All along the watchtower

gateian

Hi Guys,

I was playing around with a couple new methods of quick UV mapping WITHOUT using the automatic unwrap tool and ended up making a watch tower. I'm displaying this in Unity, which I am fairly new to but am finding very easy to work with.

Any suggestions on what I could do to improve this are welcome.:)

letronrael

i thnik if you delete your environnement around it, maybe it will look even better...

burtonyang

The support on your tower looks really flimsy..I could probably kick the connection of the pillars and it would probably break.

gateian

Thanks for the feedback. I think you are right letronrael, that the background could probably be removed. I think I should do some slightly better angles of this too. All a result of bleary eyed late night render shots

Mark Dygert

I like it, it looks good.

Crits:
The floor boards are all a little too straight, maybe rough up the silhouette a bit, it would add a few polys but could help show some age or non-laser guided craftsmanship of he industrial age, heh.

Any chance we can see the UV layout, the texture flats and a wireframe overlay shot? Can't really comment on the construction without those.

Try taking a few screen shots from the ground level, it will put less importance on the background and the object's silhouette will contrast better with the sky, it will put us more at the players level and less of a "god eye" view, plus gives your models a little more stature.
It might help to think of it this way, "we look up to the things we admire and we look down on the things we don't". There are other artistic technical reasons but I won't write a paper on it, that can be a good rule of thumb.

Also, a little composition theory never hurt a P&P shot, heh.

Looking good as far as the asset is concerned, maybe just a few minor tweaks to the model and the shots.

Snader

It doesn't really offer any height advantage, because A it's pretty low built and B it's in a valley instead of on a hill. I think the distance between the floor and the roof should be as much as the distance between the railing and the roof currently is. Possibly lengthen the supports a bit more.

I also don't see any supporting beam for the middle 10 or so floorboards, though that might be the angle.

The rope and tarp look a bit angular, but nothing a few cuts won't fix.

Matroskin

looking cool in general as to me.

Well, the cloth could be more interesting. The color could get soem saturation, some additional folds, maybe alpha on the edges (aged, ripped etc).
The rope hanging from the top looks too low-poly compared tot eh rest of the tower.
U could also add few more ropes here and there - it is n easy way of adding interesting "organic" details

Wooden support "pillars" could get few more edge loops to make them bit more irregular, maybe partially champher few vertical sharp edges.

gateian

I love you guys. Brilliant pointers here. Mark, it did cross my mind that the boards were a bit "laser" crafted haha. But didn't want to eat into the poly budget too much, hence why some parts of it look angular, but maybe 900+ polys is too little, so I might have a go at adding some details there. I love your rule about the viewing angle. Never really thought of it like that!

Here's a few more screens. I've removed the desert background and made it uneventful so that the tower is the main focus.





I'm going to read that composition article later. Thanks very much for the link.

@snader - good points. I think you can disregard the valley thing. It was just a temporary background, but I agree that maybe a bit of extra height can be given to it. Rope definitely does need some tweaking yes

@Matroskin - I agree I could have a wee bit more fun with the cloth. ripped edges will look great, so i'm going to add those. Thanks for the suggestion. Adding another rope is a good idea, but might add alot of polys.

re.wind

Not bad, but it needs bigger and more prominent diagonal supports to stop the tower from toppling over in a breeze, especially considering it appears to have wooden foundation blocks. you got the right idea with the corner supports, but those need to be bigger. like these pylons.

Farcry 1 guard towers come to mind, but i can't find an image of adquate resolution.

The wooden plank platform also needs more support beneath the actual planks because they're all floating by the looks of it.

For the cloth and rope, try using reactor simulation to get a much more believable result. tedious trial and error but is worth the effort.

gateian

Hi Guys,

I've been busy on other things so I haven't worked on this since my last post, but since I wanted to play with the new Marmoset release, I thought I would have another go. I took on all your fantastic feedback and agreed with alot of it, so I think this is a big improvement.

Obviously alot more detail now and I still want to work on the upper section and add more and better ropes and LOVED the idea of play with reactor to add some more realistic cloth, so hopefully a new update will show some improvement on that. Here are some screens.

gateian

I've updated this today and worked on the top section. Played alot with reactor for the ropes and covering sheet on top, so this took most of my time as I am fairly new to reactor. What alot of fun to play around with!

Here's some more screenshots and should be moving on to UV unwrap next.