Reims Cathedral Stained Glass Window

dtschultz

I've been slowly working on this project for a little while, but I thought I'd go ahead and post some renders before I go any further. I am hoping to take these elements into Zbrush (which I just started, and hope to have renders of soon), and then bake this down to a lowpoly, and then finish texturing them. I have two renders of the highpoly model thus far.

Now, as I am looking at it tonight, I think I need to bring out the innermost edges on those clover-shaped pieces (they look too sharp).


This is a link to a flickr photo of the window: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12388424@N00/96822012/

jocose

Looks pretty slick if you ask me. What are you plans for this, is it going to be part of a larger scene, are you going to model the rest of the structure surrounding the window?

Amadreaus

Well done, I love the layers of detail you have going on! Tons of potential.

danshewan

Looks great. Wireframes?

dtschultz

jocose wrote: »

Looks pretty slick if you ask me. What are you plans for this, is it going to be part of a larger scene, are you going to model the rest of the structure surrounding the window?

Can't get the multiquote to work (I'm probably missing something easy).

Thanks, man. I'd love to do the rest of the surrounding area, but I don't know if I'll get to it. For right now, I'm just going to try and finish out this part, and if I'm still motivated to continue, I'll do the rest. The scary part is that the area around it has a lot of sculpted saint figures, which would probably be a nightmare for me to try and sculpt.

dtschultz

Amadreaus wrote: »

Well done, I love the layers of detail you have going on! Tons of potential.

Thank you very much.

dtschultz

danshewan wrote: »

Looks great. Wireframes?

Thanks! Good point. I'll take screenshots soon.

dtschultz

Here's a wireframe. Let me know if that doesn't give you enough detail. The pink objects are instances.

dtschultz

Here's an update. I got sidetracked from the finishing the zbrush part, when I found myself with some downtime at work, and I started to model the stained glass frames. I originally was just going to do them in Photoshop, but I was going to have to basically remake the frames in Photoshop, so I decided why not make them with splines and just bake them down when the time comes.


Hope you like it.





Detail



Wires

Oniram

OH MY!!!!!! this made my jaw drop! this is insane!! its amazing! nice work

danshewan

Incredible work. 'Nuff said. Can't wait to see it lit and textured.

Outstanding.

dtschultz

Oniram and danshewan: Thank you very much for your kind words.

Marisa

Amazing detail!! Just make sure when you're baking the normal map that it's high enough resolution to capture all that detail well. Awesome job dude!

Kevin Johnstone

Good balance of detail, neatly fades into levels of detail dependant on viewing distance, its so easy to overkill a piece like this. So keep it up man, keep it restrained and beautiful!

r4ptur3

*thumbs up*

gratz dude -- lookin' real pimp

dtschultz

Marisa: Thank you very much! Yeah, uv space and texture resolution will be key.

Kevin: Thank you! I'm honored. Definitely a good point. I hope to maintain that balance. I was worried I might be making it too busy, but by keeping the spline height low, it retained more of the sense of depth I was hoping for.

R4ptur3: Thanks a lot!

whats_true

Try modeling it out without the line tool ;D

Good stuff mate :]

imb3nt

Excellent work! :thumbup: :thumbup:

dtschultz

whats_true wrote: »

Try modeling it out without the line tool ;D

Good stuff mate :]

Thanks! Haha. Yeah, that would have been a little bit more challenging.


imb3nt: Thank you very much!

Autocon

that is some fantastic detail you have there.

A.Kincade

Wow! This is awesome. Looking great.

Firebert

super slick work man.... all those stained glass pieces you added in will really help pay off in the bake. how much do you plan to complete on the window? just this one section, the vaulted section, or the whole church?!? regardless, this is solid work man.

Xaltar

Damn nice work.

dtschultz

Thank you very much everyone. I am sorry for being so slow with updates, but I have been very sick (still am), which has slowed me down quite a bit. I am working on the Zbrush part of this workflow, and I might post some updates as I finish different subtools. I haven't been working in Zbrush for very long, so it might take me awhile to get something I'm really happy with.

Firebert: Thank you for the compliment. I am not sure if I will continue on with the remainder of the window. I originally considered it, but I wanted to just concentrate on one smaller area, so as to not get overwhelmed by the vast complexity of this fantastic cathedral. In other words, I didn't want to take on too much, and end up not finishing it; and by concentrating on this small section, I can just focus on refining my workflow and skills.

Grey

Schlitz...post new stuffz...i care not that youre sick.

dtschultz

I know it's been a long time in between posts, but this has taken me awhile to get results I'm fairly happy with out of Zbrush. It's been a bit of back and forth, because I'd have something I thought looked good in Zbrush, only to find that I hadn't exaggerated and/or accentuated certain areas enough. So, I'd go back to Zbrush, and so on, and so on...

Here are two renders of the decimated meshes that I comped together. I'm curious to know what you think. There are a few areas I'm not sold on, but if I don't hear similar complaints from you all, then I might assume I'm being ridiculous. Either way, I'm starting to get the low poly together.


Long Shot:



Detail Shot:

OBlastradiusO

Awesome! I likes!

mikezoo

fantastic prop! No complaints on this end. well, mabey, perhaps you could add some more noise on the stone. weather corrosion, ect .
What exactly did you zbrush? just the details?

dtschultz

Thanks, OBlastradiusO!

mikezoo: Yeah, the noise and grit isn't showing up that well. It might be because these are the decimated meshes, so only the larger grain of noise, etc. was kept in the process. It might be that I should bake out bump maps from Zbrush, so I can keep a little bit more of the noise. I'll have to look into this.

Firebert

came out nice man! i hear ya on the loss of detail from decimation. it is a really handy tool, but it does eliminate those really fine details.

dtschultz

Firebert wrote: »

came out nice man! i hear ya on the loss of detail from decimation. it is a really handy tool, but it does eliminate those really fine details.

Thanks! A friend at work made the suggestion that my lighting (which has really soft shadows) could also be causing some of that soft, flat look. I'm going to play around with something more dynamic to see if enhances any of that detail. I should have thought of playing with that before, but I got caught up with everything else.

dtschultz

Ok. I think these are better. I went back and in increased the depth and severity of some of the sculpted areas, and I think they read a lot better now. I also changed up the lighting a bit, as well as improving the way I was masking some of the objects in my renders (no more weird shading, I think ). Now, I will start on the low poly. Of course, if you have ideas for improvement, let me know.

long shot:



close up:

dtschultz

So, I finally have an update. It's been awhile, but between the holidays and preparing for a newborn, I haven't had quite as much time as before. I might add a few other elements to the base, and a couple of other decorative elements, but I definitely want to try and texture it before the baby comes. Let me know what you think..

bbob

looking pretty spiffy there..

Kevin Johnstone

Nice, a strong balance between open and clustered sections, reads very well

dtschultz

Thanks, bbob!

Thank you, Kevin! I definitely appreciate your input.

DarthNater

Beautiful work man! Perfect amount of damage and wear. I also like the transition of detail (you didn't make it all small details or all big details). Can't wait to see where this goes!

tommywomble

Looks really good, i thought about attempting a cathedral type building but...then decided i wasn't up to it yet XD

Firebert

glad to see you're pushing this further man! congrats on the upcoming kid too! you're in for the ride of your life... your personal time is out the window for the most part, but it is totally worth it.

dtschultz

DarthNater, tommywomble, Skulburn: Thank you!

Firebert: Thanks, man! Yeah, I'm excited. I know I'm not going to have any free time for awhile, so I've been trying to push myself to finish a couple of projects.

DarthNater

Firebert wrote: »

glad to see you're pushing this further man! congrats on the upcoming kid too! you're in for the ride of your life... your personal time is out the window for the most part, but it is totally worth it.

Yeah man, I love my son, but man, I think my free time went from lots to 0. Get all the work in you can now. Kids are awesome though!

dtschultz

DarthNater wrote: »

Yeah man, I love my son, but man, I think my free time went from lots to 0. Get all the work in you can now. Kids are awesome though!

Hehe. Yeah, I'm counting on that to happen. Especially, if she takes after me.

dtschultz

Finally... So, here's a screenshot of my lowpoly from UDK with some slight alterations in PS. The lowpoly is around 3500 tris. I have three textures of my own: a diffuse, a normal, and a spec (the diffuse and normal are 2k and the spec is 1k). I used a fractal normal from UDK to get rid of mirroring seams. I know that in a lot of games the geo on top of the window would have more than likely been flat mapped on to the window geo, but I really wanted to try and give it a little bit more depth for this piece.

bbob

try giving the glass a bit more specular, as a lot of your detail is lost in the colours, which is a shame.

Grey

I love the lighting and the shadows are great man!!

whats_true

I do hope you put some color in the middle, as the detail looks smudgy.

dtschultz

bbob wrote: »

try giving the glass a bit more specular, as a lot of your detail is lost in the colours, which is a shame.

Thanks. Yeah, I can try and bump up the emissive and try pushing the spec map a bit further.

Thanks, Grey!

whats_true: i'm not sure why, but some of the detail from the map is getting mipped out at this distance. I thought i set the lodbias to 0. i'll try pushing the detail a bit further to try and pull that out more.

SasoChicken: Hah, thanks! I would love to make the rest of the building, but at this rate, I think I would be old and grey before I finished it.

3dflasher

It's looking great Dave. Good to hear the tweaks worked for you. Moving the light definately made it more dynamic. Once you get that glass popping a bit more this piece is good to go I think...than it's on the next one

Ged

your highpoly is really impressive but the lowpoly there really looks like it could have had most of it done in crazybump as its so flat. would be nice if the lighting could catch the edges of the small designs with tiny specular shines or something just so that it shows the work in the final image

Der Hollander

Man, this is crazy awesome. I don't see a lot of people modeling my favorite style of architecture often, and this is a real treat to see. I look forward to seeing where this project goes.

SHEPEIRO

push the specular on the stone and the glass it will really help the normals that youve spent so much time on, and im not saying that just because make it "next-gen" bollox.