Old Bailey Entrance

Tickwomp

Hey everyone,

Figured I should post the latest thing I've been working on and get some good old C&C. This is the Old Bailey entrance in London (I haven't added the people on the roof yet). It's sitting at 5,988 Triangles at the moment, cast from a hard-surface high-poly; the only parts sculpted are the door reliefs and the single brick texture.

I'd like this to be a portfolio piece, so any critiques or advice on anything would be awesome (presentation, textures, whatever). I appreciate y'all taking the time to look; Thanks!

Shogun3d

Very nice!! I think the textures could use a bit of work, mainly some subtle variation between bricks, adding character to the gates texture and some more subtle details to the gateway.

There's also a noticeable bend in the bricks right at the entrance, its very noticeable in your last screenshot. You should keep those bricks straight and cut them.

How did you go about creating the cloth ornaments? Zbrush?

jimmypopali

Also, with the bricks, on the inside of the door way, it is not obvious that it is made up of multiple bricks. From certain angles, it looks like one long brick on each row.

How are you texturing this? I say that because you mentioned there is one brick texture throughout. I would really get some variation in there and take little chips off corners and rough up some edges as they are perfectly straight. Being an 'old entrance' I would expect some wear and tear.

Great start, the rest looks fantastic!

DDuckworth

I agree with jimmy on the long bricks in the entranceway, they definitely look like a large single brick, as well as the bent bricks around the entrance. You have some really odd topology around the central criminal court brass plates they look like floating geometry but you have some strange cuts across them, it looks like you may have tried to line up the cuts with the underlying geo but I have no idea why you would do that if you didn't weld all edges onto it, either way I think they are fine just being left as floating geo.

The area around the "mantle" (is what i'm calling it) is far too contrasted int he texture, not the flat part, that part looks alright, but the curved arch above the door looks so blobby dark and light, it looks very off, lower the contrast about that and get rid of that curved looking mess in the texture on the midleft side of the curved mantle piece. I can point it out if you need me to.

Overall I agree it's a great start, you have a lot of great stuff here, just keep on refining

Tickwomp

Hey guys, thanks for the responses!

Kaburan - The bend in the bricks is from the normal map that thinks its folding around the corner, so i'll have to bring it straight outwards. All the cloth is made in 3DS Max with hard edges.

jimmypopali - Definitely agree with the long-looking bricks - gonna add some darker edges in the diffuse and maybe bump up the seam on the normals. For the brick texture, I made one long strip of horizontal-tiling holes and generated the normals from that. Then for each brick i moved the UVs along the strip so they're not all exactly the same this is for the high-poly bricks. The low-poly block is cast from all those. Anyways, I'll get some wear and tear in those bricks - it does look too uniform.

DDuckworth - The central criminal court sign is indeed floating geometry. Could you point the area you're specifically talking about? You mean the curved-ribbon thing with all the fruits on it?

Thanks again guys

DDuckworth

Sure thing tickwomp! I like that name haha



I did a liquify to fix the area I pointed out, also darkened it up a little because it just seems to bright for this area, overall for this mantle I would remove a lot of the white wear, it looks great on the higher part in the back but not as much on this forthcoming part. Let me know if you need further clarification

00Zero

sweet work dude. mind posting up the texture flats?

looking at some photos of it, the real one looks a bit less contrasty and slightly darker grey. like its somewhat "softer".

its probably your lighting though, if you had a nice orangish fill light coming from the bottom it would make it seem more realistic.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3029/2684456240_c7759bb866_b.jpg

as far as technical stuff...

maybe add some more sides to the curve at the top of the metal door. also one of your channels on the metal door is flipped because it looks like its getting highlights from below.

i dont know if youre color map is finished or not, but you could use some more work. around the stone. right now it looks like its pretty much the same tone of grey all over. it looks like you have the texture res to make it more interesting.

Tickwomp

Hey, heres a picture of the maps (downsized for upload)



Aye - the texture needs some re-work - i only added a few stains for variation along with the white junk. I think i forgot to flip the channel on the door, but its just a square. The crappy curve is on the brick arch; i THINK i can add a cut or 2. Thanks for the input!

DDuckworth

Why did you make an individual texture sheet for each side of the asset? You could have saved a bunch of texture sheets by layering UV's and in some places where you wanted variation then place them sepeartely, the similarities to your UV sheets are uncanny to the point of being unnecessary, the black areas on the column could simply be done away with if you cut up the geo some and squished together those spaces, a lot of optimization to be done here

00Zero

agreed. a lot of wasted space and a lot of opportunity to reused same bits. I dont think anybody would notice if the left and right sides were mirrored. 2k texture is huge.

PogoP

Agreed with what those guys said really. Brilliant high poly work but the low poly/textures could really do with some optimization. You could probably (at a push) fit all that on a couple of 1024 maps. Look into texture and model modularity.

Tickwomp

Shit, i KNEW in the back of my head that was gonna bite me in the ass. Alright, gonna try to put these on a 1024x2048. I don't think that's unreasonable for texture size for something this large. The black spot on the bricks I can add in a cut, but the pillars would require a lot more geometry than i'd be willing to give up, and I don't think its worth saving that small amount of space. Time to get to it; thanks guys.

DDuckworth

Well tickwomp from my recent understanding of the way engines are handling polycounts and texture maps, it's better to have more poly's and less texture maps, it seems that a few hundred or even a thousand extra poly's on an object these days has little to no effect on the framerate/performance. But to each his own

As for fitting everything on a 1024x2048 I wouldn't say you have to go that far, you could probably fit it all into about 4 1024 maps, some of this stuff I can't see where it was used so that would of course be up to you

Tickwomp

Hey guys, I did some updating:

Combined the mesh into one big mesh with one UV. Here is the map - 1024 x 2048.



And some shots in marmoset - the last one has a different lighting preset just to show what it looks like under different conditions.





And here's the test in UDK - tested a 1024x2048 and a 2048x4096 to compare texture density - its still well in the green compared to UDK's static meshes and textures. I don't think 2x2048 is unreasonable then for something this large.




In-game shots



The top is the 4096 map, the bottom is the 2048.

DDuckworth

I honestly can't tell a difference between the 2048 and 4096 so I would just say go with the lower res one. You did an awesome job of compressing the textures too, great endpiece!