My first prop - Japanese Bridge.

Striff

Hey guys/gals, I decided to get into prop making and environmental design, so I made a bridge for my first project.

Render 1
Render 2
Wire 1
Wire 2


It is 1,015 polys exactly. I was aiming for it to be for a pretty graphic-intense game like HL2, thats why I made it pretty detailed.

Is it too many polys? I'm not quite sure how many polys a game like Half-Life 2 or something in its ballpark would use for a prop like that. I think I optimized it the best I could, by deleting any un-used edges and the bottom faces of all the objects that you wouldn't see.

I plan on adding some vines growing off the bridge when I texture it, and am going to try to give the overall feel that it is an old bridge in the texture process.

poopinmymouth

There might be a smidge too many divisions running down the length of those rails, but it looks pretty good. I think you should definately move on to the texturing stage before we can give too much feedback. You might have been able to get away with making some of the boards solid chunks, to save some polys, but overall looks good for a first asset.

Next time dont' render on a black background.

ElysiumGX

Very simple in design, and the slight curvature of the railing does little to change that. If you're gonna go, go all out. 1 or 2 subdivisions, or none at all, per rail segment would have cut down the polycount greatly. No one will notice. Shhh...I won't tell. Nice choice of prop btw.

Striff

Finished the base of my texture, and I would like to know what you guys think of it.



It is currently 1024 x 512. Do game engines support this size, or do they have to be in even numbers like 512 x 512?

I'm going to add some vines and leaves onto the texture, and maybe some bird crap for the handrails. I think I will also going to have some alpha mapped vines hanging off of the bridge.

Im also contemplating if I should make a bump or normal map for this, as I need some experience in those. I'm not too sure if a bump map will add much detail at all.

poopinmymouth

It honestly looks like a wood plank texture with a single overlay on top. Try to get more variation and area specific damage in there. Make one board discolored or greyer, or even of a different grain pattern. When you use overlays, marquee select the different boards and flip those areas, so that the overlay doesn't continue perfectly from one board to the next. Try to get in some scratches and missing chunks of wood taken out.

Also be sure to preview it on the model as you are working. Sometimes the give and take between model and texture can really help your direction.

Striff

The overlay is some moss and dirt texture. How would you recomend painting in some dents and scratches?

Thanks Poop.

motives

the wood doesnt have much depth, look s abit like a modern plank that sawed with a electric saw you know. I guess this is supposed to be feudal times japan or somethin? try maybe overlayin the wood with another wood layer and play with the lighting modes.. or simply paint in some deeper grain and tear by hand. Usually the dodge and burn tool works pretty good when workin on wood but watch out so you dont wash out the colors.

Also, when checkin polycount its the triangle count thats important. So your bridge is 2000 rather than 1000

Zeldrik

Not a bad start, engines do support sizes that arent square but are a power of 2 however in this situaion I think you should use a 1024x1024. the way this wood is going to be used it could do with the verticle variation so it doesnt look like its repeated. Also the current texture has too many artifacts, these are bits of detail that stand out fromt the rest and make the viewer realize they are looking at a repeating texture. Things like dark knot holes and such should be avoided unless they are all over the texture. Think of it like a brick wall that has 1 green brick, it stands out and will always look bad when its repeated but if there are a lot of green bricks then its not so bad.
To avoid this do what poop says and always see what it looks like on the model while you work on it.

Anyway its looking good so hurry up and finish it :P

odium

Hope you dont mind me doing this, but I just thought it may help. Anyways, I made you a quick 1024x1024 wood texture to try. I used a couple of photosources for it. Each panel is 1024x128:

http://www.quake2evolved.com/odium/wood_png.png

odium

And then IMO, use something like this for the edges (make the wood less thick heigth wise maybe?)

http://www.quake2evolved.com/odium/wood_edge.png

odium

Which should then give you a plank that looks like this:

Striff

Hey odium, thank you SO much man, this is a great help. I was trying to decide if I should throw my whole texture out the window, and I think I will now =P

Thanks again man.

Striff

Alright, I textured the bridge with the base texture That odium supplied me with. Here is the result, its now at 1 1024x1024 map and 555 faces.






Im going to dirty up the texture and have it look like it has moss growing on it.

odium

Yeah, nice try. Also make sure that the edges to the wood look slightly damaged (like on my model shot) so that it looks more lifelike. ATM it looks like polygons, hard edged ones.

hawken

looking good!

I take it this a garden bridge for crossing a small stream and so on? There are multiple construction techniques for these but the most common being more arched. For a nice touch, to really pull off a Japanesey style, did you consider posts at the ends? They are often red, round and topped with a bell shape.

http://youko.vis.ne.jp/trip/mitinoku/akiu/niwa.jpg
http://www.hcp.bc.ca/Jap%20Pic%201.jpg
http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200501-chile/200501-la-serena/japanese-garden-01.3.jpg <-- this one

The load distribution on your bridge seems to be supported by the struts in the center, with their own arch. While this might be ok for such a small bridge, most support their load directly to the gound at either end without need for center support via struts and the like.

Maybe I'm just reading too deep Post your REF!

RickA

Hawken, that first pic, is that of a bridge in the castle (Nijo?) at Kyoto? It seems familiar.