Medinah Enviroment

jheight2

Im going to create a medium to high poly enviroment. The era will be at 600 AD. It will be set in the high afternoon in medinah, Saudi Arabia. estimated to have around 30 to 40 buildings. im in the begginning process which no prior enviroment experience so i hope you guys can help me out with constructive critisism. hope this goes sweet.

edwardE

The placement of things looks pretty good - it's nice and non-linear; buildings are placed in good variating angles. Need some nice close-ups on the building you seem to have worked on.

Are the green ovals going to be trees?

Randommonkies

Sounds like a cool proj man

I think in the bottom left of the town It seems a little too jumbled too me. The ground seems level so unless you are going to put some terrain obstacles like cliffs around there i think the town might have a little more structure to it. If not more gird-like than maybe carry on the circular look of the walls and buildings to the right of the village, hard to say right now as I'm not sure what your plans are for each block, but other than some layout structre in the bottom left it looks fine to me.
Got any close-ups of those more completed models?

jheight2

this is a house i made, took me bout a day to make.

jheight2

this is the rear end of it. gonna put sum plants and accessories in it to make it more interesting.

jheight2

this is the other building its a medium sized house. still need to decorate it with plants, pots and whatnot.

gamedev

"estimated to have around 30 to 40 buildings. im in the beginning process which no prior environment experience so i hope you guys can help me out with constructive criticism."

Best advice I could give - with no prior environment experience, cut down the scope, way way down. 30-40 buildings will never get done. Focus on one killer building and props to give it character. No sense in detailing out an entire village before you get one building looking really good.

jheight2

im not going to model and texture 40 different buidlings, but im going to make 6 types of civilian houses (2 high, 2 med, 2 low) some bedouin tents, markets maybe 2 or 3 types, a butches, blacksmith. taht would be nuts to go 40 different builidngs, i think i would go into a comma if i did that. thanks for the help

pliang

Might as well make some extras as billboards if its that populated

adam

What kind of game is this for?

t4paN

[ QUOTE ]
"estimated to have around 30 to 40 buildings. im in the beginning process which no prior environment experience so i hope you guys can help me out with constructive criticism."

Best advice I could give - with no prior environment experience, cut down the scope, way way down. 30-40 buildings will never get done. Focus on one killer building and props to give it character. No sense in detailing out an entire village before you get one building looking really good.

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree; 40 buildings do seem a bit much, but the overall idea has a good basis. There's no point in trying to create a kickass building if he is a beginner to environment modelling, because it won't look kickass, it will probably look linear-detail heavy and unrealistic.

On the other hand, creating a village with some different buildings, and variations of the existing buildings is first of all good practice, which he probably needs, and second of all will give him insight into spacing his structures.

He can always go back and add detail to buildings or create completely new ones as he becomes more efficient in environmental modeling.

TS, I like your layout and I'm looking forward to updates. Personally, I think you are on a good track - but then again I have absolutely zero grasp of architexture and environments


/edit sorry but I have to get this out of my chest! I saw a couple of environments today and it made me sick to my stomach both times. It reminds me of second year at uni, where I had to do a 100.000 environment (with multiple same buildings and shit obviously). It was the worst assignment I EVER had to do in my life, and I even did math assignments at highschool.

Every time I see walls with windows and the edges from the extruding it reminds me of that and something dies inside me

StJoris

Nice idea, hope you make a killing, start looks pretty decent. I'm interested in why you've chosen this layout. Why are the houses placed like this configuration? Is this a renactment settlement layed out in post-modern style? Is there a law in this country that enforces buildings to be placed away no less than 5 m? What is on the outside of your outline of this? Like is this a complete desert, or is there an oasis to the west, and how does the town react to that? If it's complete desert, how does the town survive.

Asking yourself these questions will bring extra quality to telling a story with your environment. What is there and what stance does this take towards that.

I think it might be worthwhile to grab a black pencil marker for this and some sketching paper and just scribble some ideas. Shouldn't take longer than 30-60 mins.

Anyhow, that's just how I think about it.

SHEPEIRO

id add some 2 more edge loops to the corners of the buildings so that you can make the shading rounded, also add at least 1 or two edge loops going across these so the corners are not straight vertically(they can end in the windows and doors for a nice clean mesh).

no sure if im correct with saudi architechture, but houses of this type often have wooded beams sticking out of the walls horizontally at the height of the flat roof. these would make for a more interesting silohette and would look cool with a bit of water damage around them

StJoris

I think you mean Mali architecture Shepeiro, off course it also appears in other parts but this place is famous for it, and you are right they do have wooden beams sticking out.

Depending on the height not only at roof level. They are for walking on to cover the facade with loam. About the water damage, it hardly rains there, so the typical stains you get from regular water exposure would not be appropriate. When it does rain, it rains a lot and parts of the building will wash away.

Jheight2:

About this, I have various books on loam/clay/mali architecture with me now. I'm working on a sustainable loam public building, but I've to return them soon. I could scan some pictures if you are interested before they are due?

jheight2

thanks for the input. im going for a reneactment. this particular place was just established and was a very fast and economical place. seeming how it is in the desert and there wasnt alot of people living at the town at that particular time, the houses i thought should be spread out but not too wide. I want the buildings to be intact with hardly any wear on them but, the construciton abilites werent great so, the buildings shouldnt be leveled and no perfect construciton should be attained. thanks for the helpful input StJoris.

adam

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What kind of game is this for?

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You said something about a reenactment, but what kind of game would we see this piece in?

I have some critiques for you but I need the game type to be clarified.

jheight2

Made an update to one of my buildings. The type of game this would be in would be call of duty 4 or battlefield 2 style so like a FPS. I havnt seen anyone do something like this kind of enviroment before, maybe the closest would be assassin's creed.

jheight2

this is the other buliding i worked on, made all the strait edges not strait and hadta do sum work over again cuz the duplicate instanced was on copy

Brice Vandemoortele

You should set these bevel edges to soft edge and orient manually the normal to make a nice soft corner. Is that the environment you want to port to psp? You could increase polycount a lot a take advantage of the vertex color maybe?

pliang

You have a lot of smoothing issues (shadows going along the edges) try giving an edge or more so on the pillars.