Another Modular dungeon you say?

Twotents

Greetings everyone,

It's been a very long time since I've last posted on Polycount thought it would be great get some critique on a project I am working on for university.

My task is to create a dungeon environment for some characters to walk through, I decided to go a modular approach because I want to put this into my portfolio too.

I wanted to do some sculpting in zBrush too but the schedule doesn't allow me the time, anyway here are the high poly models so far before I move onto baking and texturing!

Nosslak

You should really look at some brick wall references as no one would ever build a wall by just stacking the bricks in straight rows upwards. There's no structural integrity in your current walls so it'd be easy to knock it all down with a sledgehammer and there's a big chance it wouldn't stand the test of time. Making a regular brick pattern would be more difficult (as there's no straight outside borders), but at least it would make sense.

Also most of this would probably be done with maybe 2-3 tiling materials instead of unique, baked meshes.

musashidan

As Nosslak said, you need to build the walls with a stacked bond. But as it's modular you can also create  wall pier or a stone column elements to snap between the walls and hide the half-blocks. This would also look more realistic as this is the way long walls with no perpendicular supporting walls are actually built.

Twotents

Thanks Nosslak and Dan, I've gone and made adjustments to my meshes, the one thing I am stuck on is the archway and the grate, when I start modeling the actual environment would I just cut into the mesh of the wall to place those so they look like they go beyond the wall? If that makes sense.

Also Dan I watch most of your tuts on youtube I love the zBrush tuts and actually did the cistern tutorial to learn more about substance painter!

n4uj

Its looking good
I agree with @Nosslak and @musashidan
However I think that would strongly depends on the artslyte, are yoy targeting for a realistic artstyle or a stylized one? because the bricks models don't really match the real life proportion and construction standards. But if you are targeting a stylized artstyle, the sense of reality can be distorted a lot, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Twotents

Going for a stylized art style, our whole animation is going to be a hand painted style, I'm hoping to update again soon with the tileable meshes baked down and ready for texturing.

musashidan

Twotents said:

Thanks Nosslak and Dan, I've gone and made adjustments to my meshes, the one thing I am stuck on is the archway and the grate

Also Dan I watch most of your tuts on youtube I love the zBrush tuts and actually did the cistern tutorial to learn more about substance painter!

Cheers mate. Glad you'refinding the tuts useful  

It might be an idea to add to the archway/grate elements by squaring them off with more bricks so they are more suited for modularity and are easier to snap to the other parts. Roman architecture, or even neo-classical, is a great ref for this kind of modeling.

But as @n4uj said, if this is stylised then don't worry too much about the architecture nazis like me, do what you feel looks good and suits the style you're going for.

Twotents

Thanks for the suggestions @musashidan I will have a look into the references, modeling like this is kind of new to me so it's all a learning curve.