Environment Workflow
polycounter lvl 13
So I watched the Gnomon Workshop DVD; Environment Modeling for Games with Nate Stephens, and I am trying to adopt his workflow for myself but I would prefer to use 3ds Max.
A big lessons of his is how to model with curves since you can use things like lofts to create meshes with UVs automatically generated. Tiling textures become very easily to implement.
1. I can't figure out how to make lofts in Max to work like they do with surface lofts in Maya. Lofts in Max require a profile AND a Path unlike the multiple profiles required in Maya. Is there any way to make them work like in Maya with Auto Generated UVs?
2. For things like trim, I am aware that you can make a shape from edge and then sweep that shape and generate UVs. But what If I want that sweeped trim to cut into the surface like an extrusion? Is there any way to quickly implement this trim and sew it into the mesh?
3. When I sweep a spline with a rectangle shape I get some stretchyness and skewing in harsh angles like this:
Any way to easily fix this distortion and have it ready to sew back into the mesh?
4.When you generate UV coordinates in 3ds Max, the textures usually come out way out of scale, Unless you check the box labelled "Real-World Map Size" and then change everyone of you material's textures to something fitting. That's really tedious but the worst part is that none of this gets exported! your textures are still out of scale when you import into UDK. WTF! Is there any way to bake this Data into the UV Coordinates?
~~~
Yesterday I was playing around with Halo: Reach's theatre mode and trying to take some reference shots to figure out how the make their environments. I think they are still using BSP that they make in 3ds Max like they have in previous halo games so everything has to be sewn and welded back into place and STL checked for the lightmapper and collisions to work. At least that's how it was in Halo 2 when I was modding it. Nothing like UDK is these days with unique meshes.
I noticed that they BEVEL AND TRIM THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING IN SIGHT:
I can't imagine they would manually unwrap any of them beveled edges, how do they do it?
/
A big lessons of his is how to model with curves since you can use things like lofts to create meshes with UVs automatically generated. Tiling textures become very easily to implement.
1. I can't figure out how to make lofts in Max to work like they do with surface lofts in Maya. Lofts in Max require a profile AND a Path unlike the multiple profiles required in Maya. Is there any way to make them work like in Maya with Auto Generated UVs?
2. For things like trim, I am aware that you can make a shape from edge and then sweep that shape and generate UVs. But what If I want that sweeped trim to cut into the surface like an extrusion? Is there any way to quickly implement this trim and sew it into the mesh?
3. When I sweep a spline with a rectangle shape I get some stretchyness and skewing in harsh angles like this:
4.When you generate UV coordinates in 3ds Max, the textures usually come out way out of scale, Unless you check the box labelled "Real-World Map Size" and then change everyone of you material's textures to something fitting. That's really tedious but the worst part is that none of this gets exported! your textures are still out of scale when you import into UDK. WTF! Is there any way to bake this Data into the UV Coordinates?
~~~
Yesterday I was playing around with Halo: Reach's theatre mode and trying to take some reference shots to figure out how the make their environments. I think they are still using BSP that they make in 3ds Max like they have in previous halo games so everything has to be sewn and welded back into place and STL checked for the lightmapper and collisions to work. At least that's how it was in Halo 2 when I was modding it. Nothing like UDK is these days with unique meshes.
I noticed that they BEVEL AND TRIM THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING IN SIGHT:
I can't imagine they would manually unwrap any of them beveled edges, how do they do it?
/
Replies
UV UNWRAP? how else would they do it?
Those hard corners you have are always going to be distorted unless you split the edges.
I almost never have an asset that doesn't need manual unwraps on.
Sounds to good to be true, eh?
They show the method I am talking about in the gnomon DVD where you never have to enter the unwrapping window ever, you just build everything from mathematical surfaces like lofts and it is unwrap automagically. The artist who made the DVD worked on god of war 3 and a ton of other PS3 game using this method. Click the link at the top of my post, that whole environment was built and unwrapped at the same time without entering and UV editor even once. But that's in Maya, I use Max and can't figure out how to do the same, it looks like Bungie (They use Max) has which is why I brought up them Reach screenshots. everything is curved and beveled and perfectly unwrapped without skewing or distortion.
Keep in mind this is not going to autounwrap non tiling things like props. just tiling environments
You are right that this doesn't finish all your texturing layout completely but you wont have to flatten anything into UV space, only move it to match your trim textures.
Here's an example of a loft (actually just a renderable spline) that will generate good UVs
I spent the 2 seconds it took to scale the UVs up
If it didn't have autogenerated UVs, say I forgot to check the option, I could just apply a planar map then use UV strip straightener. The one issue with UV strip straightener, it only likes quads and the strip has to be open on each end. So if it's continuous like a circle, just pick an edge where your seem will be, break it and then run the straightener. If I have some triangles in a strip, I'll detatch them and run the straightener on what I can and stitch the triangles back in. I have stitch bound to "S" since I use it so much.
But I am still looking for ways to make the lofts that were used in the DVD with MAYA. the closest thing I can find requires you to use NURBS, ewww.
Thanks for recommending the script though its pretty neat.
In maya a loft produces a nurbs surface.
in maya you choose what you want the loft to produce, polygons, nurbs or subd surface.
Exactly, so its faster to go this way make a curve, convert to nurbs, loft, flip normals and so on. I can't find any other way to do this in Max though so IDK.
very fast and effecinet.
also if you really didnt want to use loft your could just start with a plane and extrude the edge on it to make a desgine similar.
I was under the impression that simple edge extrusions didn't generate correct mapping coordinates
never seen the tut, just a way i found myslef that i really liked for quickly making shapes, something i have done a lot of in both maya and silo, surprised max doesn't do it well since everyone says max is good with splines, for the kinda workflow max uses it would be cool if there was a modifier you could apply to a spline that did this, just tell it what axis to slide the shape across and how many units, than you could later collapse the stack and convert to editable poly really surprised no-one made a modifier stack plugin to do that yet.
from the very little i know about max i think the best thing would be to make a plane the length you want for the piece and select it's top edge and enter the side ortho view, and shift+drag that edge around to make the shape.
or just use swift-loop on a large plane and drag forward edges.
Thanks anyway, passerby. You don't have a portfolio linked to your account, any way for me to see some of your work?
Untrue, having worked at Bungie I can tell you that they use Max for the majority of things, and a few use Maya. These are mostly the animators, FX artists and a character artist or two. While there during Reach every Environment artist used Max.
The tools Justin linked are very much like the tools we used for Unwrapping at Bungie only in the most basic basic form. Bungie has quite possibly the best unwrapping custom built tool suit for Max or any 3d modeling program I have ever seen or have heard about. It had so many amazing and time saving features built into. Losing those tools was such a huge blow when leaving Bungie haha
It did very similar functions to the tools Justin showed of it could straighten things out evenly in a line, only objects didnt need to be pre-unwrapped with even UV's. All the UV's could be completly squeked and broken and the tool would unwrap them, align them, scale the strips and place there position in the UV editor window based on parameters you set. Handled curves great, but could have issues with 90 degree angles, and was best used with quads and tris caused problems.
For New Alexandria, the level I worked on that had a lot of soft curved surfaces and bevels to the architecture it was a life saver, and honestly the only way I would ever wish to unwrap things. We of course used instances and only had to unwrap somethings once and then could built up the level. But it also gave the freedom to add more unique forms in there as unwrapping wasnt a bitch as it is for most people.
Damn, custom tools. No chance you could ask them to share?
So is there still the requirement of having everything stitch to STL standards in halo reach? You guys still use BSP?
How would you guys go about doing the kind of trim you have in this picture where it is sepperateing the two tileing materials for the floor? I am trying it with renderable rectangular splines and then caping multple borders but it is still a bitch to work with.
I don't see anything particularly tricky or difficult to make in the scene you posted.
Lofts and sweeps work great for stuff like that. Or beveling the shit out of things, all depended on what you needed and what worked best for the given situation.
True, but STL stands for stereolithography which has a requirement of being solid and passing the checks that xView is designed to show. STL check is legacy stuff, but I was just curious to see if they moved on from the Halo 2 Era requirements, hence STL Check.
Its crazy how Halo Reach works with quake era tech
http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/
the best UV toolset for max i've used. straightens like a boss
Justin, the UV straightener is great but it expects uniform quads, it won't scale indiviadual quad's UVs but instead averages the quad sizes. Still some manual tweeking needed.
You know how you were saying that all this stretching wouldn't sit well with diffuse or normal map textures? Normals will stretch fine, they do it all the time in reach but it looks like they unwrap a second UV Set for detail-normals/diffuse textures. Kinda like what snefer was doing in his thread with the ultra low res environment texturing.
Halo 1 and Halo 2 used an old radiosity algorithm that requires the BSP geometry to be water-tight sealed with no holes. Also its collision was generated from the same closed geometry to split the world into convex shapes for portal-ing/culling. I doubt halo reach requires such things after seeing the types of complicated geometry it has especially when you manage to shove a camera outside of the playable area.
But yea what Autocon said about straitening UVs is correct. I also recommend having a single texture containing multiple trims and tiles horizontally. That way you can model your trims and then just match the UVs up to the trim of your choice.
Here is an example of a trim atlas I made for an old Halo CE map I never finished...
It will only average quads if you check the options for Average Us and Average Vs. As far as UV tools I also highly recommend Textools by RenderJHS
That looks like it could have been made by Bungie, reminds me of ODST. like half of their textures are just fancilly unwrapped trim.
I think the main parts like the skybox and terrain still need to be sealed air tight but things like instanced geo can stick out just like in Halo 2.
@Justin:
I figured out that it WILL actually individually average them based on their size just before you apply the script so I just have to split some of them up, relax and then run it.
I am using Textools, but the feature That I want for this called rectify seems to not work. No biggie since the UV straightener seems to do the trick now that I got the hang of it. Thanks Man!
Think about how the program sees the points, it can't make it into all rectangles if its to messed up.
you might be expecting too much. like a 1 click solution
speaking of rectify, does anyone know of a tool like this in maya? I think it has one.
I'm unwrapping a wheel and want to straighten out all the uv's. with relax is seems to bottle neck the ends. the above picture is from Max where i could just use textools
I tried using rectify, but I never got it to actually do a single thing, it wouldn't even move a vert. Maybe I am using it wrong?
Oh, i apologize then i just assumed after in some of the vidocs i saw people using maya for modeling
Try this :
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/texturing/c/uvdeluxe
The edge straightening tools will help you grid UVs. There's a bunch of other handy stuff too.
after reading this thread and making my most recent post i went to creative crash to download some uv tools and i just downloaded this exact tool before looking back at this thread lol