scale, etc, not details.
Unfortunately things are probably going to slow down for me during the week
@MalloryW Some good reference there. Cheers for posting that.
Anyway here's my block-out in its current stage.
I think that my approach to this will be to create two tiling textures. One for the floor around the structure, and the other for the floor segments of the structure base. The pillars and the arches themselves I think might be best to build out of individual stone blocks, sculpt then bake.
This workflow pretty much should be ideal
http://www.grimrock.net/2011/09/08/building-the-dungeon/
Has anyone got any different and/or better approaches to the scene?
@ChaosWWW Liking your block out with some simple textures on there already.
After last months challenge my main concern was building in 3ds max so that it fits together on the grid in udk. So I actually built my block out in udk, imported to 3ds and used it as a rough guide line for my static mesh creation. Not much to show in 3ds atm but here is my block out in udk.
Arches as well. You need to add supporting arch anyway, and it should nicely fit into tileable trim texture.
Thanks for the fine new challenge! I'm in!
Started off a bit late maybe... Here is what I did on Sunday:
Thats my setup.
- ground materials will be tileable of course
- blue will be horizontally tileable I think.
- Rest will be "unique" mostly... I re-use a lot anyways.
My biggest concern: The re-use of textures might make it a bit boring and monochrimatic. We will see. You guys do pretty much the same thing, so I felt quite comf'ty with it.
Whiteboxing:
lets see what the week brings. I'm a bit behind all of you. Game is on
Cheers!
Sir_Dillon
I think that a misconception has spread on the "modularity" of environments.
All the speaking of grid and snapping has got people thinkg that every module should be a square or of similar shape to move on the XYZ axes and be done with it like it was some sort of board game.
And even more people think that this has to be done in engine only.
Remember that modularity is a concept of building things by breaking them into multiple and repeatable pieces. None is forbidding to assemble those pieces in engine and then export a single mesh out if there's the need to do so.
This comes in handy on circular shapes such as those of this concept. You could model a section made of a pillar and his arch and the snap the pivot to the center of the platfrom and duplicate it by rotating the mesh.
Modularity is used to get the most mileage off a single piece of mesh or texture and it must not be limited by the grid, but you should be a good problem solver to make your mesh work with it.
At eurogamer expo i got to talk with some darn good artist about game art and the topic of modularity came in pretty often.
They all love it but they all know that a modular environment needs to look like it's not made of modules or it'll eventually look boring.
And we don't want boring environments, do we?
Hope i can get my point on this through and not sound like a douche
Then I'm currently sculpting quite a lot of bricks in zbrush which I'll use to make a tiling texture for the top cylindrical shape and 2 or 3 variations of uniquely mapped pillars.
The geo i got in my blockout was made clean enough to be used as final geo with the tiling texture and with some blending and by adding random moss and vegetation it won't (hopefully) even show as being a tiled texture.
Early observations from the concept art:
Temple is a dodecagon with a front point removed to create an entrance; rotation angle snaps should be at 30 degrees. Base and pillar arrangement is faceted (ie flat sides) but the base for the upper roof section is not and is curved (maybe it used to be a dome...?)
Regarding the foliage/stone interactions, I'll be using the UDK for this, for one very simple reason. Other (UDK specific) relevant links: Foliage, Modular Environment Creation.
Regarding rocks, modularity and all that jazz, PhilipK has some excellent tutorials on his site. Creating tiling stone textures, modular rocks and a general piece on modular sets (though admittedly that one leans more towards the metal/scifi spectrum)
Tools I'll be using: UDK (Sept. 2012), Max 2011, 3D Coat (I have ZBrush as well but 3DCoat is more intuitive for me) and Photoshop CS6 (with CrazyBump and nDo2 though I doubt they'll be much use here)
I've not really done a lot of organic / sculpt modelling, so this is going to be an interesting learning experience...
Regarding the statue, would it be valid to use an existing base mesh you have lying around as a starting point?
I've used Gir's Base Mesh from the polycount Wiki...
Am I right in thinking that although its a 30 degree angle for the circle, the top few drawings suggests otherwise? I've snapped modular parts in Max together following the grid, and its slightly differed to the concept.
It is 30 degrees yes. The temple is a dodecagon with the front point removed for the double-sized entry arch.
colours are grouped by instances (ie so two objects with the same colour = instances of each other... except for that platform under the statue that I've only just noticed. That's a coincidence... <_<)
This is how I plan on breaking it down to model. The blue bits are unique parts, and the top arches will be one solid mesh for the most part
I want to try to reuse textures as much as possible. Tiling floor texture, and a texture atlas for the pillars, the arches, and the smooth stone trim around the base.
For me it looks like your pillars are a bit too thick. Also if you look closely at the concept you can see that thesockets of the pillars extend a bit over the floor structure.
@L3XICON:
Thank you very much for the detailed advice! As you and PyrZern suggested I made the pillars a bit smaller.
I went on with my first texture, the one for the base floor. (I made one of those fancy 3 in 1 displays for the first time
Is it to dark maybe? Also it feels a bit too smoth and not very rock like, how could I change that?
Here is the texture on the model, everything still in Blender, Unity comes later.
The texture comes from a non tiling photosource from cgtextures.com. Is there any fast way or tool to make such a texture tiling? I made it by hand which took quite a while and I'm wondering if I'm missing an easy way maybe?
So far, I only have the blockout and putting together the enviro around it. I'm planning on having a pond/body of water surround it and get some lighting going from below the water, but I'm not really sure on where I want to take it.
There isn't, really. There's a few tricks you can use but any 'automatic' tiler is never going to give you good results. I cheated with the UVs on mine so I didn't need to make the texture tile.
Regarding your stone floor texture, short answer is that it'll look smooth because you've got smooth(ish) normals in the normalmap. I'm guessing that's straight out of CrazyBump? :'D
For sharp, pointy rocks you want sharp, pointy normals; this means sharp contrasts and larger, flatter areas. A good trick is to desaturate the image you're getting the cracks out of and adjust the levels so you have black where the cracks are and white everywhere else (I'd recommend using an adjustment layer to do this; you'll likely have to dodge/burn areas on the underlying layer to get them into the right value ranges).
This you can use to get an additional 'sharp' normalmap out of crazybump (turn all the sliders save Fine/Very Fine detail down to zero) to overlay on top of another extracted from a rock texture or somesuch. In the diffuse, you can also use the crackmap as an alpha to blend in another texture (ie dirt) for in the seams.
Trick to using CrazyBump is not to use it to get a whole normal map at once. Use it to get various 'elements' of detail, ie large-scale noise, cracks, fine detail etc and then blend all this together in photoshop, where you can fiddle around with the opacities to your heart's content.
Which looks like this ingame:
(admittedly it's come out kind of weak because I haven't done anything with the lighting much / at all).
It's not CrazyBump, it's Bitmap2Material but in regards of normalmap generation it is quite similar I guess.
Ok so i'm stuck. I'm trying to make my blockout modular and to the power of 2 for Unreal Units. My issue is my dodecagon. In that, I make a 12 sided cylinder, scale it to the size of the dodecagon, use a cap sub of 2 to make it a trim. I then split these segments off so I have 11 edges perfectly alligned at the required angle..... however when I make this match the grid it either overlaps or falls short.... how can I make this match and the grid, and be modular?
If it doesn't fit a design, just don't do it.
It is no holy grail to split everything in the way it must fit to the grid. Split in the way it is convinient and fast to work with.
I think that advice about modularity from first post should be really removed. It brings more confusion than good ;p.
Thanks for the feedback ill fix those up im gonna start the textures soon
Fair enough, it just confuses me that it clearly is possible as someone has done it already using UDK static meshes... whether or not this matches the concept is a different matter.... just ideally wanted to learn how to make the most of this grid business...
Grid really fits, only griddy things (pun intended). Like perfect squares, rectangles, cylinders, 45, 90, 180 angles etc.
But once you get something more organic/asymetric the entire grid buisness is gone. You can still make modules, but you must approach them diffrently.
That 10 sided +1, platform will never perfectly fit power of 2 grid, but it perfectly fit into metric system.
(EDIT: What resolution are you aiming for with the textures?)
Going to be putting this into cry engine, decided to go with the rickety kind of look because piling stones ontop of eachother in a manner where they would probably straight up fall down is awesome XD.
Doodled a few rocks in Zb then duplicated them up, did some modifications, combined the chunk then dublicated it again and filled in the holes.
Mostly hard polish and trim dynamic brush.
Tesselated column in marmo, base column is a 1k cylinder, going fairly high res because my last project was looowwwww
Texture res is currently stupid and will be lowered. Will probably just lose a little bit of noise as a result.
the platform has the wrong material assigned for the time being as it was used in testing the material setup : D
anyway here's a screeny:
I'll probably get the moss in there soon and start working for the statue and the altar in the next days... will probably take breaks doing some vegetation and some setting for the cave.
Also what do you guys think of the lighting compared to the last update?
Next I'll start on the altar first and the other tilings after. Guess i'll keep the statue last as it'll be quite a lot of work
Right now I've started on my first rock texture which will go on the pillars and archways. I blocked out the rough base to check that it tiles okay, and have now moved it to mudbox to start sculpting the details.
Rough stone base:
I'm working mainly on lighting, effects (perticles etc), and general atmopshere right now. The object on it's own is not that important, beside statue and sarcophagus.
Since it's mainly learning experience, I'm trying to get good lighting by using only the lights that are logical and have their place (no corrective lights put over level).
@Hannah
Nice blockout, but those stones are to rectungular. If you look at concept there is pretty much no rectangular stones over it.
@Fnitrox
Very nice atmosphere!
My next step is to start working on the textures
@Fnitrox
I think your new lighting set up looks better, but the moss in the hot spot of the light almost seems overexposed a bit, but that might just be the texture.
Also, try using a height map in the blend texture for the moss. It will blend in the cracks first instead of blending uniformly.
Now I know that it doesn't look 100% like the concept but I found some parts too difficult to match it exactly with the concept. Also It looks pretty clean and perfect atm, I plan on adding lots of the damage and wear with zbrush. I also plan on only sculpting 1 or 2 pieces ( like the pillars for example ) and then just re using them. If anyone's got some critiques that be great before I move on to sculpting it.
Everything was done inside of blender. I just ported it into zbrush for a quick render.
@iniside Thanks for the blockout advice.
@shiv That column looks awesome, I agree about the method of building like a drystone wall that looks like it's going to crumble at any second.