TGI Friday's (environment)
polycounter lvl 17
Hi, this is my first environment, hopefully it will be easier to get into the industry than with character stuff. Any help on how I can improve it will be really appreciated.
5075 polygons. 14x 512 maps, 1x 1024 and 1x 512 by 256. Made in Max, no lights. the 1024 is the road. The model is based on a photo.
5075 polygons. 14x 512 maps, 1x 1024 and 1x 512 by 256. Made in Max, no lights. the 1024 is the road. The model is based on a photo.
Replies
to agree with something thats been mentioned.. the photos don't work well,, especialy if you can get any where near the object in game. it will be obvious its a flat texture with no real depth, i would go withthe typical grey blue glass, with a bit of rrelfection on it
Here's a perspective view for Manic
http://img466.imageshack.us/my.php?image=perspectiveview4kp.jpg
And here's the new street which is 1024 x 256
Now, lets see a nice render with normal maps and spec maps. If you dont have them, you should. Why? Looking at theat environment, the poly could you have used and the texture sizes, I'm guess Xbox360 or PS3 for the platform, and with those platfroms the lighting does a LOAD of the work. So you'll be needing the bump and spec maps to describe the materials.
Do you have a photo ref to work from? I ask that becase I don't belive a TGIs would look like that - the sighs would be much larger.
1024x256 does not fly on ps3 or xbox360, textures still need to be a power of two. 1024x512 or 512x256 if you want rectangular textures.
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Sorry for this little off topic question but I always thought that "power of two" only concerned the width and height of a texture but not their relation to each other.
Since 1024 is a power of two and 256 is a power of two I would have considered it a "proper" power of two texture?
An extreme example I also would have considered to be a "proper" power of two texture would have been 2048x16 (yes, I know noone would do that
I improved the lower windows aswell. and optimized the door area texture so it isn't as small.
I have a couple suggestions, though it's definitely getting there:
- the proportions of the grand orders (those two-story pilasters) and the windows are different from the actual building. the pilasters should be slightly wider, and the windows slightly more narrow. moreover, increase the width of the molding around the window substantially. nailing the proportions of a certain building's windows it absolutely key, since they read as the building's "eyes." along those lines, see if you cant duplicate the geometry that happens at the base of the lower row of windows, without creating another dedicated texture. I'm talking about how the molding branches outward to join the foot of the pilaster.
- the raytraced shadows certainly add a bunch, but as long as you're going for a raytraced render, you should definitely throw a reflective material onto the windows. a subtle reflection of something blueish/greyish/nothing will go a long way.
- last, take a closer look at the geometry that happens at the top of the building, through the entablature. here's a great diagram showing the front view and section of the corinthian order cornice, which this building is based off of: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/us.capitol/kninety.jpg
Make sure, as well, to line up those rectangular vents/windows (?) in the red part below the white cornice. they should align vertically with the window bays below.
coming along though! looking forward to seeing even more development.
ps: I'm rarely an advocate for increasing saturation and contrast in textures, but I think those striped awnings could use a little dose.
Seems you're missing the signs that jut out above the canopies, intentional?
Can I see the wireframe please? I'm wondering about the tops of the pilasters.
How many separate bitmaps? Seems to me you could pack quite a bit, maybe into a single sheet, unless the windows have reflection.
love to see some wires of it.
looking fantastic tho, keep it up.
But ... really nice piece. Keep it going.
Looking nice with limited reference - really nice job infact
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1024x256 does not fly on ps3 or xbox360, textures still need to be a power of two. 1024x512 or 512x256 if you want rectangular textures.
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Sorry for this little off topic question but I always thought that "power of two" only concerned the width and height of a texture but not their relation to each other.
Since 1024 is a power of two and 256 is a power of two I would have considered it a "proper" power of two texture?
An extreme example I also would have considered to be a "proper" power of two texture would have been 2048x16 (yes, I know noone would do that
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This is true. The width can be 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096 and the height can be 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096. It doesn't matter what order it goes in, 64x64, 128x2048, 4096x2, it doesn't matter, as long as both the X and the Y use one of these sizes, your fine. (Of course you can go higher, 8192, 16384, 32768, but your not gonna want to go higher than 4096 for a loooooong time)
Take your texture, and fill it with a small black/white boxes. Just like a Chess Board. Stand back and take a look at how your model looks now. Your aim is to get the boxes to appear the same size all over, so that each area is in pixels pretty much the same. If you have a wall that uses a 512x512 texture and a small sign below that uses a 512x512 texture, sure it may look readable but its just a really bad eye soar. Keeping things like resolution consistent is one of the many things i love about design, and when things are not consistent it really hurts my eyes to look at. It just confuses me tbh, from both a design point of view and a visual point of view. Sure there will be times when you will have a big space on the texture that will be blank, but fill it with something else, another wal ltexture maybe to stop it repeating, something else. But try not to make things HUGE in res compared to everything else.
There will be times that this can sometimes be ignored, a player texture for example will sometimes use a higher res texture for main areas of focus like the head, or chest. But for world textures it looks a lot better if you keep things consistent.
I've never worked on a game that allows 1024x256? Although I've heard of a few engines which support it, I think it might be something less common? Our current next gen project does not support these kind of textures.
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Serious? Its not a game engine "feature" its more to do with how the image is handled GPU side. The reason you keep the extures power of two is so that they appear sharper because it wont convert them on the fly to the nearest power of two size. Every engine i've ever worked with has used this, any power of two size X any power of two size. Im sure your engine can too.
Im sure its not an engine "features" but just "standards". You can do anything X anything, but keep it to power of two so that it loads faster and looks better,
And just about every game engine I've ever worked with, and most that I know of support non square textures, so long as the dimension of each side is a power of 2.
yes malcom you are incorrect. They are scaled usually via mipmapping (pre sampled and filtered) rather than runtime downsampling. http://www.3drender.com/glossary/mipmapping.htm
They are scaled down to the next lower power of 2 however that doesn't make them square, it makes them 1/4 their original dimension.
Ie a 512X128 samples to a 256X64 samples to a 128X32 etc ultimately down to a 4x1 as the lowest mip level.
The reason people tend to stick with square textures is because they are easier to layout in a uv editor, and often the extra space is handy.
Rectangular textures are still mapped from u0v0 to u1v1, so your uv layout is still square, but will appear distorted in one direction in the editor, However the texture with the non square res will be sampled across the uv square and will appear correctly on the mesh.
Being as memory space is a concern, especially with consoles, if what you are textureing better fits a smal rectangle then better to use one than to force the same mesh into a square texture sheet.
Okay but if these resolution are supported but get scaled to the nearest power of two at run time, you are wasting texture space and potentially getting crappy looking art in game? A best practice would be to avoid strange shapes, I'm I wrong? I looked at the half life2 and doom3 textures and did not see any 256x16 in there.
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Erm no you are wrong and totally din't read what i said.
1024x16 is perfectly fine and will NOT get downsized to the nearest power of two. Because it already IS power of two.
However 1000x18 WILL be downsized, because it is NOT power of two.
The fact that Doom 3 doesn't use many textures like this means nothing at all, they just had a lot of need for Square tiles thats all.
Trust me, its PERFECTLY fine for you to use a 4096x8 texture in a game if you want with ZERO scaling, and still be fine. Its got nothing to do with the engine, its got everything to do with the artist and if he actually NEEDS this shape texture.
Paul posted in this thread and if he pops back up i'm sure he will tell you the same.
(Doom 3uses many 64x2 size pics. So in other words if what your saying is true (And it isnt), that would also mean a 1024x32 texture is possible.)
Its got nothing to do with anything. I could use a 1999x23 texture if i wanted and it would show up perfectly fine. However, it WOULD get downscaled to 1024x16 because its the nearest power of two. Using a 1024x16 texture on the other hand, will NOT be downsized as it already IS the nearest power of two texture size.
You may need to do a bit of reading because a few of you dont 100% understand how textures are loaded.
http://panda3d.org/wiki/index.php/Choosing_a_Texture_Size
"Most graphics hardware requires that your texture images always be a size that is a power of two in each dimension. That means you can use any of the following choices for a texture size: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, or so on (but unless you have a really high-end card, you'll probably need to stop there).
The textures don't usually have to be square: they don't have to have the same size in both dimensions. But each dimension does usually have to be a power of two. So 64
Its looking really really good.
One minor thing is the spacing between the awnings as well as the friday's branded gates/barriers. In the photo the gap between the awnings looks to be about half what it is in your model. The large "american bar" railings look like they could just use a stretch to touch the "fridays" railings next to them.
Minor things, but it should push it to look even more like the photo.
Also you could set up a camera to get a render with the same perspective as that ref photo. Could help the rest of us compare apples to apples.
otherwise it looks very good.