Reel Piece: Cabin

Sage

This is the latest piece I will be adding to my reel. It's still wip so the texture is far from done. It is currently 658 polys and textured with 1 512 x 512 targa with alpha. I'll be adding some plants, mail box and maybe some chairs to the cabin. Let me know what you think.

Alex

Rick Stirling

The roof tiler went a bit mental when he was doing the eaves. I hope medicine helped.

Its too monototone - loads of colours, but it looks like each area is a solid block of colour.

The model itself is also very symmetrical - you could make it a much more interesting.

Have a wee think about the cabin - who built it, when they built and what it purpose was. Did the current owners build it as a playhouse for the kids? Did the current owners grandfather build it with his bare hands as a hunting lodge? Those 2 stories make 2 totally buildings.

Sage

Thanks for the feedback Rick. Acutally I modeled it from a real cabin that looks to be for people that go to vacations. My intent was just to make it look as close to the real thing and spice it up a bit here and there. The real cabin looks very clean and well maintained unlike my version.

I would like some feedback on how models like this are made for games to make the most use of the texture. I'm texturing this with the limited knowledge I have of rts games, however I am looking to expand my workflow so I can be useful as an environment artist. When I made the model I wanted it to have the least amount of polys and did not set the model up for mirroring.

Here is how the model looked before I removed the quads so it had the least amount of polys. Should I leave more polys to allow for tileable textures? I do know it depends on the game, but I'm looking to get hired full time so I'm wondering what I need to do to get there. Thanks.

Alex

danr

well, in 99.9% of environment art you wouldn't unwrap a model like this for a single texture-sheet, like you would a character. You'd have a few different tiling textures (roof tiles, slats, bricks etc) and a few more for details (windows, door etc) and model in polys to accept the mapping. You could be clever with the polys and UVs to avoid needing bespoke textures, like the surround of your blue triangular window thing.

At the moment, you're using a 512x512 that essentially contains only a handful of 32x32s. I see about 8, possibly 9, only about 1/32 of your current texture space. For any showreel, you'd have to provide a very good reason why you have chosen to build the model like this.

Rick Stirling

Yup, tile it like Dan says, then if you want you can add extra polys floating over the top to layer on extra textures - this means your base is nicely tiled to give a good use of UVs, then a few extra textures over the top break up the uniformity. It's jsut like a new layer in photshop, except the layer is a polygon with alpha.

The bplack lines on the texture to define the plans are very harsh, and they simply wouldn't be that dark or as uniform in colour.

danr

floating polys = often problematic, depending on the quality of your z-buffer, so i wouldn't use them for everything. Doors and windows would ideally be meshed in, and looking at the design of the cabin the dirt along the base of the walls could be too (new wood texture with muck painted directly on).

That's not to say you shouldn't use alpha decals - they're very useful as rick says. But they depend on the engine and can always be minimized.

moose

i think if you broke up the horizontal black lines of the walls with a dark shade of brown (so its not black), and drop some pixel highlights in there it could come off less cartoony. The contrast in the panels is nice, but i think a little subtlety in its exaggeration will go a long way. a little color variation and dirt will go a long way for ya too. Its wood, its outside, put some dirt and mildew on that sucker!

Id work the chimney a little more, its very reptetive atm.

the mesh is nice, but i think the texture has a lil ways to go.