[WIP] Copernicus City

Jryea

Hey everyone,

This is a project I started to learn Maya's game asset workflow and as a test piece for hand painted textures. I've been using Max for the last 8 years or so and the change to Maya has been a lot of fun.

The piece is based on a piece of concept art for 38 Studios upcoming MMO Copernicus. So far the environment only holds up from this view, but I'm hoping to add some additional models later to flesh out the city better. I'm using UDK.

In the upcoming weeks I'm hoping I can get decent lighting and start adding some hand painted textures.

Jryea

I've started to light my scene, but I seem to have some issues with some really ugly light maps being created. I bumped up the resolution to 128, but it's still looking pretty rough. I've attached both the texture UVs and the light map UVs. The UVs are a little sloppy as I had to go back and UV my entire scene after I had already modeled it.

percydaman

I'm not seeing any images.

Jryea

Hey man, it's good to see you on these forums, I had no idea you were posting on Polycount.
Any better? I'm still trying to get the hang of using dropbox to host image files.

Anthy9986

it looks like you would have to bump it up higher to get better light mapping detail. You have the pieces at about 1/9th the full size giving it about 42 pixels across and high for lightmap detail. My question is why does you light map for that piece have 4 sides? would it be possible to break that piece into a smaller pieces since all 4 sides look identical on the lightmap??

I hope that makes sense.

Dismembered

That is a pretty good blockout, the only thing that I feel isn't quite the same is the depth of the ground piece that holds the water. I feel that section should be a bit lower.

Oniram

what are u lighting the object with? just a regular point light or a dominant light?

Noors

I tend to split my uv on lightmap channel where there are 90° angles, imo the result looks better even if the lightmap is very small.
Now i wonder if vertex color wudn't be a better choice for this kind of stuff like here :
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=68238

percydaman

Its a generally accepted rule to keep as few separate uv islands when creating a secondary lightmap uv layout. The reason being the more exposed sides of an island, the more pixel padding is going to occur. Add in mip mapping, and it can get ugly at times, where pixels bleed into each other due to insufficient padding. I'm not sure that's whats going on here, I would definitely try raising the lightmap resolution to something as high as 1024 just take make sure it's possible for it to look good with a higner resolution.

I like how its looking so far though!

Jryea

Anthy9986 - I guess I was trying too keep the number of Static Meshes in my scene from getting too high. Here's an image that shows how I've broken down all the static meshes in the scene. I originally intended the scene to make better use of modular pieces, but I ended up trying to stay as close to the concept as possible and have mostly unique meshes in the scene.



I'll try breaking down the foreground pieces even more and see if I can better results that way.

I'm thinking it might be possible to lower the water/ground area by raising up the foreground pieces and the platform the view is taken from. I'll give it a shot.

Oniram, if you're asking about the closeup of the low lightmap resolution, the only lighting is from an environment light bake. Not sure if I'm using the right terminology here?

Hey Noors, I'll read through that SquareSoft town thread carefully and see what I can find out about utilizing vertex color, that project turned out really nice.

Jessica Dinh

Oo, nice block-out!! Will be fun to see the textures 8]

Spitfire

i can see some awesome promise in this thing!

paradise.engineering

wow this is so exciting! looking forward to see some paint on it!

megalmn2000

Blocking looks good.

Jryea

I broke apart some of the models and added some resolution to the lightmaps.



Here's my first pass at lighting the scene, I'll refine it along the way, but I wanted to make sure I had some lighting to test how the textures will look.

megalmn2000

Nice progression! Can't wait to see more!

KyleJensen

I love concept and your most recent lighting pass. Keep it up.

chrisavigni

Great start! I am looking forward to see more.