Jumping into making my first scene. Please help me PC

BARDLER

So for the past few months I have been cranking through a handful of books for modeling and I think I am ready to challenge myself to try and crate my own scene.

These are a handful of pictures for references I will use.




My idea is to create this old church and grave yard with an old worn picket fence to hold everything in. The scene will be at night lit by a full moon, a lot of creepy candles, and a camp fire or two. On the inside of this seemingly abandoned church will be this crazy active Satan blood cult filled with skulls, pentagrams, and sadistic altar as the focal point. I plan to put this into UDK.

I want to create the outside assets first so I started with the picket fence.



So the main thing I struggle with is UV mapping. What would be the best way to create good UV maps for this style of fence? Do I need to map each individual picket post or can I combine them at all? Also for the low poly version what would be a good way to cut polys off the top detail of the fence but still make it look good.

Thanks for any help and critiques. I hope this turns out well.

LMP

Right away I would rework your picket fence. Way too high poly for a low poly. They also seem awfully thin at the top, looking at your refs, I'm assuming that you're basing it on the top ref for the picket fence. The wide points on the curves look as though they are just a little short of being as wide the the entire picket, however in your model they taper off at they head towards the top.

marq4porsche

LMP is right, those fences are way too dense at the top. Remember if you're going to have a fence, chances are it's going to repeat throughout the environment. So if you have a lot of polys in each fencepost it's going to get heavy really fast. That said, I hope you've laid out what you want this environment to look like beforehand otherwise it's going to be a pain when you start building everything.

BARDLER

@LMP those are the high poly versions. My question was what would be a good way to go from that to a low poly version with out loosing a lot of detail at the top of the picket post. I see what you are saying with the width at the tip though, I will rework them.

@marq4porsche yea I have some sketches on my pad but don't have a scanner so I will redo them in photoshop if needed. I thought the style of the picket fence was cool but do you think I should go for a more simple style like of picket fence?

marq4porsche

You don't need a simple style fence, the design is pretty cool. But you can cut about half the polys that you're using and the edges don't need to be beveled as much either. Put it this way, when a player is going through your level he's not going to be looking at the fences much, so you can lose polys there. Also look at it from a silhouette point of view from a distance, everything that doesn't add to the silhouette can go.

BARDLER

True, I do not think anybody will actually look at the cool fences I made, lol. I think I might go for a little more simple style just for the sake of making my life easier at the moment.

cholden

If you're serious about putting this in UDK, you should blockout the entire scene first. Get the scale of assets right before you start detailing/UVing them. To be fair, nitpicking any assets, specifically a non-focal one this early is just going to slow and confuse the process. And you're going to run into technical issues in UDK and your modeling package that may or may not be important, but you won't know that until you're focusing on the realtime scene.

marq4porsche

Nah, this one has a great look, and getting rid of some of the polys isn't gonna be too much of a hassle. I just made a picket fence a little while ago and this one looks more fun, plus it'll really add to the mood of the scene. Plus Chris is right, you need to block out everything to see how it all looks first before you start adding all your detail in.

BARDLER

I did a small block of to get the sense of the scale before I modeled the fence. I am working on finishing up the block out right now actually. I started to model the fence before I actually got the idea for the scene that is why I went kind of backwards, lol.

BARDLER

Small update. I reworked the fence. I cut down a lot of polys but it still has that cool gothic look. I also finished the simple block out of my scene in UDK. I kind of want to keep it simple so I do not get overwhelmed on my first scene.


UDK blockout



High Poly


Low Poly


Low Poly Wire



The left section is almost 900 tris, the middle sections are about 800 tris, and the broken sections are about 750 tris.

Any tips of getting a normal map out of my highpoly? I use Maya and from the books I have read they do not explain in depth step by step how to create a quality normal map from the high poly version. Does anybody have a good method and/or tutorial they could show me, thanks.

biofrost

I would suggest getting Xnormal, it is free and from my limited experience with it, handles balking nromals and AO maps beter.