Medieval Buildings

Maxilator

Hi, I'm trying my hand at making some modular medieval buildings, I just started and this is what I have so far. I'm making the buildings so that they would suit a strategy game or something isometric so the polycount is supposed to be pretty low but atm the count is fairly high due to lack of optimization, I'm gonna keep doing other versions using these and similar parts so that I might make a nice little collection that would suit my portfolio. The maps are currently just diffuse.

Maxilator

Made some more pieces, I'm currently only using diffuse map, do you think normal, spec and gloss is called for?

Makkon

These are looking pretty solid, man. If you want to work on optimizing these for a top-down view, normal maps can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to implied details.

But these days, poly count isn't nearly as big of a deal as drawcalls and shader complexity. What do your texture maps look like?

APiotrW

Looks very good! Would be nice to see them in engine.

Doxturtle

the last pictures look a lot better with the nice lighting, these look really cool

Maxilator

Well, first of all i should add that I use this workflow :http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/ModularMountAndBlade

As far as the normal maps go, I'll try to see where I should use it, might add it on the roofs especially.

Maxilator

Hey, I tried to import these buildings into unreal engine and threw them into the top down scene and it works pretty well (I managed to get all the collision stuff working and they render fine) though I have a slight problem. Basically every building has it's own material, even though they are identical, so there is for example a wall plaster material for every building using that. How can I fix this? (There are no duplicates of the textures only the materials)

I have no prior experience with UE for the record.

Makkon

Sounds like UE4 imported the materials you had in Maya, and I'm not totally sure how to set up a proper import for that sort of thing, though I'm sure there's documentation on it.
I usually turn that box off on import, and do all the material setup myself for each texture. if you want to do that, you'll have to learn a bit about the material editor to do that, but it's a nice system and it's worth learning.

Maxilator

Makkon wrote: »

Sounds like UE4 imported the materials you had in Maya, and I'm not totally sure how to set up a proper import for that sort of thing, though I'm sure there's documentation on it.
I usually turn that box off on import, and do all the material setup myself for each texture. if you want to do that, you'll have to learn a bit about the material editor to do that, but it's a nice system and it's worth learning.

Cool, I'll take a look at it, I did some searching before but couldn't find anything along those lines. What I did now though was just to remove the duplicates manually and assigned the one i kept to the ones that lost their material, but there is probably as you say a better way. I'll put up a video of how it looks in engine in a while, don't really have much time to spend on it today but hopefully it'll be up by tonight.

Maxilator

Okay, I managed to capture this video now, I have no experience with fraps so it came out a bit laggy in the beginning but this was the best I could manage. I'm having some trouble with the baked shadows in the scene, as you can see they are pretty much just blobs so if anyone knows how to fix that I would be glad to hear it. Other critique is welcome as well, keep in mind that it is the buildings themselves that I want critiqued.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGs-h64lGmY&feature=youtu.be

Makkon

It's a little tough to embed youtube sometimes, here you go
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGs-h64lGmY[/ame]


And I think it's looking great! You're picking this up fast, and your models are looking solid in engine which is a good sign.
As for baked shadows, if you're baking shadows in ue4 you need to make lightmaps. You can either have UE4 do them for you (which doesn't always get good results), or you can make your own in Maya using a second UV map, which can be kinda tedious. More information about that here:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJsR0y7R8U[/ame]

Maxilator

Hey, I managed to solve the shadow issue, it was only too low res, and decided that I would wrap up the project, here is the finished result! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/medieval-village-ed0b1a43-86f5-44af-a73a-1bd7cc8230c0

Thanks for all the feedback!

HashBrownHamish

You should make a mod for banished with these would love to see them in game ^^