Ancient Stone Blocks Wall - need advices
polycounter lvl 8
Hi guys,
I'll be short. I am working on a next-gen Env, an ancient temple. The target platform is Xbox 360.
It's the first time I deal with this kind of project and environment stuff, I already read a lot of useful tutorial on modular assets etc but now I have a specific quesiton for you.
I need to create a tile as the one showed in the picture below, an ancient wall made of giant blocks. I was wondering what solution could be the best in this case.
1 - A simple plane with a baked normal map + parallax to give the deepness. (less polys but parallax)
2 - A roughly modeled stone wall, I mean just some extrusions for the blocks and a normal map applied. (more polys without parallax)
Honestly I am curious about the screenshot itself, I don't own Uncharted so I was wondering what solution they adopted here.
I'll be short. I am working on a next-gen Env, an ancient temple. The target platform is Xbox 360.
It's the first time I deal with this kind of project and environment stuff, I already read a lot of useful tutorial on modular assets etc but now I have a specific quesiton for you.
I need to create a tile as the one showed in the picture below, an ancient wall made of giant blocks. I was wondering what solution could be the best in this case.
1 - A simple plane with a baked normal map + parallax to give the deepness. (less polys but parallax)
2 - A roughly modeled stone wall, I mean just some extrusions for the blocks and a normal map applied. (more polys without parallax)
Honestly I am curious about the screenshot itself, I don't own Uncharted so I was wondering what solution they adopted here.
Replies
It also depends on what engine you are using and how well it handles it.
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_rocks/modular_rocks.html
And for that specific screenshot, yeah, that's definitely geometry!
to HP : thanks, I already taken a look to it
Oh man, i didn't knew that YT channel! Completely escaped under my radar till now. thanks for sharing man.
Thanks, there's really some fantastic enviro stuff in there. The only complain is that they didn't share models/wires.
I guess they're mapping all that stuff onto simple planes :shifty:
Like that:
Polycount is the least of our worries on this gen. The key is the smart reuse of modular pieces and UV space.
Oh and btw, of course, check this out if you haven't already. (Previous pic is from this tut as well! Peris <33)
http://www.brameulaers.com/tutorials/generic_wall_tutorial/generic_wall_tutorial.html
anyway here's the wall normal mapped :
Sure man, here's some images of the solution I'v taken. To be honest, as I already said I got no great experience with next-gen creation so I could miss something important
Anyway, there's only one shell, the texture is tiled and I filled the 0-1 space fully and no hard edges (this could give some render artifact but I tested out and It works well with normal)
The first baked ones didn´t have these sharp angles i think.The image with the 90° angles was before he baked them and HP said he should avoid 90° angles.
Unless your using rectangular maps you will have twice as many vertical pixels - I do think however, that you simply stretched your UV island to show me that it fits nicely within UV space.
If that is the case, did you consider using a square diffuse and filling the empty space with a second mesh? If you make both of them tilable, you would be able to break up the tiling by arranging the meshes in different ways. As it is now you can spot an obvious geometrical pattern.
Specter: Yeah, you're right. I was under the impression that Kuki's low had multiple smoothing groups. Since height differences in his current mesh are minimal it's easy to fit it into 0-1 space with only minimal stretching.
The texture is a rectangular 1024x512, the ratio is almost perfect as the model is 2x1.
to teaandcigarettes : The solution you suggest could be also good but I decided that I'll give differentiation by using vertex painting and blending another version of the texture (destroyed and dirt). Maybe I'll create also some custom models with missing bricks etc...
Another note is the fact that this tile will be part of a completely dark/underground environment. The character will show the env around him by using his torch (like Uncharted 2) so I guess the tiling problem will be less important.
Any advice is well accepted, I am new to the next gen world