WIP: Building Environment
polycounter lvl 17
My portfolio is lacking in proportion to what I want to do with my life.
I want to be an Environmental Artist, as well as work for White Wolf on their upcoming MMO.
So I got to looking at pics and saw this (from a similar game called Cry Gaia)...
Inspired, I set off to create something similar remembering a similar building from back home.
Here is what I have done so far. Granted, I am only pulling minor references, and not trying to recreate either scene. I want to shoot for a subtle mix of Gas Light as well as Neon.
I am confident at my ability to texture, however, I am unsure if I should unwrap this thing, or tile it with planar maps.
I am going to add a back to the building with an alley scene and place some parking meeters on the curb.
The Tri count is only 741 for now.
The Block is a Gordon. I am used to modeling for Source, everything in inches and 512^2 sheets for every 128^2 inches of worldspace.
Reminds me a bit of Sesame Street (to be honest). More to come...
I want to be an Environmental Artist, as well as work for White Wolf on their upcoming MMO.
So I got to looking at pics and saw this (from a similar game called Cry Gaia)...
Inspired, I set off to create something similar remembering a similar building from back home.
Here is what I have done so far. Granted, I am only pulling minor references, and not trying to recreate either scene. I want to shoot for a subtle mix of Gas Light as well as Neon.
I am confident at my ability to texture, however, I am unsure if I should unwrap this thing, or tile it with planar maps.
I am going to add a back to the building with an alley scene and place some parking meeters on the curb.
The Tri count is only 741 for now.
The Block is a Gordon. I am used to modeling for Source, everything in inches and 512^2 sheets for every 128^2 inches of worldspace.
Reminds me a bit of Sesame Street (to be honest). More to come...
Replies
If you are using Max, check out this dx material by crazybutcher (whoops linked the wrong one, fixed)
Here is what I have gotten done during the night/morning. Tri count is at 781. Stairs, Rails, Windows and such have not been textured.
Crits:
- The parking meter wouldn't be that close to a corner. 1 parking meter = 1 parked car. Most cities don't allow parked cars that close to corners and actually paint tow away zones on the curbs (<-hint for detail). They create blind spots where pedestrians can step out into traffic, and it makes turning around the corner hard when cars are that close. Replace it with a street lamp, a traffic pole, a mailbox, a news box, a fire hydrant or follow the top concept and put in the fancy half pillar/hitching posts that have a chain running along them. Place them in front or behind the meters and have the half pillars continue on farther down to the corner then the meters.
- Check the number of sides on those poles by the stairs they look really round but the joint is really angular. If you can reduce the number of sides and smooth out that angle it will help. Most of the time those kinds of poles are bent not cut and welded which is the only way to get a sharp angle like that. But it leaves the joint, sharp and weaker then if its bent.
- You might want to remove the hand railings all together and put some small square pillars that have mini statues, urns or lights on top. You could then frame in the sides of the stairs with some nice trim details. It depends on how detailed or run down you want the place to feel. Since it looks like the doorway is shaping up to be the focal point of the piece you might want to make it a bit more detailed.
I hear you on the parking meter crit. I modeled it, and just wanted to spread it around temporarily. A Streetlight might be good, going for those New Orleans like Gaslights.
I am not certain what to do with the shader or why I need to be doing anything with vertex paint. I have been texturing for some time now and never touched the feature. Care to educate a little, I know I am missing the point.
I may redo the stairs, since I have not textured them yet. I may break them away from the bulk of the model, and give them those fatter railings. Using them for urns or little gargoyles is a great suggestion I feel like an ass for not thinking of it.
Thank you for the support.
-Andrew
<font color="orange">Mini Tutorial:</font>
Create a plane, 512x512 1 segment x 1 segment. Or however your tiles are going to be laid out.
1) Create a blend material, by setting a material from "standard" to "blend".
2) Set the first material to your clean brick texture.
3) Set the second material to your dirty brick texture.
4) Set the mask to vertex color and apply this material to your plane. Copy your plane and increase the amount of segments so its fairly dense like 8. Apply the vertex paint modifier.
5) Set the view vertex color mode to the second option this will give you a good view of your B/W mask.
6) Set the color to white and click the paint bucket to flood the layer with white. If you don't it will count it as transparent just like a photoshop layer.
7) Set your brush size and opacity to your desired settings, set the color to black, and click the paint brush.
8) Paint...
9) Render out the high poly plane using any method you like, personally I use the render to texture feature. Apply that newly rendered image to a new material and apply that to your original low poly plane.
The reason Crazy butchers script is nice, is it doesnt make you have to bake down the texture, it blends them on the model so you can have 2 seperate textures. blended.
the script alows you to vertex blend the textures, it also allows you to do a overlay texture and multiply layers over the diffuse texture, all of these can use seperate uv channels.
Ignore the multiply part, I thought there was a bug where I had to load a blank texture in even if I wasn't using it, turns out I needed Blend2blahblah selected (circled)
Here's the tree textures > texture A, B and the overlay (I it in both overlay slots so it overlays the blended texture as well)
Here's the model straight from the viewport
all showing real time and matches how it will look in the game engine
vig, i may not be understanding your proccess, but how is that different than just taking the 2 textures and blending them with a mask in photoshop?
The reason Crazy butchers script is nice, is it doesnt make you have to bake down the texture, it blends them on the model so you can have 2 seperate textures. blended.
the script alows you to vertex blend the textures, it also allows you to do a overlay texture and multiply layers over the diffuse texture, all of these can use seperate uv channels.
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The point of doing it in max is that you can paint around details that are in the scene that aren't accounted for on the texture. You can use it on complexly unwrapped objects also and save yourself hours of painting on all the fractured UV pieces.
It comes in handy for;
- Dirt paths
- Foot prints in the snow
- Painting rust on things like the bumper of a car
- Painting snow or dust on the tops of rocks and objects
- When you have a wall full of pipes and fiddly bits clipping into a wall and the wall texture needs to "interact" with those pieces. It can save quite a bit of time if you know where each one of those meets the wall.
- Render out a UV template of your high poly mesh which will give you another guide to go by in addition to the vertex painted markers.
- Use it to paint or fix up AO shadows right on the environment.
There are a lot of uses for the method.
Also you can blend as many textures as you wish you aren't limited to just using two. You just need to create a new blend and put your old blend in one of the slots, your new texture in the other. Set the vertex color to a new channel and apply a new vertex paint modifier on top of the old and set it to use that new vertex channel.
Since you're using two "materials" to blend you can change up the spec on one, the bump in another and bake that all into the defuse and spec maps. Shinny pipes with dust on the top, no prob spec is covered in the blend for you. You don't always have to go crazy with the Sub-D either to get good results. It all depends on the object and what you need to do tho.
I didn't know about the multiply function in CB's script, that could be well worth its weight. I'll have to take a look at it. But don't you still have to render out the final defuse texture or are you using it as a shader the engine would read?
But don't you still have to render out the final defuse texture or are you using it as a shader the engine would read?
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Yup our shader uses overlay and multiply maps (to name a few)
Check out the two banners in this screenshot, they both have the same diffuse but different overlays. Look at the barrels in the forground, they must have a dark or detail map with screwed up UVs, causing the banding... how'd that get on the website? lolzers!
sorry for deraling your thread, Incomitatum, keep on truckin'
What I would add is that entrance seems a bit too small comparing to the size reference box that u placed. It may feel too narrow and low for player.
I have made the stoop now, and will have some more pics as soon as I get the doors and windows textured.
:P
The only kind of 2 car/1 meter we have around here are two headed unless they are the new fancy 1 giant pay station that looks like an ATM.
I'm not saying that single headed, coin op, 2 car meters don't exist, its a crazy big world and anything is possible but the majority of meters I've had to use (not many) are 1 head = 1 car.
And I've officially caused one of THESE in this thread, my work here is done...
AdamBrome - Your work is amazing. I noticed your forts. One is JUST an AO pass. However the rest of the fort looks derived from tiled sheets and is not unwrapped. Is this assumption wrong? If not, how did you mix the AO sheet and the DIF sheet?
Thank you all, I hope to have another update soon.
The AO was a comp done during the final stages:
I rendered out the colour and lighting, then the AO, the comp'd them together in Photoshop - saving me a boat load of time since this was purely for my portfolio. Other methods you may want to consider is baking the AO directly to your textures, or faking a lightmap.
Here's my brief (and probably useless) explanation of both:
AO baked right to texture: This is a method used where you render out the AO to individual textures you're using for your scene. It'll save you time in the texturing process.
Faking a light map: This one is a little more tricky, and I only know of one game that has done it before. Basically once your entire environment is done you duplicate the entire thing. With the duplicate, attach it all together as one complete object. Do a quick flat-map unwrap job then do the above mentioned 'render to texture' process on that. With this new lightmap shell, you then have it render as an additive to the scene, putting the AO on top of your regular scene, faking a light map.
All methods are just a way of replicating AO/light bounces to fill in corners of geometry with some occlusion and give a more realistic light pass.
For you though, I'd worry about using your textures the best you can, scale, geometry resolution, realistic set-dressing, and so forth. Leave the more technical stuff for once you have the more 'beginner' things down.
I mostly have the roofs done. I need to touch up the UVW Map. Then I am on to addons. All have to be modeled and Textured
Lamps
Newspaper Boxes
Trashcan
Dumpster
Payphone
Billboard
Air Conditioners
Antenna
Sattelite Receiver
Power Meters
Grafitti
Random Trash
2 Neon Signs
I have alot of work ahead of me...
The problem is considering -how- it would be afixed to the building in a practical, real life, example.
I have been looking at various buildings online, and not coming up with much.
Enclosed are 3 shots for comparison. The cone is hanging out over the edge. And I might have it supported by wooden beams arrayed out from the face of the brick. Would the weight of something like this support it'self?
Crits welcome. I have a bunch of little things to work on now. 2 windows and doors need textures still, I want to do some sprites that will add wear, and also I have many props to texture as well. I am going to try to see if I can fit them all on one 1024.
Nearly done with the building. I know I am putting off making the props and texturing them. :S
At the very end I might put a beat up Impala parked on the street outside.
As for the cone in the previous post...it doesn't make sense why is it just sticking out of the cube on the top floor, add the supports on there if you haven't already.
Car seems a cool idea btw
If you have any other suggesstions on how to make it beliviably "supported", I would love to hear them.
You have touched on it breifly. The more work I do, the bigger the concept becomes, and the more work I want to do...
I will have to stop somewhere, I am not modeling an entire city...
Thanks for your support.
I'm a bit confused about your floors, is the ground level very high and uses the second row of windows too?
OR it could be that you have your first floor right about the door, which would make for a very low room, unless in some place the floor goes down again. Also then the placement of the windows on the first floor might be a bit awkward, about 2,5 bricks from the floor...
About the support, it is either built in brickwork, and having that so thick that it can support the structure, or use a concrete structure(lots of other things possible, but those look most likely used here). As the bottom looks concrete, it is highly likely it has got a framework of concrete going up too with a brickwork shell.
I hope this helps some, you might not want to go this far though, it's not an architectural plan
Perhaps I should make the polys around the base of the cone (on the backside) brick.
Rain? Holy crap man, I didn't even consider how this structure would deal with rain. Perhaps I need to place a pipe along the back.
Furthermore, do any of you know why buildings often have rocks/gravel on their roofs?
Besides the rainwater system, you might also want to look into ventilation as that will show mostly as a sort of box ontop of the roof, for example a condensor.
kind of like this. Adding Crown molding details around the top of the building will help some of the grandeur also. Part of why the cone looks out of place is because it is a fancy detail on a kind of drab building. If you add in some of those finishing touches and punch up the molding it might blend better.
One thing that would really push the architecture stand out, would be to take that rounded corner, and turn it into a cylinder that trims the sides instead of just being a rounded corner. Here is a paint over of some redesign changes I would make.
- Extend the sidewalk, add drains or sunken daylight basement windows around the base of the building.
- Add the round pillars/chains to the edge of the side walk. For some reason I really like that detail in the top concept painting.
- Possibly add awnings? Or extrude out the bottom layer of the building to break up the straight vertical lines.
- Create just above the awnings, a half story decorative border, and have the arched windows take up the rest of that story. So the windows don't go from floor to ceiling, and it gives you more options for decoration.
- Push out the rounded corner making it more like the building in the second ref shot. Making it more like a cylinder instead of a rounded corner. Using this new cylinder to trim each side of the building making them completely separate objects.
- To keep people from falling in the drains or daylight basement windows, a small decorative iron fence could be a nice touch. Or maybe a half wall with planter boxes?
- You might want to change the color of the brick to something less saturated and maybe even a dark grey or near black like the concept painting above? Maybe even a tan solid stone like the New York MET.
I was wanting to do other building and I think I will. I like the fencing and the slanted awning, but not so much on this building. I may also bulge out the rounded corner, that is a good suggestion.
Holy crap! Now I finally see what you guys mean, "floor-to-ceiling-windows". Yeah, those do look dumb, I am going to have to change that.
However, the tooth-like bricks look great! Are my molding bricks allowed to be floaters, or should I punch them in and weld them into the geometry?
Some engines like unreal have issues if you delete the unseen faces that clip into the building, so I would suggest that you leave them in. You "can" apply a different texture to those hidden polys and reuse the same piece of trim in a different way. It's all about using what you have to make the most, something you've got a good foot hold on already.
Think of the building trim sets like legos you can mix and match the pieces on different floors to make various kinds of detail. You've got a good amount of that going on already with the brick details, but doing a set for the trim details could be really useful. Also think of trim as more then brick and wood. Think about drain pipes, corner statues, electrical wires, light fixtures, sign mounts, posters bla bla bla...
You could be floating quite a bit of stuff and save a few polys, but really its just a few polys and I wouldn't worry about it, unless your going to be very annal about every last poly.
Thank you all so far for the feedback. Finals are here, and I am about to graduate so that means I am moving back to Idaho as well. Things are about to get real crazy, and if I were better at managing my time I would finish this. As it stands it will be a little while, maybe not till the end of January. I hope to see some of you again at GDC.
Out of nowhere I dreamed about it all night. So I decided to rework ALL my textures. The Diffuse textures stayed the same for the most part, but rather than just FEED them to Crazy Bump. I worked on each of them, making a detailed height-map for each before going into Crazy Bump. Man, I was lazy last time I tackled this.
In addition to reworking all the textures, I added a mural to the alley wall, and worked out a sign for the front. Hooray for neon!
The mural does have a rather in-depth alpha map. If you compare the illustrator image, to how you see it on the brick, you will notice it isn't as consistent as you think.
Here is a render of the Air Conditioning unit I modeled. It's one of the large commercial types. I learned a lot today, like how to clean up seams in Photoshop, and how to load models into Marmoset Toolbag.
This is also the first time I have made judicious use of Floats rather than trying to carve the geometry right in and vomit everywhere while trying to deal with Chamfer Stars. :S
Other things I am going to be modeling.
Newspaper Dispensers, Parking Meters, a Bus Stop, Dumpster, Trashcan, Light Sconces, and a <s>Billboard</s> Payphone.
I looked at several different city bus-stops to get a feel for how I wanted this to turn out. I may tweak a few more things here and there; but it's not going to change much so enjoy!
If you want to see the adverts:
Above are the two renders from Max, and below is the real-time output from Marmoset. Good-golly I love Marmoset (I just wish it handled transparency better.:
Just curious, but did you go with a tileable brick texture? If so, did you just unwrap the building and then apply the tiling texture?
This sort of thing is the result of a full 8 hour day. It's frustrating getting only one model done a day. But that is Modeled, Unwrapped, and textured
Any-who, here are my two Newspaper Dispensers. Courtesy of Marmoset Toolbag.
And here are the two adverts a little closer:
So, while I haven't set to any modeling today, here is an update that shows the building, in day and night conditions.
Alright. I have been overlooking the "Object Space Normals" option. I have done some beauty captures, but was miffed at Marmoset for refusing to shadow surfaces properly.
IF I check this, do I still need to invert the Green Channel on the Normal Maps for Marmoset's sake?
Also:
I spend a ton of time playing with the Post Effects each time. And each of the environments the sun seems to be a a low angle. Do any of you have a canned Post Effect you swear by, and or an environment where the light is more at a 30-45 degree angle (if 90 were straight up). I hate having to mess with that every time, and most environments are WAY to bright. Even "Shady".
Thanks for helping this NOOB. Me.
I asked this in the Marmoset thread as well, but wanted to document my STOOPIDity here
Then I went on to modeling, unwrapping, and texturing this lamp to use around the building. As well as a "lit" version of the texture for when I change over to the night version.
See for yourself:
Tomorrow I need to texture the Parking Meters. Soon I will be modeling and texturing a Mailbox,Trashcan, Dumpster... and I am not sure how to decorate the roof.
I could either make it a whole mini-scene in its self, or put something large up there like a billboard or urban water-tower.
All that, and I will be revisiting the structure of the building its self. At the rate I am going now it will take me at least 6 more days :S. I also might want to do a Soda Machine or two. I am really liking props where I get to do some sarcastic neo-retro marketing like I have been.
I'll say it now, KNOW YOUR TEXTURE SPACE. I packed these UV's again and again, and it's all my fault for screwing up the first time. Not giving enough pixels to the faces that needed them, and not wanting to let parts be mirrored.
I made this texture three times. And finally, after my mind had shattered, I had lost all confidence I knew what I was doing, and I watched a tutorial to tell me what I already supposedly knew, I set to work doing -this- one.
I am happy how it came out. The moral of the story is, it could have come out this way the first time, with little more planning; but then. I don't think I would have found the etching brush I did.
If you want some good tutorials on Max related things pop over to CGTuts. Also this guy, Racer445, has some nice tutorials and you can get his etching brush HERE
Here is my dumpster. Also, I am starting to hate Marmoset. You have more control in Max if you will just use a 3-Point light setup and a DirectX Shader or render.
So I took my blocky Mc-blocky picture and painted over it.
This concept represents the sum of what I hope to achieve in the next 2-3 weeks. Once I do, and create a few beauty renders and fly-throughs, I think I will have enough meaty fodder to start applying for game jobs.
If you have any input, let me know.
keep it up!