Tutorial time: Modular sets
polycounter lvl 10
Hi there, I don't think I've ever posted anything I made here earlier. I'm a pretty long time lurker tho and it's great to have such an active forum to check out now and then 
Anyhow I've made a tutorial. It's not done actually... I plan to make two versions of it actually... One basic, not indepth ideas on anything, and one more nerdy where I try and go into obstacles, workarounds and general ideas and techniques I've come across when working with modular units before.
The examples in this tutorial are extremely basic on purpose btw It's mostly to be able to show off the ideas I had easier (and a little bit because I feel lazy...)
This "first draft" I guess is something inbetween indepth stuff and basic not so indepth. I also need to go through the text and clean up weird sentences and stuff... I hope this may come in handy for some people at least.
You can find it here:
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_sets/modular_sets.html
Anyhow I've made a tutorial. It's not done actually... I plan to make two versions of it actually... One basic, not indepth ideas on anything, and one more nerdy where I try and go into obstacles, workarounds and general ideas and techniques I've come across when working with modular units before.
The examples in this tutorial are extremely basic on purpose btw
It's mostly to be able to show off the ideas I had easier (and a little bit because I feel lazy...)This "first draft" I guess is something inbetween indepth stuff and basic not so indepth. I also need to go through the text and clean up weird sentences and stuff... I hope this may come in handy for some people at least.
You can find it here:
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_sets/modular_sets.html
Replies
In Max there's a utility called "Assign Vertex Colors", if you open that up you see you can goto your radiosity setup there. You run the radiosity bake and then press "Assign to selected" assuming you've got your mesh selected
In Maya I'm not sure, but there should be a similar way of doing this.
In the tutorial I was more referring to painting the "AO" by hand with just a vertex color modifier applied to your mesh (or just select the vertices and color them with the slider in edit poly mode)
Hope that helped
Sounds like a plan. I'll see what I can put together. To just say the basics I have a similar workflow then, with the exception I usually start with creating some base texture and then go to the mesh splitting that up where I have seams and stuff in the texture. That way you can make sure to have a tiling texture/textures and still be able to create several different meshes with the same texture.
I've added a page to the polycount wiki with a further breakdown of How to bake ambient occlusion into your vertex colors.
I'm gonna try and wrap this one up asap.
Maybe I'll try and move on to a more specific modular rock/nature workflow one after that. I read that vertex color wiki entry here too. Great stuff. I may do a quick tutorial where I go into some workflow I usually have when I mockup stuff using vertex colors as help, but describing the process of baking AO that entry did perfectly!
Thanks for taking the time and making this, i've already learned a bunch, cheers!
Awesome example assets btw
Not to mention you have some great work in your folio. The texture examples down at the bottom of your portfolio are fantastic.
ah I thought you were doing it in UDK :P Still nifty trick. Will have to try and see where Maya has it. Curse you computer for dying on me.
The funny thing is, more tutors they are, the more posts we'll get asking for them :P
Really need to wrap this one up now and start on the next tutorial... It seems rocks/nature modular stuff is on que.. I also got the idea to make a smaller brick/cobble photoshop tutorial and how I usually go about creating those without any modeling or sculpting involved (and how you can mix that with potential sculpting).
YES :thumbup: We need a hug emoticon
Not sure how much this helps with memory savings, since vertex colour is stored per vertex, but I would hope a clever engine will only store the vertex colour for multiple instances of the same mesh, instead of storing the whole mesh data for every different colouration. I might be wrong there though, I don't really know how that works.
Good point there, I'm actually not sure about how that works either.. In UEngine,
if you make a a mesh and instance that and then starts painting vcolor on it... It'd be great if it could instance everything but the vertex color info somehow. Just like MoP said in a better way :P
Anyhow I'm wrapping up a (quite clean) scifi texture set that I'm going to release hopefully this weekend at least. It's basically a selection of loads of older textures I had laying around but that I've made a polish pass on just now. Gonna release it as a Source version and one pack with just the TGA's. I know pure texture sets may not be that useful anymore but I think they could actually be a base for some more simple meshes as well if anyone would like to do that.
After that I'm really going to do the rock/nature modular piece tutorial finally... I have several more tutorials in mind as well. I'll have to write down all ideas I got so they may eventually turn into something useful hopefully :S
Yeah, I saw in UT3 /UDK you can paint vertex colour,
Maybe some engines compress/ignore the 'unused' vetices, say if you only coloured a few choice sections.
The main thing is you're still saving texture space regardless, so you can resuse the same shader on multiple assets but get more milage with subtle vertex colour changes.
I'm guessing for the sharp edged sections you're using loops close together, in order not to have the colour bleed everywhere?