I can see why this is disorienting on the large scale; should I also avoid using the Ortho view in pics that show off the individual props; since it is -less- disorienting on an individual basis?
I think so, it seems more natural and in line with what the player will actually see which is what you want to keep in mind constantly.
Unless the player is going to get on the roof and get close to the AC units, they've been wasted. If the player does get up there, if the area surounding the AC units is a lower in pixel density than the AC units, its going to look out of place. For example if your roof uses 64px of a 256 sheet, and the AC units use all of a 1024x1024 they will look out of place, especially with a highly detailed noisy texture.
How much is too much? How many tries should I be shooting for in a prop? Some things have come out too low because I have been too conservative.
It's the kind of prop I would LOD heavily. It really depends on how it looks when you start wacking polys. I would try to keep it under 8k if its a focal object and probably not go lower than 500. But those are rough numbers it really depends on the thing. The savings will come from it using a flat tiny texture instead of a huge expensive texture.
For lower LODs you can cut it down to 3 sided and sharp corners. Splines themselves have tools to upres and down res quickly, you can also ProOptimize it and with a little clean up it will work out fine.
I also think the building was a little conservative even for 3 years ago. It's not really polygons that kill your scenes, its textures. That doesn't mean you have free reign to go crazy but I think you could double even triple the polys you have on the building and no one would bat an eye at the final count, but the detail would benefit from a huge boost.
For me personally its easier to optimize something down, rather than try and build in detail later.
Purple is a regal color, in many ancient civilizations only the wealthy could afford to wear purple. Even with its history aside its still a very bright happy color. On a dingy building it seems kind of odd. You can keep the purple because it can play well in a night scene but the high contrast between all the colors is breaking things into their own color groups. Normally you use a contrasting color to draw attention to something.
In unifying the colors, as was suggested before. I can go into a city and see all manner of colors, as well as some things that have various levels of wear on them. I suppose the dichotomy is between a unified "artistic" look, and what -might- happen in a city environment. My hesitation to follow this example is it makes it look very drab and "gears of war". Again, just an observation, I am being obstinate, and would like to converse about it.
In level design it would be something you want to draw the player too. If you wash out and unify the colors in a street but at the end of the street put a red mailbox it catches their attention and directs them to explore that way. If you have a bunch of spots of contrast it gets confusing and its hard to send that message "hey look at this, come here".
You definitely don't need to go brown and drab like Gears. I went that route because its the easiest and fastest way to unify colors in a paint over. Which is something they actually do, but in post. Even bright vibrant games like WoW or TF2 have unified color pallets. It gets across mood and so much more.
The grass isn't day glow green, the trees aren't baby crap brown. The flowers in the background don't really contrast with the leaves on the trees. It all reads as the objects it should but the colors don't clash and contrast.
See how each side has its own shade of yellow and brown? Those subtle color shifts are what help unify colors so they all click, instead of contrast. you can use green, just use a shade that complements the other colors.
If not green, and not purple, then what do you suggest?
Personally I would go with a darker slate color with hints of purple to compliment the drapes. I would give the brick a similar treatment.
My main point is that you have some high contrast colors and none of them are blending together. You have 5-6 color pallet and no colors in between. You can make the colors you have work, but each texture needs to help transition to its neighbors. It happens A LOT when working with broken up UV chunks, this chunk gets this color the others get these and none of them party together.
1) The full range of colors you should be using across all of your UV pieces.
2) The range you're using.
Well! That -was- very informative. And I thank you for taking the time to clarify those points.
When you have some time, and this is a long shot; if you could go into a little more depth what you mean about, "trim, everything!", that would be appreciated. I mean, I sort of get it, I'm not fully daft, but I have seen some buildings without it that do quite well as well.
Could mine benefit from it? Well, if you say so, then I am sure it could. You are talking about a way to extrapolate edge loops in to quick trim that is easy to texture; this is a process I would love to learn. You have talked with how I could add many more polys to my buildings, And in many ways, unless your tutelage hits home, I am not sure -where- I -would- add more.
I understand your time is precious, and you have given me quite enough attention already. I appreciate all you have done.
So recently it has come to light that my old way of showing things off in Orthographic/Isometric (SimCity looking) mode is not good.
This led me to put down specific cameras that I will use in the future to do beauty renders as the scene starts to come together more. Cameras mean Perspective; yeah there are other ways to get it, but this means I can call on these shots later.
You may remember -this- image:
This paint-over, minus the parking-lot that is now a park, is my rubric for where I am going to take the scene, after that I will make minimal additions.
Here is where I am at so far.
All in all this whole project is about:
1: Churning out -something- every day.
2: Creating environments and props worthy of my portfolio.
3: Networking with people on Polycount.
4: Learning new skills and work-flows as I work.
5: Landing, at least, an entry level job as an Environment Artist.
I numbered them for reference. Let me say this. I -do- hate the texture I have for the sidewalk. I have changed it often, and have yet to settle on something.
2: I may desaturate the mailbox, slightly. Also the black box will be a window on the back of 'Uncle Chow's'. I need to add the/a mural back to the Hotel.
3: The soda machines turned out great, and match the paint-over well. Now I need to go in and texture the doors and windows, the proxy objects for them are missing from these renders. The Projects/Apartment needs a Front Door/Front Windows as well.
4: This building, the Office, has it's proxy windows and doors hidden, it needs an awning over the main door. The patio/bar-and-grill on the roof, needs much more attention. It will have Tables-for-four, and dining chairs. The Green awnings for the Hotel are built, but need to be unwrapped and textured.
5: The park benches are done, need to be textured, I also need to learn how to do trees. Keeping the idea, and textures, I may change the fountain to have columns that are taller/thinner.
6: The alleys need to be junkafied. Trashcans, trashbags, cardboard boxes, grease barrels. Decals to crap it up.
8: The office will get a back door. As well as other props such as vents and pipes and whatnot.
When you have some time, and this is a long shot; if you could go into a little more depth what you mean about, "trim, everything!", that would be appreciated.
Could mine benefit from it?
I think so, probably just a slight brick boarder but a full on decorative boarder can be pretty awesome too. It's normally only a handful of more polys but really punches things up. Even buildings that attempt to have a smooth outer facade have some window trim holding it in place. Its perfectly fine to put that as extra geometry instead of all in the texture for the window. It's not that many polys and it looks a lot better than trying to normal map that kind of detail.
You are talking about a way to extrapolate edge loops in to quick trim that is easy to texture; this is a process I would love to learn.
Select a few edges in edit poly click "Create Shape from Selection" This will create a spline.
Select the spline and turn on "Enable in Viewport", "Enable in Renderer" and "Generate Mapping Coords" to get UV's.
Set it to rectangular and adjust the values as needed.
You can do this trick to get drain pipes, gutters, shutters a whole bunch of things.
You can punch it up by adding a sweep modifier which allows you to define a custom "profile shape" that is swept across the surface of the spline. Giving you awesome trim with great UV's. The really cool thing about this is that you can go back and tweak the profile shape and it adjusts the trim geometry. Great for creating LODs and ultra high poly models for normal maps. Or just optimizing when your boss flips out and wants to cut 2k polys from your buildings.
You have talked with how I could add many more polys to my buildings, And in many ways, unless your tutelage hits home, I am not sure -where- I -would- add more.
The round windows are probably the first area I would up res. Instead of slapping a flat diffuse like a decal on a child's toy, you should probably model out a tiny, super low poly room, especially since the curtains are open and you see objects inside. If you do that, it will parallax correctly and not look flat.
Also rounded window glass is really really rare. Normally the windows are a bunch of flat windows arranged and rotated to fake a rounded look. Sometimes the outer wall is curved but the windows are straight.
I would add gutters and pipes, I would also trim out the edges of the rounded turret thing, just to help it pop out a little more. Probably use a spline painter script to draw some wires or pipes, on the side of the building.
A million time thank you! That was -very- informative and I will be practicing with this more.
As for pipes and gutters, yes, I wholly agrees, I have made the gutters (and drain pipes) out of a 4 sided editable spline; I just need to figure out how I am going to texture them. And then they will start showing up in renders.
I forgot to mention this handy little script for cataloging profile splines. You don't have to stick to the defaults you can add or remove them as needed.
I am considering boolean cutting my floating boxes, that are acting as my windows, into my buildings; since I am being too conservative with dressing, style, and especially polycounts.
I was nervous at first, but I am hearing that Boolean operations have gotten much smarter in Max 2010-11.
Right now my windows are about 1-2 inch thick boxes with their back side missing, floating on the skin of my building (this is not the case for the Hotel, which I have already cut the windows into long ago); more-so the Office and Uncle Chow's.
Use ProBoolean instead of boolean. It allows you to add a bunch of objects and the final geometry isn't calculated until the end, it also has make quads option which "can" give you better results than a bunch of triangles. It will still require some clean up tho.
I'm going to be doing some junk items: A barrel with two texture variations, an 'Oscar-the-Grouch' style trash-can as well as a dented one, and some cardboard boxes.
Do you think there would be anything wrong, professionally, with having these things all share the same texture sheet?
Additionally anyone have any good examples or work-flows how to model and texture "little piles" of junk?
I have seen crushed cans, loose bottles, styrofoam cups and all manner of cruddy paper in Sandbox games (Which really those sandbox games are my inspiration); they are normally very low poly.
What kinds of things will I have to keep in mind when making them, assumptions I should not assume.
Overall, towards the end, I need to dirty my scene up a little. Not TOO much, but for now it is too pristine.
I started this thing quite some time ago. As such, there was a lot I didn't know, and many things I was pigheaded and naive about.
You can see from -this- picture, from some time back (nearly 2 years?), how I planned all this out.
I knew -those- would be my modular parts and once I textured them with large, box projected, textures I could then just copy those parts and make a building.
That was all good for 3dsMax, but I now know, for a game engine like UDK, they needed to stay separate, not welded together. They also need back faces (which don't need to have precise UVs), and they need to fit on the sacred "Grid".
This grid thing is super important. I have been using it forever in Max, but not to the same extent as I should in UDK.
So, I am looking at my model all nearly done and wondering, how the heck do I go about getting it on the grid? (here is what it mostly looked like before this post).
I have been doing some test level stuff in UDK; importing all my prop meshes, rigging up the materials, getting the lighting the way I like, learning about lightmaps and secondary uvs for shadows...
The biggest problem is the mental disconnect I had from modeling for Hammer. The -one- thing Hammer had going for it was that everything was modeled and laid out in inches. And a 128 inch wall looked real good with a 512 texture on it.
In UDK everything is in Unreal Units or "uu". Uu are equal to 2 centimeters. When I want to model a chair or know how tall a trashcan is, I can easily bust out a measuring tape and start modeling, in inches. In Hammer your person (Gordon) is 72 inches tall or 6 feet. In UDK your model is 96uu tall, which is 192cm or about 6.3 feet. Overall this means all my props need to be scaled up 150% (or the difference between 72 and 96). This isn't a big deal.
I struggled to come up with a correlation between units in real life and UDK. Things like ceiling heights, door heights, hallway widths, and sidewalk widths, didn't translate well. While I could force their real life sizes to appear in UDK they were often too small, and I had trouble "threading" a character through doorways.
The solution here was to increase all my measurements by 150% and then go up or down to the nearest PowerOfTwo number (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512...) give or take another PowerOfTwo number; all this to keep things on the grid.
In the end I found that doorways work well at 64x128, and that walls work well at 192x192 and still accept a 512 texture sheet alright. It isn't quite the 1:4 texture density of Hammer (128:512).
Empowered will all -this- I then set about to break things from my scene, rebuild them with back-faces pulling from a -new- texture sheet, and make sure they all fit "on the grid".
This is where I am at this -very- moment.
The hard part now is moving away from my 512x512 textures and laying everything out nicely on one texture sheet for efficiency. I can also then add more detail to the stairs (probably going to take them into Mudbox); and when I am done this can be a 4 story, or 400 story building.
And I will finally redo those damn windows. The curtains are staying purple though.
Replies
YES. I am using photoshop.
Unless the player is going to get on the roof and get close to the AC units, they've been wasted. If the player does get up there, if the area surounding the AC units is a lower in pixel density than the AC units, its going to look out of place. For example if your roof uses 64px of a 256 sheet, and the AC units use all of a 1024x1024 they will look out of place, especially with a highly detailed noisy texture.
It's the kind of prop I would LOD heavily. It really depends on how it looks when you start wacking polys. I would try to keep it under 8k if its a focal object and probably not go lower than 500. But those are rough numbers it really depends on the thing. The savings will come from it using a flat tiny texture instead of a huge expensive texture.
For lower LODs you can cut it down to 3 sided and sharp corners. Splines themselves have tools to upres and down res quickly, you can also ProOptimize it and with a little clean up it will work out fine.
I also think the building was a little conservative even for 3 years ago. It's not really polygons that kill your scenes, its textures. That doesn't mean you have free reign to go crazy but I think you could double even triple the polys you have on the building and no one would bat an eye at the final count, but the detail would benefit from a huge boost.
For me personally its easier to optimize something down, rather than try and build in detail later.
Purple is a regal color, in many ancient civilizations only the wealthy could afford to wear purple. Even with its history aside its still a very bright happy color. On a dingy building it seems kind of odd. You can keep the purple because it can play well in a night scene but the high contrast between all the colors is breaking things into their own color groups. Normally you use a contrasting color to draw attention to something.
In level design it would be something you want to draw the player too. If you wash out and unify the colors in a street but at the end of the street put a red mailbox it catches their attention and directs them to explore that way. If you have a bunch of spots of contrast it gets confusing and its hard to send that message "hey look at this, come here".
You definitely don't need to go brown and drab like Gears. I went that route because its the easiest and fastest way to unify colors in a paint over. Which is something they actually do, but in post. Even bright vibrant games like WoW or TF2 have unified color pallets. It gets across mood and so much more.
The grass isn't day glow green, the trees aren't baby crap brown. The flowers in the background don't really contrast with the leaves on the trees. It all reads as the objects it should but the colors don't clash and contrast.
See how each side has its own shade of yellow and brown? Those subtle color shifts are what help unify colors so they all click, instead of contrast. you can use green, just use a shade that complements the other colors.
Personally I would go with a darker slate color with hints of purple to compliment the drapes. I would give the brick a similar treatment.
My main point is that you have some high contrast colors and none of them are blending together. You have 5-6 color pallet and no colors in between. You can make the colors you have work, but each texture needs to help transition to its neighbors. It happens A LOT when working with broken up UV chunks, this chunk gets this color the others get these and none of them party together.
1) The full range of colors you should be using across all of your UV pieces.
2) The range you're using.
When you have some time, and this is a long shot; if you could go into a little more depth what you mean about, "trim, everything!", that would be appreciated. I mean, I sort of get it, I'm not fully daft, but I have seen some buildings without it that do quite well as well.
Could mine benefit from it? Well, if you say so, then I am sure it could. You are talking about a way to extrapolate edge loops in to quick trim that is easy to texture; this is a process I would love to learn. You have talked with how I could add many more polys to my buildings, And in many ways, unless your tutelage hits home, I am not sure -where- I -would- add more.
I understand your time is precious, and you have given me quite enough attention already. I appreciate all you have done.
Thank you again.
This led me to put down specific cameras that I will use in the future to do beauty renders as the scene starts to come together more. Cameras mean Perspective; yeah there are other ways to get it, but this means I can call on these shots later.
You may remember -this- image:
This paint-over, minus the parking-lot that is now a park, is my rubric for where I am going to take the scene, after that I will make minimal additions.
Here is where I am at so far.
All in all this whole project is about:
1: Churning out -something- every day.
2: Creating environments and props worthy of my portfolio.
3: Networking with people on Polycount.
4: Learning new skills and work-flows as I work.
5: Landing, at least, an entry level job as an Environment Artist.
I numbered them for reference. Let me say this. I -do- hate the texture I have for the sidewalk. I have changed it often, and have yet to settle on something.
2: I may desaturate the mailbox, slightly. Also the black box will be a window on the back of 'Uncle Chow's'. I need to add the/a mural back to the Hotel.
3: The soda machines turned out great, and match the paint-over well. Now I need to go in and texture the doors and windows, the proxy objects for them are missing from these renders. The Projects/Apartment needs a Front Door/Front Windows as well.
4: This building, the Office, has it's proxy windows and doors hidden, it needs an awning over the main door. The patio/bar-and-grill on the roof, needs much more attention. It will have Tables-for-four, and dining chairs. The Green awnings for the Hotel are built, but need to be unwrapped and textured.
5: The park benches are done, need to be textured, I also need to learn how to do trees. Keeping the idea, and textures, I may change the fountain to have columns that are taller/thinner.
6: The alleys need to be junkafied. Trashcans, trashbags, cardboard boxes, grease barrels. Decals to crap it up.
8: The office will get a back door. As well as other props such as vents and pipes and whatnot.
Select a few edges in edit poly click "Create Shape from Selection" This will create a spline.
Select the spline and turn on "Enable in Viewport", "Enable in Renderer" and "Generate Mapping Coords" to get UV's.
Set it to rectangular and adjust the values as needed.
You can do this trick to get drain pipes, gutters, shutters a whole bunch of things.
You can punch it up by adding a sweep modifier which allows you to define a custom "profile shape" that is swept across the surface of the spline. Giving you awesome trim with great UV's. The really cool thing about this is that you can go back and tweak the profile shape and it adjusts the trim geometry. Great for creating LODs and ultra high poly models for normal maps. Or just optimizing when your boss flips out and wants to cut 2k polys from your buildings.
The round windows are probably the first area I would up res. Instead of slapping a flat diffuse like a decal on a child's toy, you should probably model out a tiny, super low poly room, especially since the curtains are open and you see objects inside. If you do that, it will parallax correctly and not look flat.
Also rounded window glass is really really rare. Normally the windows are a bunch of flat windows arranged and rotated to fake a rounded look. Sometimes the outer wall is curved but the windows are straight.
I would add gutters and pipes, I would also trim out the edges of the rounded turret thing, just to help it pop out a little more. Probably use a spline painter script to draw some wires or pipes, on the side of the building.
As for pipes and gutters, yes, I wholly agrees, I have made the gutters (and drain pipes) out of a 4 sided editable spline; I just need to figure out how I am going to texture them. And then they will start showing up in renders.
I forgot to mention this handy little script for cataloging profile splines. You don't have to stick to the defaults you can add or remove them as needed.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/sweep-profile
I was nervous at first, but I am hearing that Boolean operations have gotten much smarter in Max 2010-11.
Right now my windows are about 1-2 inch thick boxes with their back side missing, floating on the skin of my building (this is not the case for the Hotel, which I have already cut the windows into long ago); more-so the Office and Uncle Chow's.
Use ProBoolean instead of boolean. It allows you to add a bunch of objects and the final geometry isn't calculated until the end, it also has make quads option which "can" give you better results than a bunch of triangles. It will still require some clean up tho.
Only boolean closed geometry.
Do you think there would be anything wrong, professionally, with having these things all share the same texture sheet?
Additionally anyone have any good examples or work-flows how to model and texture "little piles" of junk?
I have seen crushed cans, loose bottles, styrofoam cups and all manner of cruddy paper in Sandbox games (Which really those sandbox games are my inspiration); they are normally very low poly.
What kinds of things will I have to keep in mind when making them, assumptions I should not assume.
Overall, towards the end, I need to dirty my scene up a little. Not TOO much, but for now it is too pristine.
As such, I wanted to share with you my facade for Uncle Chow's. I am assured the characters say Uncle.
Next, a Billboard about Meat. I really need to swap out that sidewalk texture I hate so much.
You can see from -this- picture, from some time back (nearly 2 years?), how I planned all this out.
I knew -those- would be my modular parts and once I textured them with large, box projected, textures I could then just copy those parts and make a building.
That was all good for 3dsMax, but I now know, for a game engine like UDK, they needed to stay separate, not welded together. They also need back faces (which don't need to have precise UVs), and they need to fit on the sacred "Grid".
This grid thing is super important. I have been using it forever in Max, but not to the same extent as I should in UDK.
So, I am looking at my model all nearly done and wondering, how the heck do I go about getting it on the grid? (here is what it mostly looked like before this post).
I have been doing some test level stuff in UDK; importing all my prop meshes, rigging up the materials, getting the lighting the way I like, learning about lightmaps and secondary uvs for shadows...
The biggest problem is the mental disconnect I had from modeling for Hammer. The -one- thing Hammer had going for it was that everything was modeled and laid out in inches. And a 128 inch wall looked real good with a 512 texture on it.
In UDK everything is in Unreal Units or "uu". Uu are equal to 2 centimeters. When I want to model a chair or know how tall a trashcan is, I can easily bust out a measuring tape and start modeling, in inches. In Hammer your person (Gordon) is 72 inches tall or 6 feet. In UDK your model is 96uu tall, which is 192cm or about 6.3 feet. Overall this means all my props need to be scaled up 150% (or the difference between 72 and 96). This isn't a big deal.
I struggled to come up with a correlation between units in real life and UDK. Things like ceiling heights, door heights, hallway widths, and sidewalk widths, didn't translate well. While I could force their real life sizes to appear in UDK they were often too small, and I had trouble "threading" a character through doorways.
The solution here was to increase all my measurements by 150% and then go up or down to the nearest PowerOfTwo number (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512...) give or take another PowerOfTwo number; all this to keep things on the grid.
In the end I found that doorways work well at 64x128, and that walls work well at 192x192 and still accept a 512 texture sheet alright. It isn't quite the 1:4 texture density of Hammer (128:512).
Empowered will all -this- I then set about to break things from my scene, rebuild them with back-faces pulling from a -new- texture sheet, and make sure they all fit "on the grid".
This is where I am at this -very- moment.
The hard part now is moving away from my 512x512 textures and laying everything out nicely on one texture sheet for efficiency. I can also then add more detail to the stairs (probably going to take them into Mudbox); and when I am done this can be a 4 story, or 400 story building.
And I will finally redo those damn windows. The curtains are staying purple though.
Curtains are white and interior is black so I can control their color and content via Texture and Vector Parameter instances.
It's 2am. More work on this tomorrow. Hopefully I will get it all into UDK then.