Couple of questions about WoW style environments, one regarding UV layout
Hi there,
After being inspired by some of the great recent hand-painted environments posted on here, I've decided to attempt one myself.
I've never done one and thought it might be a good portfolio piece and also a chance to improve my painting.
I've just got a couple of questions.
Firstly, do games that use the hand-painted art styles usually use baked AO, light maps, or is AO calculated at render time?
And secondly, what would be the best way to tackle this;
Some of the assets in the scene I'm creating, for example a pile of logs, will be cloned objects rotated/scaled and repositioned. Obviously I'd like the different instances/clones to share the same UVs, and this is where my first question comes into play.
Assuming I'm creating the scene entirely in Max and taking a viewport render as oppose to putting it into an engine, if AO is baked, the shared UV's would obviously mean there would be problems since anything sharing texture space can't have differing textures.
Hopefully you see what I mean, I'm still very much a beginner so this kind of thing is new to me!
Many thanks
After being inspired by some of the great recent hand-painted environments posted on here, I've decided to attempt one myself.
I've never done one and thought it might be a good portfolio piece and also a chance to improve my painting.
I've just got a couple of questions.
Firstly, do games that use the hand-painted art styles usually use baked AO, light maps, or is AO calculated at render time?
And secondly, what would be the best way to tackle this;
Some of the assets in the scene I'm creating, for example a pile of logs, will be cloned objects rotated/scaled and repositioned. Obviously I'd like the different instances/clones to share the same UVs, and this is where my first question comes into play.
Assuming I'm creating the scene entirely in Max and taking a viewport render as oppose to putting it into an engine, if AO is baked, the shared UV's would obviously mean there would be problems since anything sharing texture space can't have differing textures.
Hopefully you see what I mean, I'm still very much a beginner so this kind of thing is new to me!
Many thanks
Replies
2. if you are making a scen that is suposed to be game rez,, they why would you want to do it in max, thats useless, udk is completely free and anyone skilled enough to make objects in max can easily figure out how to make a scene.
i'm sure you could wrangle a way to do this, in max, i'm not sure off hand i think i could sit down and figure it out for you, but i'm not, its like giving brain surgery to someone with ass cancer,, its a fix, but the wrong one.
if theres a reason you dont want to further your skillset and use udk let us know, if its a valid one and not just "new things scare me" i may try and help you out
Heres my 2 cents.
1. Bake AO can be great for adding some subtle contraststo stand alone objects, I almost always do it. I know UDK kind of fakes it in real time. But a good rule of thumb, if the object isnt going to move, then baking stuff is a viable route.
2. As for how to go about it, I've heard baking with Maya(atleast for normal maps is better) but i havent seen a difference with AO bakes between maya and 3ds, so either one is fine.
Hope I helped!
Rhinokey -
I think I might give the AO bake a miss, you're 100% right in my opinion by saying that it could ruin the look I'm going for. I think if I just try and paint in what shadow I can see then it might look better.
As for the in-engine thing... I've used UnrealEd a bunch of times already (long before UDK itself was even heard of), and it would be no problem to get the scene in there.
For simplicitys sake I guess I could just send it to UE3 and just instance the SM's after they've had materials applied. I guess I could play with the real time lighting better too.
Don't get me wrong, I agree it seems stupid to render game-art outside of a game-engine, but I wanted to have the ability to render the scene in Max, UE3, or Marmoset and take grabs of whatever looks best, I suppose though the only authentic two out of those would be UE / Marmoset. I could also use Neox's TF2 style shader too which may or may not work here.
And it's nothing to do with not wanting to try anything new! If anything, it would actually be more difficult for me to do within Max, but then as you say, what's the point... more work for less result.
Albino_Goldfish -
Thanks for your comment, I agree AO can be great to add subtle effect and I find it's a great assist in texturing. I think I worded my post badly though... that 'What would be the best way to tackle this:' actually referred to the second part and not the AO bake! I know how to bake AO!
BGoodsell -
Thanks for the reply, I hadn't considered multiple UV sets so that's something to bear in mind.