Wooden Gothic City Project

Barnstable

Hey everyone.

I started this scene as an assignment in school where we worked on this single project for the whole term. I think I can make it into something, so I'm going to continue fleshing it out, and place it in the UDK as a playable level, then add it to my portfolio concentrating on environmental work. This will be huge, and I know it will take a long time, but I really want to complete it. I decided I want to do environmental work in the industry, so this will be a big part of my portfolio.

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Concept: This is a mini Gothic city all to itself similar to the Vatican, sitting on stilts in the middle of a lake. The dock, building itself, and most everything is made of wood as that is lighter on the supporting stilts, and can handle the moisture and somewhat move with the water in a storm for instance.

There are basically three areas of the city. A dock where supplies and visitors enter the city, an upper city which is pristine, home to the upperclassmen and beautiful, and the underside of the city, that is home to the workers, seamen, and is filthy, in a horrible state of repair. There are extra beams holding up parts of the upper city, and it looks like it could collapse at any time.

My Concerns: I know I need to tweak and/or delete what I already have here too. I already had the boats, and dock textured, but now that I know much more about how to UV properly (relatively for my level of experience), I just stripped the whole thing and I'm going to start from scratch. I need to adjust some proportions for a figure in the scene (I already put it in Unity, and most of the proportions were good), reduce the number of polys here and there, and I know I can get away with letting the textures do the work instead of geometry in some places.

I plan on doing the lighting in UDK as well, but I've never used it at all before, so.... that should be fun:poly122:

I know I need to reduce the amount of geometry seen in the distance, so I have some plans for that as well.

The player starts off on the tiny dock next to the dingy.

Any and all crits and comments are welcome.

Edit: these pics are a bit blurry, I'll post better ones in a minute.

c0ldhands

Nice layout, looks good, would be interesting to follow. Just wondering, is the platform the building rests on gonna be like a dock itself or maybe rock?

Steve Schulze

Looks like you're off to a good start with the ship and docks area. The city itself appears to be quite small for what you're planning to work into it though.

This is a mini Gothic city all to itself similar to the Vatican

If it's like the Vatican then you'd be wanting Baroque references for the most part rather than Gothic.

Peter H

looking nice, looking forward to seeing it flshed out more

Zwebbie

Are you familiar with Mont Saint-Michel? It's a beautiful medieval city in the water, so there could be good reference there.

Huw_Dawson

I agree with Zwebbie - Mont Saint-Michel would work as a great starting point. I went there as a child, beautiful place. All the roads were very steep... and they were renovating at the time - which you do a lot with old cathedrals and such - so a good quarter of the cathedral had scaffolding all over it.

Anyway, that's a great start - all the boxes and whatnot on the dock add a lot of ambinece. Not a huge fan of the stern of the ship, however.

Barnstable

Thanks for the comments everyone.

c0ldhands: The upper platform is just a huge wooden platform. The upper class won't risk having their beautifull view of the lake sullied by an un-kept boat. The open areas to the sides will be like parks that have Trees and such in them (the tree roots will be pushing through the roof of the lower city.

Jackablade: Yeah, I was thinking the main cathedral/building is too small. But I think I'm going to expand up rather than out. That will just make it look more grandiose, while not adding too much more work, as I think I can just copy the layout and geometry on lower levels. As it is right now, it only has two levels. And the reference to the Vatican was only in that this will be like a self contained city as well. I don't plan on following too much of the details of the actual Vatican City.

Zwebbie: No, I had never seen Mont Saint-Michel before. I can probably get some ideas from it. Thanks.

Huw_Dawson: Yeah, I'm not happy with the stern of the ship either. There are a few areas that I want to totally remodel.

Barnstable

Not much of an update tonight, I mostly did some clean up work, as the work I did in class was not optimized for a game engine. So I reduce the number of polys here and there, and addressed some scale issues on and around the dock.

I used the obligatory Scale Ninja as my point of reference (the scale Ninja will never fail you). Turned out the ropes and pillars they attached to were too low, so I adjusted that, and detached the sections of the ramps because I decided they would need to be less ridged, and needed to be entirely connected to one another by rope.

Updated pics tomorrow.

Barnstable

So I did a bit more work on it tonight.

I modeled the first gate on the dock. It's pretty high poly just because It's going to be one of the main visuals once the player gets to the top of the dock, and I think I can make it really impressive. While the gates themselves are done, the frame around the gates is WIP, I know it's not right yet, so it's going to change pretty dramatically by the time it's done.

I deleted the rigging around the main bridge because I thought the setup was a bit haphazard, and I could do better now compared to when I was in school. I also extended the main bridge a bit.

The afore mentioned Scale Ninjas are in place to give a better idea of the size of things.

Barnstable

Worked on the gate frame and how it connects to the posts on the side a bit today. Also worked on the lamp holders attached to the pillar. I still have to smooth out some curves on the lamp holders, and the gate frame.

I'm making this gate a bit less craftsman like than the one leading to the Palace just so the player gets a more impressive visual as they advance towards the palace in the distance.

Any thoughts or crit would be appreciated. I have a vision of where I'm going, but I'd like to know if I'm missing anything.

Barnstable

Alright,so I finally got some time to work on this. I decided that this project is way to large to finish in any reasonable amount of time if I want to add other things to my portfolio too, so I think I'm going to just finish the dock and the Boat, add that to my portfolio, and put the rest on hold.

I've been working on the Ship for the most part. After thinking about it, and looking at reference's, the amount of ropes and rigging will be ridiculous, so I figure I need to save some poly's by doing most of the filigree detail with the textures rather than Mudbox sculpting.

Please let me know what you think... all comments and crits are welcome.

rustim

The detail work looks cool. The boat looks a little too tall to me, if you were going for a realistic style. Or maybe it just needs to be a bit lower in the water.

Barnstable

I never noticed that, but I think you're right. The ship is sitting up in the water a bit. I'll change that. Thanks rustim.

Barnstable

I modeled every piece of it in Maya. No Z brush involved.

I'm just learning Mudbox right now, so yes I sculpt.... kind of. I don't have much confidence in my sculpting abilities in Mudbox as of yet, but I try.

I probably should do some detailing in Mudbox and bake the normals as suggested. I was thinking of making a displacement map and using that to sculpt the detail and bake, as I know how to use displacement maps much better than Mudbox. What do you think of that?

Shogun3d

Your packing in a ton of detail without looking at scale and form. A lot of proportions are off. You need to take a look at a lot of real world reference and build on scale. The ships bulk has a height that's amost as tall as the main mast. This shouldn't be so.

The bottom rear should also start to curve and tighten up in place of the rudder.

Barnstable

Kaburan- You're totally right about the proportions. Thank you for noticing that. I'm working form multiple reference pictures, each showing a small part of different ships, using that to guide me, but I totally lost track of the big picture for a bit. I will correct that.

Barnstable

So I changed the form of the Ship a bit. I made it taper a bit more in the front to cut through the water, lengthened the masts, lowered the ship in the water, and I slightly changed the shape in the back and added a rudder. I also added a bit more rigging.

The rigging is tricky. I'm looking at photo reference, but it's still kind of hard to tell what's happening in the huge mishmash of ropes. My best guess is that when the ship is docked (as this one is supposed to be) it might have some ropes that would otherwise get in the way of the sails. I'm still arranging the rigging though, so I think some of the positioning might change.

Anyway:

Barnstable

Alright, so I wasn't originally intending for the ship to be such a huge project in itself, but that seems to be the case. So what I'm going to do is finish the ship on it's own, slip it into my portfolio, and then finish the Dock and the City, separately (possibly later down the line).

I added a lot more detail and rigging, although I still haven't done much with the rigging that's up in the air. I added cannons, but this isn't a war ship, so they are what I would think would be appropriately small. I hope to get the modeling finished within the next few days so I can move on to texturing.

Right now, all those ropes might be making this boat supper poly heavy. Right now the ship alone is at 265985 tris. Is that too much for a project like this?

Comments and crits would be a great help. Thanks in advance.