"Mod Facade" Challenge - Jackablade

Steve Schulze

I like a project that I can collect reference for as I walk to the coffee shop.








This is a small selection of the loads of photos I grabbed this afternoon from the houses in my street. I'm planning to design a building that encorporates bits and pieces from a lot of them. The big two story place will be more or less the base, but I want to get some of the Hawthorn brick patterns and metal lacework in my piece. Will probably take some noodling about to get it to all come together and get enough repetition to show off the modular technique, but it should work pretty well I think.

Sage

This should be good.

Alex

Steve Schulze

I think this should work pretty well. Plenty of repetition of elements but still interesting to look at. I might change it a bit as model it.

Japhir

that looks promising! wonderfull!

okkun

I like that you've got so much depth going on. People tend to think flat when they hear facade

EarthQuake

sweet

Mark Dygert

loving the ref, and the concept, provided you finish in time it should be a great entry!

Steve Schulze

Alright gents, I've been out of the city for a week or so, but now I'm ready to get stuck into this sucker.
A quick question though, how would you reccomend I do the lace work? theres obviously going to be some alpha involved, but its likely to look a bit flat, even with a normal map stuck on.

ImSlightlyBored

normals+parallax displacement? bit expensive maybe (hide displacement map on to the blue channel of normals and rebuild normal map blue channel in engine if its possible?)

Another technique could be to do just a plane with normals and alpha mapped 'lace' then duplicate that, shift it behind a little and itll parallax scroll when viewed. With the depth of that detailing being quite small its not going to be too noticeable.
I think that technique is possible through shader instructions on one plane, too, but could necessitate loading in more tex samples unless you cleverly do it.

Steve Schulze

Just about ready to get some normal maps and stuff going. Faces are unfinished placeholders.

Tumerboy

cool! Needs more floozies though.

Steve Schulze

Alright, well I'm out of my depth now. I'm starting nice and simple with the slate tiles on the roof. I modelled up some simple tiles, bevelled the edges a little, lined them up so that they overlapped eachother a little vertically and rendered a normal map. The result is very flat. Theres no real sense that the tiles are overlapping. I'm wondering what the best option here is. I've got polys to spare, I could simply add the overlaps with geometry, but if theres a better way to utilise the normal map (which I'm sure there is) I'd like to learn it. Theres plenty of resources around, but I'm not entirely sure what I should be looking for.

EDIT: Never mind, I'm an idiot.

Tumerboy

lol. So. . .did you figure it out? Either way, post the texture and we can take a look.

Steve Schulze

I had the normal map set up wrong so it was rendering as a regular bump map.

I've got it working now though it still doesn't have the illusion of depth I'd really like. I've still got some noodling about to do with it, I'll post up my progress tomorrow once I've got it touched up a bit.

Sage

try and see if adding a bump map or just passing a height map through crazybump and mixing it with your current normal helps. You can try angling it a bit, and see if it looks good enough, even if that's not what you wanted.

RazorBladder

A heightmap is absolutely key to attaining the right depth. I tend to find having a gradient from grey to white (top->bottom) on each tile piece works well, if the depth isn't quite enough then gradually extend the grey to a darker value.

Steve Schulze

Height map eh. So once I've got that I merge it into the Normal map?

I notice that the normal map in Crazy Bump has a much, much better sense of depth about it than when its displayed in Maya. Is this some parallax mapping? If so, does anyone have any idea about how to coax Maya into displaying normals like that? Slightly Bored mentioned something about the blue channel.

Sage

Actually the ideal thing would be to use in say unreal ed as a parallax map. You might have to blur the height map a little if comes out to harsh though.

If that's not an option you can see if Maya lets you use a bump and a normal map at the same time, that should work, or turn that height map into a normal map as well and then mix that with your original normal map. Always keep a copy. just in case. You can do that with either crazybump or photoshop using the nvidia plugin..

In photoshop just double click on the heightmap so you can see properties and where you see what channels it uses turn off blue then set to overlay or you can use levels or curves and set the blue to 128 or 127.

Steve Schulze

Isn't there some deal about using your height map as an alpha channel?

I'll have a poke about in UnrealEd.

Sage

well you put it in the alpha channel of a texture to save memory. You can use as a separate file if you wanted. I have to look through some files to remember how it set it up.