[UDK] Stockholm train station
polycounter lvl 16
Hello Polycounting slaves
My next project is a group project together with 4 of my classmates,
it is a school project with the theme "Out of Oil", deadline 1st of June, and the scenario we were given is as follows:
Back in 1973 Earths oil supply came to an end and no one had come up with a
substitute. Today, anyone still driving have their own generator gas aggregate fueling the car. This gas is generated by burning wood at high
temperatures, thus making the world really dirty and pretty much treeless.
The final result will be a ca 10-15 sec flyby shot from inside UDK.
Our goal is to recreate the Karlberg train station in here in Stockholm Sweden.
Basically we are creating this train station as it looked back in 1973, but as it
would have looked today had this scenario taken place. Our idea is to make it a
place where humans have sought refugee, it's going to be some kind of gathering spot,
where trains (that hardly ever traffic the rails) shuffle humans to the real
"area of living" or tree harvesting area, still undecided.
I have one first question for you folks out there, as you can see from the following images of the train station, the station platform is pretty curved. We figured the best way to recreate this would be by using static meshes, would this be the best solution for it? I cant really see how CSG geo would recreate it in a better way, but since we're all still new to UDK I figured I should ask you guru's.
My next project is a group project together with 4 of my classmates,
it is a school project with the theme "Out of Oil", deadline 1st of June, and the scenario we were given is as follows:
Back in 1973 Earths oil supply came to an end and no one had come up with a
substitute. Today, anyone still driving have their own generator gas aggregate fueling the car. This gas is generated by burning wood at high
temperatures, thus making the world really dirty and pretty much treeless.
The final result will be a ca 10-15 sec flyby shot from inside UDK.
Our goal is to recreate the Karlberg train station in here in Stockholm Sweden.
Basically we are creating this train station as it looked back in 1973, but as it
would have looked today had this scenario taken place. Our idea is to make it a
place where humans have sought refugee, it's going to be some kind of gathering spot,
where trains (that hardly ever traffic the rails) shuffle humans to the real
"area of living" or tree harvesting area, still undecided.
I have one first question for you folks out there, as you can see from the following images of the train station, the station platform is pretty curved. We figured the best way to recreate this would be by using static meshes, would this be the best solution for it? I cant really see how CSG geo would recreate it in a better way, but since we're all still new to UDK I figured I should ask you guru's.
Replies
As for your question I really dont know, sorry.
I would suggest modeling up a basic patch of traintracks in maya, that you then scale up in length, either grab a CV curve and bend it along that curve, or use a bend deformer.
Create a tileable texture that you tile along the track before you bend it though, or its gonna be a pain. I would suggest tiling it by stretching the UV outside the uv box, to be on the safe side, and not tile it in the material, since i dont think you can export shader tiling into UDK, but i cant say for sure on that one.
Once you got it all as a model, just export it into UDK.
Its nice to see other students found their way in here aswell
Haven't been too active posting updates here which I am a little ashamed of to be honest.
Deadline is closing in on this and I need some help with a normal map issue if anyone can be so kind, I cant get rid of these errors on this pillar. The lowpoly has overlapping UV's but the mesh I send as LP to xNormal has the overlapping uv's moved as you can see on the image below.
One edge is nice but as you can see I get these weird errors on the face above.
Ive also edited the mesh scale in xNormal to 100 and swizzle coordinates +x +y +z, tangent space.
Thanks!
With a lot I mean a number that is approximately 25k+ depending on your computer.
Just so you don't decide to model all of the rail details and duplicate them.
I learned this the hard way...
Tr to adjust the search rays in xNormals. I would do that in maya, i've stopped using xNormals.
First, with a shape like this, I'd be more inclined to use a tiling material. Since it is fairly large, all it's details modeled in, and the model's shapes will generate a nice shading once the scene is lite.
Secondly, when you do have a hard edge on the low, you need to chamfer that edge so light can bend around it, and normals to render properly.
Third, every one of your edges is a UV seam. This will always be a pain in the ass to get normals to render properly. Stitch some UVs for the love of god.
And finally, the high poly has no real information to transfer to your low. Seriously, your high is just a smoothed version of your low. The only information is some slight rounded of edges, which is darn near impossible to notice in game, and is technically not going to work due to the second and third error I presented.
In conclusion, see the first paragraph, and you won’t even have to worry about the other problems . Tile a material for the best results here.
I beg to differ, i don't know if your a maya user or not, but rendering normal maps on hard edges in maya is like a little boxed piece of cake (:
If you have a hard edges in maya, if you need to have it that is, all you have to do is to move the UV shells a bit from each other. If you'r baking something giving you a lot of waving on the normalmap, you should try to change the setting "match using" to surface normal, instead of geometry. You will find this in the advanced section of transfer maps. You get some nasty seems though, nothing both normal maps and some cloning in Ps can't clean.
[EDIT] Added the normalmap
@NiklasT: I thought that static meshes were def the way to go? What do you use instead of static meshes? I've heard BSP brushes slow things down a lot? The rails Im planning to do by importing one tileble mesh and instancing it. The PC's at school makes it a pain to work in UDK at all though.
@sltrOlsson: I'll have a look at the search rays, thanks! We had a teacher telling us the other way around about the waving issue though, he used geometry to cure that and surface for everything else, seemed to work like a charm
@Visceral: Mostly because this one is really close to school for easy refs, but also because it's so boring it's awsome
@cholden: I actually started out with a tiling texture for this, but I figured I need more normal map practice so I chose this approach. I agree a chamfer/bevel would make the lighting look better, and this case would probably be the definition on where to use that technique since it's very lowpoly and a few chamfers wouldnt really matter, but as Mr. sltrOlsson pointed out it isnt necessary, have a look at Chai's tutorial http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/article_normalmaps/normalmaps.html
it's just one of many tuts that mention to separate the uv's at 90 degree angles (as well as the more beautiful yet more expensive chamfer/bevel technique).
I would have made the highpoly more interesting if I had more time, but as I said: this was more for educational purposes.
I think I'll follow your comments though and bevel it's edges slightly and just go with a tileable texture and save the bake practice for a more interesting object.
Thanks for all your inputs!
25k is a crap load! Just know this... on the xbox there's usually a soft budget of about 2000 static mesh instances that can be loaded at one time. I'm not sure if you'll be running this on the xbox so I'm not so sure you'll have to worry about how many objects you have in your scene. And if you are worried about it, just separate sections of your environment into different sub levels, that way you can toggle them on/off if your computer is chugging.
Bbox85: Yup, we are a small group that is developing a game as I write this and we never thought that the amount of objects would be that enormous so we just threw in a load of modules that were tileable.
It ended up with us having 26.000 objects and an fpsrate which we will not speak of here.. We put together the objects (it is buildings.. just for the record) in Maya and now the game works really fine
EDIT: We have about 1000-2000 objects now.
Our project was completed enough for the deadline last week however there's still a few things we would like to fix, like creating the planned backdrop consisting of buildings, adding more lightning, fixing a few lightmap issues/other errors and adding more props and details.
Anyway, here's the result:
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Thanks for the inputs everyone.
edit: ah i see you mentioned it in your previous post.
I agree with motives, has an eerie feel to it. Something with the fog I suppose. Maybe too dense?
A. Its nice to add chamfers everywhere, but i think this is a pretty poor example of when you would want to do that. It would increase the tricount by 3 fold or more, and really not have much of a visual affect at all. And in actuality, unless he's using an engine and baker that have perfectly synced tangents(max, maya, xn, etc + unreal... dont) chamfering these edges as apposed to having simple geometry with hard edges is going to cause smoothing errors, and look worse.
B. You've got this pretty much backwards, as everywhere you have a hard edge you NEED uv splits. Read up here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=73593
The rest of your points i generally agree with, however the nature of the shape he is creating necessitates he do it exactly as he is doing it.
Pumbaa: The final scene here looks great, the solution to your edge issue is likely the result of not using an averaged cage when baking, again refer to the same linked thread above!