Modular Environment Kit - 1st Ever Serious Attempt
polycounter lvl 6
So here I am, a long-time member of Polycount but a guy who almost never posts ever. In that past, that was mostly about being intimidated by all the excellent work from people that gets shown here and thinking to myself that I wasn't ready to "play the game" at that level and not wanting to be embarrassed or feel inferior.
In other words, I was chicken.
Whatever, time to move on and not be chicken. Time to participate rather than just take advantage of ghosting excellent technical discussions or reading the wiki or something like that.
So I'm currently in the early stages of my first serious attempt at a modular environment kit.
The "flavor" of it is super-near future (maybe 2020-2025) southern European (Altantis actually, but not that's irrelevant) urban and residential. Attached is a pic that shows some inspiration for the buildings. If memory serves, two of the pics are Barcelona, one is Lisbon, and the fourth one is Marseille. One can see tucked in there a handful of techy/sci-fi bits too. Some of that is kinda grungy and looks like it came from some AAA game that was sitting somewhere in Doom country or something dark and grungy like it while a couple of the other bits are super clean and minimal and represent bits and pieces of our near future from a very different Star-Trek-y//Portal-y looking clean minimalism. Part of the reason that the sci-fi bits on my inspiration collage are small compared to the architectural bits is because they won't constitute a significant amount of stuff in the kit or in whatever environment a level designer might be making. Y'know...like a bit of pepper and parsely on top of the steak or something like that.
My futuristic greeble bits will try and straddle the difference between those two futuristic design motifs. A bit more complex and grungy than the super clean stuff but not as complicated and industrial looking as the other stuff. Somewhere in the middle.
*
So here's the completed base low-poly stuff; All of it. All the pieces have a single uv channel mapped but no lightmap data yet and no high-poly stuff for anything yet. I figured this would be a great time to post and get some feedback before going on and wasting a huge amount of work on a bad strategy.
My pieces all have their pivots in the right place and the stuff that actually is meant to fit together like lego can do so while a lot of the other stuff can get spackled on more-or less wherever. Windows, doors, hanging plants, TV antennas blah blah, those also have their pivots set but mostly just for precise convenience later.
I'm using a combination of multi-subs with 1024 tiling textures (often layered using masks and various compositing nodes like multiply or add and lerps etc. AND unique textures for stuff all laid out on 17 different 2048x2048 atlases.
90% of the basic modeling was done in 3ds Max although I'm trying to learn a bit of Maya as well to theoretically make myself more employable so I made a handful of the things shown in Maya as well and then added 'em to the collection in Max when I was done. My game engine will be UE4. I was going to try out Unity but I've decided that I don't want to go in cold not knowing hardly anything about Unity or how it's lighting and shaders work etc. with a project that requires complicated nodal networks for its shaders like this. My next project after this one is going to be a mech which will have a much more simple texture layout and I'll use that as an excuse to learn a thing or two about Unity. For now, I'll stick with what I know (except for the Maya part) and go with Unreal.
Here's the pic of the whole kit from a perspective and from the top where I showed how the various parts are associated in the 17 different 2k atlases.
In other words, I was chicken.
Whatever, time to move on and not be chicken. Time to participate rather than just take advantage of ghosting excellent technical discussions or reading the wiki or something like that.
So I'm currently in the early stages of my first serious attempt at a modular environment kit.
The "flavor" of it is super-near future (maybe 2020-2025) southern European (Altantis actually, but not that's irrelevant) urban and residential. Attached is a pic that shows some inspiration for the buildings. If memory serves, two of the pics are Barcelona, one is Lisbon, and the fourth one is Marseille. One can see tucked in there a handful of techy/sci-fi bits too. Some of that is kinda grungy and looks like it came from some AAA game that was sitting somewhere in Doom country or something dark and grungy like it while a couple of the other bits are super clean and minimal and represent bits and pieces of our near future from a very different Star-Trek-y//Portal-y looking clean minimalism. Part of the reason that the sci-fi bits on my inspiration collage are small compared to the architectural bits is because they won't constitute a significant amount of stuff in the kit or in whatever environment a level designer might be making. Y'know...like a bit of pepper and parsely on top of the steak or something like that.
My futuristic greeble bits will try and straddle the difference between those two futuristic design motifs. A bit more complex and grungy than the super clean stuff but not as complicated and industrial looking as the other stuff. Somewhere in the middle.*
So here's the completed base low-poly stuff; All of it. All the pieces have a single uv channel mapped but no lightmap data yet and no high-poly stuff for anything yet. I figured this would be a great time to post and get some feedback before going on and wasting a huge amount of work on a bad strategy.
My pieces all have their pivots in the right place and the stuff that actually is meant to fit together like lego can do so while a lot of the other stuff can get spackled on more-or less wherever. Windows, doors, hanging plants, TV antennas blah blah, those also have their pivots set but mostly just for precise convenience later.
I'm using a combination of multi-subs with 1024 tiling textures (often layered using masks and various compositing nodes like multiply or add and lerps etc. AND unique textures for stuff all laid out on 17 different 2048x2048 atlases.
90% of the basic modeling was done in 3ds Max although I'm trying to learn a bit of Maya as well to theoretically make myself more employable so I made a handful of the things shown in Maya as well and then added 'em to the collection in Max when I was done. My game engine will be UE4. I was going to try out Unity but I've decided that I don't want to go in cold not knowing hardly anything about Unity or how it's lighting and shaders work etc. with a project that requires complicated nodal networks for its shaders like this. My next project after this one is going to be a mech which will have a much more simple texture layout and I'll use that as an excuse to learn a thing or two about Unity. For now, I'll stick with what I know (except for the Maya part) and go with Unreal.
Here's the pic of the whole kit from a perspective and from the top where I showed how the various parts are associated in the 17 different 2k atlases.
Replies
This final pic shows a door with a multi-sub on it. Each of those materials may or may not have at least one and probably more layered tiling textures slapped on them. I'll get my masks and tiling textures kinda like this:
Stuff gets normal maps high>low via the typical high>low projection. Normal and geo go to Knald to get AO, Concavity, Convexity, and Curvature. Piece by piece, all of that will get composited together until each 2k atlas has a complete set of maps: Normal, AO, Concavity, Convexity, and Curvature. Those will be used to create masks in Substance Painter and those masks will be used in various ways to blend albedo, roughness, metalness, normals, and other crap when necessary.
Lerp lerp lerp! Lerpity lerp de-lerp!
The frame of the door for instance...that's probably a painted surface (with a 3vector to describe the paint color) composited over either a rough wood or a plaster and then over the top of those two, a third tiling texture that's a bit of dirt and/or maybe a teeny bit of moss.
Rinse/repeat for each material. At first, say, for the first six objects or so, the going is going to be pretty slow as I have to set up the shaders and hook all the nodes up etc. But after a while, it'll be fast because I'm duping shaders that I made for a different object and just changing the masks for different ones.