Environment - The Ottoman Workshop
Ok... drumroll please.
After weeks of bitching and moaning I've decided to knuckle down and get into a 'proper' environment. Following some suggestions to find a good concept I like and work through it, that's what I intend to do.
I absolutely love the concept and hopefully I can do it justice. It's by Vincent Morin, for an animated short called 'The Ottoman'.
So I'm trying to go about this the right way. In all prior environments I've modelled each prop first then fleshed out the environment which has led to the inevitable proportion and layout problems later on.
I've started on the blockout and will be looking for crit every step of the way. I want this to be my strongest portfolio piece.
I know I've got my work cut out but one of the reasons I chose this piece is that I should get a lot of practice on a lot of aspects of environment art. Lighting and texturing will be a huge task, as well as some nice high poly modelling for all of the details.
So here's my blockout progress, it's early stages but I figure if I get some crit early then I can eradicate issues that may pop up too late in the game.
After weeks of bitching and moaning I've decided to knuckle down and get into a 'proper' environment. Following some suggestions to find a good concept I like and work through it, that's what I intend to do.
I absolutely love the concept and hopefully I can do it justice. It's by Vincent Morin, for an animated short called 'The Ottoman'.
So I'm trying to go about this the right way. In all prior environments I've modelled each prop first then fleshed out the environment which has led to the inevitable proportion and layout problems later on.
I've started on the blockout and will be looking for crit every step of the way. I want this to be my strongest portfolio piece.
I know I've got my work cut out but one of the reasons I chose this piece is that I should get a lot of practice on a lot of aspects of environment art. Lighting and texturing will be a huge task, as well as some nice high poly modelling for all of the details.
So here's my blockout progress, it's early stages but I figure if I get some crit early then I can eradicate issues that may pop up too late in the game.
Replies
It think the room is a little to wide at the moment.
And in the concept the area above the arch (with the 2 fans) doesn't go in the way it does in your block out.
Also the beams near the ceiling aren't exactly like in the concept. The spacing between the girders in your blockout is to big.
Thanks, yeah good call on the archway. I'll fix that. And I'm a beginner too
@Mistry10
Me too! It's such an awesome concept, so much stuff to really get into and it should be a fun project.
@Arac
Well spotted on the top of the archway, I guess at first glance I thought it was recessed back above it, but now you mention it I can see it's flush with the front of the arch as there is no reveal on the sides. I'll fix that along with the curve of the arch.
When you say the spacing in the girders, how do you mean? Too far between each one or too deep between the upper and lower beams on each one?
I doesn't really make a difference. It just depens on how hard you want to stick to the concept.
so the different is that you believe there to be no distance between wall and vertical beam on the left side?
i'd disagree since the storage rack on the left side blocks the view.
on topic: your block-out room doesnt seem to be as tall as the room in the concept. most noticable in the work bench area and the distance between the racks on the left.
not much to add besides that, so... gogo?
Thanks for the crit. I'll make the changes when I'm back on it tomorrow morning. You're right though, the room scale is something I've had trouble with since the FOV is probably different in the concept to how I've got the Max viewport. A fresh pair of eyes and suggestions from others should help me get it right.
@Skayne
Thanks man, I hope so too!
You've definitely made the right choice in how to approach the scene - I made a similar mistake recently, and fixing everything really slowed me down. I'll be keeping an eye on this for sure!
I'm gonna go for realistic textures. Two reasons really; firstly, my previous environment piece was 100% hand painted and I wanna keep the variation in my folio. Secondly, I need to learn more about UE3 shaders so trying to get some realism with all the different surfaces and materials in the concept should be a good chance to explore that.
Of course there will likely be an element of hand painting. I'm toting with the idea of some polypainting although I tried that on some rocks recently and while it turns out ok and saves a bunch of time, I still prefer to texture in 2D. Time isn't really a concern here, I've made the mistake of rushing before and I want this to be my strongest piece yet. Hopefully some of the props might make nice portfolio pieces on their own so I can be adding bits as I go.
I'm pretty much gonna be updating it daily hopefully, I'm trying to structure my work (main job work) so I get to spend a couple of hours on this every morning which works out good because I can post my progress here and get a list of changes from crits over the rest of the day.
So tomorrow I'll make the changes as noted above and start roughing out some more of the main architectural details maybe some of the larger props
I'm wondering how to do the floor though, I was hoping to use BSP or at least just a simple plane so I can get an easy tile for the material, but I'd like to actually have that floor fan in a recessed chamber so it'll have to be a mesh. But I've no idea how to tile the UVs on a mesh with a big hole in the middle. Unless I do it similar to Jason Lavoies Demon Throne central floor where it's done in quadrants around the circular centre part.
That's a long way off anyway so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I'm facing a similar choice in terms of flooring, and have decided to go with simple modular meshes as opposed to textured BSP. Might take a little longer, but I'm sure it'll be worth it. I'm presuming you're also taking the modular approach with the majority of the scene?
I'd also say not to be afraid of deviating from the concept - I've found that following concepts too rigidly can be quite restrictive (unless that's a specific goal of the project, of course). Either way, you've picked an interesting concept and you're off to a good start - let's see this one finished!
I'm actually probably not gonna go for the modular approach, at least that's what I'm thinking at this stage. Many of the props that appear more than once will likely be modelled/textured with slight variations on each side, the boxes/crates for example so they can be reused/rotated without it being obvious they're being copy/pasted. For the main structure though I'd rather have complete control over everything being unique, especially since it's just a single room. I think using modular pieces for much of the structure in such a smallish scene would result in the reuse of pieces too obvious. As I said though, that's what I'm thinking at this stage, obviously if I spot some possibility of optimisation by modulating some structural pieces then I'll go for it.
Nice tip thanks, I'll certainly need to take some artistic license on a few of the props and pieces which are difficult to make out in the concept so if I find when it's in 3D certain things look better if they stray from the concept a little then so be it.
Disappointingly slow progress today, only got about 20-30 mins on it to fix some of the issues mentioned yesterday. A load of work came up that needed my attention for the majority of today, hopefully I'll get a bit more time on it over the next day or two.
Your textures could use a bit of work too.
And wtf is wrong with my textures hey? I thought they were pretty damn good, I drew the wireframes in and everything.
'TL;DR NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IMAGE IS DEMONSTRATIVE TO ILLUSTRATE EFFECTS OF FOV'
Almost done with the structural details so I can start getting onto the bigger props and hopefully the scene will start looking a bit more 'together' once some of those are blocked in.
Obviously I've used a bit of artistic license on the floor fan as some of it isn't very clear in the concept, but since this is just a blockout, details can be added and refined later, I kinda like where it's at right now though.
EDIT: Just noticed the fan is far too big... will resize that!
The triangular open spaces together roughly form a square, and then adding the top and bottom beam makes the support have standing rectangles instead of lieing like you have now.
With regards to the proportions of the actual room, I'm gonna have to stop playing with it soon otherwise I'm gonne be messing with them forver. I'm happy with where they're at now, it seems silly to spend so much time trying to replicate the exact position of the camera, as long as the room scale is close then I'm happy.
a rough shape for each solid object... give them all colour sets in max so you can see what assets need to be made and get a bit of lighting in there... its a much better way of working and will help your scales/ comp alot
personally i would get this blocked in in an hour or two with cylinders for fans etc, then work out a wee schedule (asset an evening or something...so ican figure exactly how much of my spare time ui will need and whether i think i can put the effort in
also helps to have an entire scene blocked in befor you start adding details as the compostion may affect the details
As I mentioned, this is my first time using the blockout method, previously I have gone the 'make the assets first and then realise the scale is screwed' route. I think I have got a bit carried away with a few of the bits, so I'll do as you suggest and just stick some representative primitives in there.
Thanks for the tip about setting up a schedule too, streamlining my thought process is something I'm working on so I don't get overwhelmed with the project as that has been an issue for me in the past.
I'll take this approach tomorrow then and hopefully I can get the scene looking a lot fuller and more complete.
The door is central in the right hand wall, and the distance between the door's sides and the girders running above is the same on both sides. The distance between the girders and the walls they run paralell to is also the same distance on both sides. On your blockout the girder columns seem to be randomly placed. Also, the circular feature in the middle of the room looks to be exactly in the middle and not offset closer to the camera. Hope this helps!
That's actually helped me a great deal with the perspective and when I see it laid out like that it certainly makes it clear on the positioning of the structural elements.
Really awesome man, thanks again.
I'm not too worried about polycount right now, I'm gonna try and reuse as much as possible with the props and hopefully some tiling floor/ceiling pieces to keep it optimised. We'll see though!
I also made the position changes of the door/ceiling girders/fan with reference to the paintover from Tda. I've shown a top view to illustrate this, it looks better I think so thanks Tda.
I just have a quick question too. It's shameful I don't know the answer to this but I see a lot of talk of lightmaps since UDK was released. Now 90% of my learning of UE3 was done back when you got it with UT3, before UDK was released, I'm not sure if lightmapping was included then but I never learned about them. I know it's not correct but I'd just UV my meshes with 1 channel for texturing and drop them straight into Unreal.
So, what is the purpose of a Lightmap? I know how to unwrap a 2nd channel, and I know there's a vid over on 3DMotive, but I'm still not sure what the purpose of a lightmap is, I know it stores baked lighting from Unreal, but I've never used them before and my meshes seem to be lit ok? At least I think they have been!
As I said, shameful admission of lack of knowledge but if someone could clear that up I'd appreciate it!
So I'm gonna spend the weekend going over some learning about Unreal Materials, and probably lighting too. I've only brushed the surface on both subjects and I think it's important I get a much better understanding, especially materials.
YOU MEAN YOU DONT KNOW EVERYTHING??!? shamefull.
Basically a lightmap is a rendered version of your levels static lighting. it calculates bounced light and colour bleeding, and area shadows. These are too expensive for realtime rendering but with lightmaps they only get calculated once.
basically lightmass(the light mapper) does very complex realistic lighting calculations which are too slow for realtime rendering and stores the results in textures.
So if you don't give a mesh a channel for lightmapping, what happens in UDK by default now? Does it not get lit/cast shadow or is it just a lower quality than if you use a lightmap?
I guess that's why I have never used them, because I didn't know they existed and no lighting problems were immediately visible, to my then untrained eye at least!
Or is there no difference and it's simply a performance optimisation?
If UT does it, you'll likely end up with something like:
which wastes a bit of space. It's not a huge difference though. And seeing as this is only for a PF and not a highly optimized game, you can just opt to render out a huge lightmap for better looking screenshots.
So do you physically have to tell UDK to create a Lightmap? Like what happens if you just drop in a mesh, some lights, and build the lighting? Is the lightmap created automatically?
To use lightmaps properly, most assets will need a second set of UVs. This is because for the UVs you use with a lightmap, everything needs to uniquely unwrapped -- no stacking or mirroring -- and it should all be packed just within the 0-1 UV range. That doesn't mean lightmapped assets can't have stacking and mirroring for their diffuse/normal textures, just that when you take your diffuse/normal unwrap and copy it over to the second UV layer for manual tweaking you should be sure to fix any stacking and mirroring you did in the standard UVs.
Additionally you usually should put more spacing between UV islands on the lightmap UVs because the lightmap textures are always significantly lower resolution than your diffuse/normal textures. It's common to give medium and small scale props lightmaps as small as 32x32, so you want to be sure you have enough space between UV islands for that not to cause problems. For a prop with UVs like Snader posted above, you would probably need a minimum lightmap of 128x128 before all resolution-caused artifacting went away.
Of course, for a portfolio environment, you can cheat a bit and crank your lightmap resolutions higher than they would actually be in most games.
To have UE3 auto-generate lightmap UVs for you, with the Static Mesh Editor preview window open: click on the menu Mesh > Generate Unique UVs.
Right, todays progress, tried to get as much blocked in as I could, but I've got a couple of questions now;
Firstly, as you can see from the concept, some of the props are pretty tricky to make out smaller details, at a glance they look pretty 'complete' but when you focus in a bit, it's tough to make out exactly what's supposed to be going on. In this case, I was thinking I could maybe bust out the sketchbook and try and concept out some of my own machinery bits to clear up any bits I'm not sure about. Good idea or bad idea? I figured doing it that way allows me to develop other skills a bit too, namely concepting and creativity in translating rough concept art where details aren't so clear.
Secondly, right now there's a lot of temporary ngons in my scene, when I get this in UDK at blockout stage to sort composition and lighting schemes, am I gonna have problems with ngons? If it is a problem, is there a script or function in Max that allows you to select 5+ sided polys like in Modo (and possibly Maya's cleanup tool)?
I thought you might say that
It wouldn't take too long by hand since it's fairly easy to spot what has ngons, but it'd be nice if something would do it automatically.
I think a lot of them are the caps on renderable splines, and a few cylinder primitives.
Some googling led me to this.
http://scripts.subd.nl/?f=JHN_FaceSelector2.mcr seems to be some sort of macro. Hope it helps
Ah nice one Divi, that's what I was wondering, that'll save a bit of hassle for sure.
I shoulda screenshotted this really but I was in a rush to check it out in UDK before I left work, and it didn't turn out so well. I basically combined the whole scene into 3 ASE's, and let UDK auto unwrap for the lightmap.
This resulted in horrible blurry shadows even after bumping the lightmap res to silly sized like 4096... is this due to the auto UV's being far too tiny since I combined so many meshes together?
If so, is it really necessary to unwrap everything just for a lightmap at this blockout stage? What's the best way to get it into UDK, surely not individual assets?! Maybe break it down into like 20 or so ASE's?
And finally, is there a way to place meshes in UDK so they position themselves at an exact point, so if I set all the pivots/centres in Max of each set of objects, when they come into UDK they'll be perfectly aligned?
Regarding the blurriness, need to see screenshots and mesh settings to say for sure. What do the autogenerated UVs look like? Depending on your settings, with enough pieces it could end up being a matrix of tiny pieces with large gaps between them. Is "Override Light Map Res?" (under StaticMeshActor>StaticMeshComponent) enabled on your in-map actors? If so, that is the lightmap resolution being used rather than the setting stored in the UPK.
I didn't check the UV's, stupidly. I will do when I'm back at my computer tomorrow. It was literally just 3 static meshes though, the walls, main structural elements, and then props/scene accessories. Then those were just auto-UV'd, I'm pretty sure some of those shells must've been tiny.
Regarding lightmap resolution, I didn't check if the Override was on (didn't know that option existed!) I was just changing the lightmap value in the Static Mesh window, to be honest, it didn't look like it was changing at all despite supposedly cranking it from the default 32 to 4096.
Let me just clarify that lighting is purely there for lightings sake right now. Lighting is probably my weakest part of UDK knowledge and I'm gonna take a few days to learn a bit more about it all before I try some proper lighting tests with this scene.
How's the lightmap looking? It's kinda hard to tell with just a grey mat on everything, but the res looks ok to me. Right now it's at 512 on everything which seems crazy high but obviously once all the props are in as separate pieces with their own UV's then I can drop that right down on less noticeable areas.