Radiator Room [CE3]

hostilis

Hello guys,

I'm creating this environment (http://www.nonplused.org/panos/fort_mac/html/04.html) for an free indie game using the free ce3sdk. I'm stuck and I suck at texturing the assets of the environment.

I really need your tips/crits/advice because I really want to improve my weakness(I can't even match the lighting and color of the wall from the reference :poly127:). Textures are WIP








Here are the texture sheets:

hostilis

Bonus HP's:











Sorry for the Photo-Barrage

Jessica Dinh

Wowza, your high polies are nice!! Except for maybe the screws are way too tiny and are not even noticeable in your scene, they could stand to be scaled up. But yeah I think your textures are not doing your models any justice, first of all do you have spec maps? I think that would help a great deal, as of now it doesn't seem like you have any, and all the materials look the same.

For the color of the walls, I'm pretty sure they are just an off-white, and a lot of their coloring is coming from the lighting - natural white light from the window and a pretty strong orange bulb on the ceiling. In your scene the bulb does not appear to be giving off any light.

Keep it up!

hostilis

Hi Jessica,

yup I have some spec maps but it is the grayscaled version of the diffuse, leveled and painted the recessed part of the model. One of my problems is the dark metal material because the texture details really don't show much.

I'll try adjusting the strength of the lights so it will be noticeable.

Thanks for the crit.

Envart

I think that the texture on the turbine isn't really helping. Your hi-poly stuff looks amazing. Try to texture it so that it supports and hilights all the detail you've modelled.

hostilis

I haven't started texturing the radiator engine. The texture is just bake base colors. Thanks for the tip.

hostilis

Small Update

I re-textured the door and the hatch.





Flats:

Door Diffuse and Spec



Hatch Diffuse and Spec



I tweak the lighting a bit by adding more power to the orange lights.



Once again I need your crits in my texturing because as you can see I really suck at it.

BenHenry

You don't suck at it, stop saying that otherwise you will end up actually sucking at it. It looks good so far, keep more coming!

duoxan

it looks like youre just starting out with your textures. this is a generator room, so its going to be dirty, greasy, grimy, all sorts of gross. throw some dirt in corners and on the bottom of your walls towards the floor. add some dust around the ceiling. your modeling seems to be quite good, so now you have to practice texturing. i wouldnt say you suck, more that perhaps you havent stopped to examine what a room like that would look like.

kind of a tiny image, but it gets the point across. your walls are going to be dirty, and the metal on those doors will be rusted. you have a good start, you just need to push it further. good luck!

Computron

In crysis 2, the interiors of the buildings were split off of the exterior as 2 sepperate meshes. the interior is then placed in a VisArea, which will block the sun's ambient light and lead to better interior lighting. then you can place various small lights and anti-lights to fake some global illumination.

hostilis

@BenHenry

that's just the way I feel after I saw epic environments here in polycount, anyway thanks for encouraging me to post more

@ duoxan

hmm yes I'll try to stray out from the reference because it looks kinda bland and empty. I'm considering adding more grime and dirt to the environment. thank you for the tips

@Computron

If that's the case then crysis 2 did a good job fooling me (in a good way) by believing that it has GI in the interior levels :icon3:. I'll experiment using that technique and apply it in my environment. thanks for the info.

Computron

They also would use vertex color for better Ambient occlusion and you might want to look into blend shaders. as it stands, your not really using much of what cryengine has to offer.

hostilis

Update:

I used the visarea/portal to recreate the lighting of the environment. I also retextured the modular walls.






need crits again for the textures, thanks.

hostilis

Update:

Bump up the contrast in the shadows and re-textured the walls again. This environment needs to be clean (but not super clean).

Stromberg90

It looks good so far, but where are you heading with this, cause you say you want a clean look, but right now it looks very boring and uninteresting.

Even if you decide to dirt it up some more or not it needs more props, if you don't know what to do with the texturing right now, start on some props and come back to the texturing when you got more of a feel for the scene.

myles

As Stromberg90 said, its fine having a clean scene, but you still need to paint the texture that would exist in real life. The large pump machine things right now look spotless, atleast add some thin layers of dust and grime in some of the recesses. Your specular could probably have higher contrast metal photos in it too.
Also the doors and pumps are creating a lot of void space at the moment, which is making your image quite boring to look at.

hostilis

@stromberg Thanks for the advice! I'm going to take a little break in texturing (I'm getting frustrated in fact)



Since I'm planning to deviate from the reference, I did a little research about the things that I can put in the scene and also why I put it in there.

Thermometer thingy: I've research a little about radiators and its main purpose is to cool or heat something. So I think it is logical to put an industrial thermometer in between the radiators.
(the reference looks destroyed but I'll make it clean)

Emergency Light: I'm assuming that the door below it is an exit so I think it is logical to put an emergency light because you don't want to bump those engines when blackout strikes

Blackboard: I believe that the operations of the engine will change depends on the season... hmmm maybe if it is summer, the engine might need to operate longer. So I think it is more easier to use a blackboard than to print new schedules.

Light switch: I also did a little research on clap on lights, the earliest clap on lights was marketed last October 29, 1965.

Fire Extinguishers: who knows what could happen? I'm having a hard time if I will choose the brass over the red one because the strong saturated red color might draw the eyes away from the radiator engines.

Label "Fire Extinguisher": just to indicate that "this space is reserved for the fire extinguisher".

Sign: I place this important sign in front of the window hatch so that the sun light can help emphasized it.

Electrical Outlet: a simple decal that can be place everywhere.

Toolbox w/ wrench: the engine is full of bolts, so someone needs a wrench to fix it (I'm planning to place it near the engine)

Box trash: If you can read the reference the box is for a spark plug. I'm going to change it into a "fuse box" since the room beside the radiator room is the "power room".

Electric Box: I think it is more logical to put this on the power room but I'm running out of ideas in what to put on that wall.

Hope I make sense.
____

I would love to hear your comment/crits to improve my thought process so I can improve my planning in my next project.

@myles

I picture the engine as the final boss of my texturing adventures



Before I attempt to texture the engine I must texture all the assets correctly since I can apply all the knowledge I've learned texturing the other assets to the engine.

hostilis

Texturing without a tablet is really hard and I'm excited to buy an intuos 4 so I've textured the wrench.



I hoped that I nailed the material correctly need crits about it.

btw here's the high poly

tristamus

I'm dieing to see some wires!!

Ged

wrench looks good, so does the scene so far

e-freak

inverted normals on the lowboly bake?

hostilis

@e-freak

yup forgot to invert the normals inside marmoset, thanks.

I've been practicing texturing lately and redone some textures of the assets.

Here's some textured assets:

Electric Box





Texture: 1024x1024

Switch





Texture: 256x256

Toolbox




Texture: 512x512

Wrench

chrisradsby

I cringe a little bit looking at that texture map. That bottom part is bigger than the actual wrench itself, texel density is wack! Other than that, nice work in CE3!

Stromberg90

^^
Agreed, you should try and keep the texel density consistent.
The electric box looks really nice

hostilis

Thanks for pointing that out. I re-uv'd the wrench and here's the result:



At first I have a fear of putting seams across the long part of the wrench.

might want some tips/crit before I texture it again.

Envart

This is looking lots more realistic, you've got some great materials.

ScottP

I highly recommend the Eat 3D DVD tutorial of Next- Gen Texturing if you are serious about improving your textures. I think what your probably missing the most is a simple guideline for texturing (AO, base, layers, grunge, highlights, ect ect) and the best methods to create them with the best results.

If you want to see my workflow i can show you a few tips and methods via screen sharing that would probably help you alot just PM me if you need to and i can get you up to speed!

tristamus

Great work so far man, and THANK YOU for putting up your wires =]

It always interests me to see exactly how someone is using their geo / how they are controlling topology.

Your materials read very well!

hostilis

Thanks for the comments/crit guys I appreciate it.

@ScottPetty

Thank you for the offer I'll try to contact you by PM . I would love to learn more about other's workflow in texturing.


Still practicing texturing here some updates:

Old Style Fire Extinguisher





Texture: 1024x1024

Warning Board/Sign





Texture: 512x512

Industrial Thermometer (Sorry if the background is too dark)





Texture: 512x512

I reuv'ed and retextured the wrench because the texel density is off. (thanks chrisradsby and Stromberg90)

Wrench



Texture: 512x512

hostilis

Sorry can't add more images from my top post

HP's

hostilis

Finished texturing some assets. I'll be importing my stuffs inside the sdk and I hope that it will look good inside the environment.

Emergency Light (Texture: 512x512)

The glass shader might improve inside the sdk, looks like plastic at the moment :poly127:.





Fuse (Texture: 512x512)





Socket (Texture: 512x512)

No need for wires screenshot for this one, just imagine two planes .






Crits are still welcomed.

hostilis

Update:

Lights (Glass might improve inside sdk)





Sign





Radiator





In-Game







Before I call this environment done, I would love to hear your crits first.

Thanks

theonebutcher

I really like this man! would be nice if you could get some higher res grabs from the engine though.

if you need to know how to get higher red grabs out take a look here:
http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=326&t=72419

I think the mats you have in here look great, any chance you could post up some of the setups for your mats in the SDK?

Think it looks really cool mate, potentially a little too clean for a radiator room imo.

Ged

really cool, some of those shots look properly photo real the only thing that pushes it away from realism a little is the powerful fov but thats cool.

hostilis

@theonebutcher

thanks for the link, it helped me to take high res shots . I was using the old print screen + paste method :poly142:.

____

I didn't notice that photobucket were shrinking down my screenshots, happens to be that the free accounts have dimension limit :poly141:. I changed to dropbox for uploading my stuffs.

Added some subtle decals for finishing touches.









Thanks for the comment/crits guys I learned a lot creating this environment. I'm excited to start my next environment project.

Computron

Solid.

hostilis

Thanks computron!.

-pt1-
Here's a brief rundown, experiences and mistakes I've encountered when I was creating this environment.

This is my first project using cryengine and I've learned lots of things, I've been dreaming to create this kind of documentations so that you guys can give me crits about my current workflow in environment creations.

So this environment began when I got the go signal to create the radiator room of fort mac arthur for the project. I chose this reference (http://www.nonplused.org/panos/fort_mac/html/04.html) because I wanted to start small to improve my weakness, the dreaded "TEXTURING" and learning the engine.

I carefully analyzed and planned the reference with modularity in mind to look for pieces that can be reused to create a whole new environment using the same assets.

I took a screenshot and divided it inside photoshop by colors. Same Color = Same Asset.



After planning the divisions of the pieces I created a blockout inside 3dsmax. The scale I used is 180 cm for the player.



and imported it inside the sdk to check if the scale and feel of the environment is correct:




When I was planning the modularity, the only thing in my mind is the proper scale of the scene I was kinda wrong because I didn't think about wise texturing method (I'll explain later).

After the blockout, I started creating the props:

Starting from High poly


to low poly w/ baked texture (AO,Normal map, select map, basic diffuse map)

*the smoothing errors are the result of xnormal map bakes rendered inside 3dsmax using nitrous viewport.*


One thing I want to share is my workflow on creating hp/lp modular walls. I learned this technique when I was creating my last project before this. I was having a problem removing the seams and lining up the texture. What I did is to make the hp's border edges wider than the lp:



The seam problem is caused by the high poly smoothing of the edges if the projection occurs on a flat surface the baked textures will have no seams. After the seam removal the lining of the texture details was my next problem. The mistake I was talking about before was I didn't create the wall pieces square in dimension (192Wx256H instead of 256Wx256H), making a gap in the UV's if I use the quick planar map, this will make the tiling textures and details normal map create unwanted seams. I used the proper Planar Projection instead of the quick one. The UV's will be stretched a bit but It will be unnoticeable:



Here's the modular pieces' dimension:




I've imported the assets inside the sdk this is the iterations I've made:


1.) Too clean I know .


2.) Imported the modular pipes. I think the non-uniform scaling can only be used for small assets like the pipes because whenever I non-uniformly scaled an asset it breaks up the physics proxy.


3.) Imported all the initial assets inside the scene.


4.) Iteration on wall textures.


5.) Another Iteration on textures.



-continue pt 2-

hostilis

-pt2-

6.) A major iteration on textures based from the helpful constructive crit of BuLL (thanks!). I learned to focus more on the subtle details the reference has to offer. I thought the walls are just a rough slab of painted concrete but by further examining it the walls have subtle brick patterns!.

This is the iteration I've used the portal/visareas techniques where I faked the light bounces using small and negative lights. My initial thought about the realtime GI TOD system of CE3 was a one stop shop lighting solution.

Here's a screen of the lighting placement:


Some people's crits told me that the reference itself is too empty and boring so I decided to stray away from it and add more assets inside the scene. Here's the planning part of it:



Back to Hp/LP modeling and more serious texturing practice.

The things I've learned so far in texturing this environment:

1.) Study the reference thoroughly.
2.) Never underestimate the power of a specular and gloss map because it can make or break the material.
3.) Lighting and position of the object can dictate the needed resolution and details of the texture.
4.) Always localize wear/damage details. Only put wear or scratches where it is logical to occur.
5.) Always bake texture maps in high resolution then shrink down the final texture maps to the desired resolution.
6.) Always keep in mind equal distribution of texel density.
7.) Always save because photoshop doesn't have a built-in backup system .

and lastly

Organize using good naming convention and named folders because my asset listing is a disaster.

After texturing the assets and setting up the materials I've added some decals to finish the environment:



Things I've wanted to implement is to put some dust particles, use the blend shader and vertex painting.
Sorry If there are some grammatical errors, English is not my native language.

Thanks for reading I love sharing my experiences in order for other people to avoid the problems I've encountered.

pseudoBug

Amazing stuff.


It's quite evident to me that you've been using the ever important skill of observation, and reference. Some of the most realistic overall looking stuff I've seen in a while.

ZacD

Awesome break down, I really love the lighting and the mostly clean look of the final piece.

hostilis

Thanks guys I appreciate it.

theonebutcher

Breakdown is great man! glad you found the screengrab method useful, I think the scene looks great overall. You can create custom UI buttons within sandbox that can make life easier when taking screengrabs so that you dont have to keep typing in console commands. Might be useful for you. Again awesome stuff!

hostilis

oh wow never thought of that! brilliant! I was having a bad time retyping capture_frame_once 1 :poly142: Thanks!

choco

Clean and solid work, keep it up.