Small Lab Room with Water Tank WIP

ScottHoneycutt

AO
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My goal here was to dive into this piece without fear and simply start creating, even if I didn't know what it was, or how it would be presented. As time went on I moved away from the apartment look and further toward the lab idea with some sort of hydro engineering taking place. This would be a small room as part of a bigger game environment. I could have kept adding little details forever but started to get antsy to move on to texturing. All thoughts are welcome. Thanks!

foredea

Nice start! I like that you made variety between simple shapes and complex details. And the scene looks like believable.
I'm expecting more variation of the materials. Don't be fear to use Specular maps and reflection maps.

Texelion

Could be nice to put some plants in/instead of the water maybe ?

ScottHoneycutt

Thanks for the help. I have a few questions. I separated the objects in 6 parts for the unwrapping so I have 6 objects with UV layouts that look like the image above. I simply used UVW maps to layout a checker pattern over all of their polys and then packed them to a generic layout layout. I figured all I need is the AO and Normal bake and the rest will be fairly simply colors or tiles. As always I tried X-Normal (because it's been recommended to me numerous times) and failed to get anything to work so I started baking in 3ds Max. I eventually realized that the AO won't be effective unless all the pieces are touching each other during the bake.

Should I even do the shadow bake? How does an actual game environment with several pieces like this get put together ... in several pieces? Or should I simply divided the objects up more unconventionally like literally slicing a wall in half? That could maybe at least address the AO issue since the wall polys are side by side and not shadowing each other. Does that make sense? It seems impractical to make it all one piece because of how small every island would be.

Thanks

ScottHoneycutt

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out in the end. As for the AO issue I realized I could have all the low poly objects visible when baking with the one high poly object needed. I used the Xoliul shader mostly in 3ds Max. All comments welcome. Thanks