Modular Building Project: Cathedral

Xelan101

So I'm working on a project for school, we've been tasked with creating a modular building set which can be used to create several unique buildings (2 different buildings are required for the finished turn in) coupled with no less that 6 props to litter the scene at least two of which must have normal maps.

I've chosen a gothic style cathedral, based mostly on this image here (color coded to try and figure out which unique pieces I would use, although I eventually cut down the number of pieces)

*EDIT * ADDING THE MOST RECENT SHOT HERE SO PEOPLE CAN SEE PROGRESS MORE EASILY









I've decided on these 6 props, if I have more time I'll add to the list (if I have time I'd really like to add some gargoyles), or if I get some good suggestions I may substitute something (I'm not too attached to the mausoleum/crypt entrance) The reference is just for general guidelines, I'm trying to stylize things a bit more and add my own flair to things rather than copying them directly.


As of right now I've got a block out done with some quickly done pieces for the modular set (which will be built more efficiently and with better details in the next couple weeks) and placeholders for the props (which I'm going to be completing at a rate of at least two per week)

*NOTE* the blockout is currently missing the large hexagonal piece on the far left hand side of the cathedral, I haven't forgotten it, I just haven't been able to figure out with best way to build it from my modular pieces within Unreal, I may end up resorting to mocking it up in Max and then importing that piece in as a whole as I haven't found a way yet to have UDK rotate an exact 60 degree angle, much less snap correctly in place afterwards

I will be adding a skybox as well as a somewhat bumpy hilly terrain that will get more mountainous in the distance, these mountains and a thick layer of fog, which will also serve to enhance the atmosphere, will hide the empty outer reaches of the scene. The composition is subject to change and will most likely end up much closer to the Cathedral, possible with the graveyard off to the side or somewhat behind it rather than in front (thoughts on this would be great)



As of right now I have the roofing mostly done (barring good crits of course) with a few things to iron out, I need to fix to trim on the triangular roofs, it was supposed to have a different material ID and have a grey color on it rather than the roof tilable but that got messed up somehow...I've also got one tombstone prop completed, once I complete the required 6 different props I'm going to create several variant tombstones to keep the graveyard from looking boring.

(And yes that's just the default night scene from UDK, just to put something in the background other than blackness for these shots that were due for class)
















Feedback on what I've got so far would be great, and I'll be working pretty fast and hard on this, so I'll try to be updating frequently. The deadline right now is 3 weeks from now but it may be extended to 4.

Sorry for the big wall of text, I promise more pics and less text as I update!

SgtNasty

You planned out the scene fairly well, but I would say your execution thus far feels pretty rushed. You said that this is a class project, due in four weeks or whatever, so you have some constraints.

One of the issues I see is that your UVs look pretty stretched, the steeple in particular. You need to model it so that the shingles will be repeated, but stay the same size on all sections of the roof. The roof texture itself is a good first try, but it's very monotone and very maroon-y.

It might sound crazy, but I think it might be worth it to just re do what you have so far. You will be faster, and will do a much better job on it the second time around. If you are a fulltime student, and all you have to do is work on 3D, this scene should easily be do able in three weeks. Hope this helps, good luck

Xelan101

Thanks SgtNasty,

yeah thanks for reminding me about that roof. I stretched the UVS out like that initially because I was hoping (in vain) that I could get it to line up to the edges of the texture and tile with itself, once I figured out that just wasn't going to happen I added the edging along the corners but I forgot to put the UVS back nice and orderly.

As for the roof texture I agree it ended up kind of monotone, I was creating it on a time constraint, as in progress shots we due yesterday, and forgot to really throw some color variation into it after the fact. I was shooting for something fairly dark and somewhat monotone with a blue-brown base (although the brown is very lost) and for both the roof and the tombstone I've been painting my lights assuming a yellow-green light source with red-violet shadows, although I may have pushed the red-violet too hard.

As much as starting over might work better I don't think I'll be able to, all the pieces are still just block-out for the most part so I can and will alter them quite a bit but unfortunately I have several other classes this semester, none of which are 3D (which is stupid but they're all required to graduate classes, otherwise I'd be taking nothing but 3D) so I can't even double-dip for my projects. I only really have time to forge ahead and make big changes, but not quite enough to redo the whole modular set. But like I said I'm quite willing to take what I have and make big changes to get things looking better.

At the moment I'm working on the angel statue, I 'll post up the sculpt once I'm further along, and I'll probably be working out the best way to do a stone wall texture that might be able to be tiled across the different wall pieces... That or I'll do each one individually and just make sure they tile horizontally and then add a trim piece wherever two different walls meet vertically (thoughts?)

My plan right now as suggested by my instructor is to get everything to at least a decent base level as fast as possible and them polish things as much as time permits. The parameters for next saturday are that we have at least 2 more props and 3 more modular pieces at least to the level of the stuff above ^^^^ I'll try to post in progress shots of those this week and hopefully I can get more than the base requirements done this week.

..... Didn't I promise less text in future posts o.O oh well

Xelan101

Posting some progress shots before bed

I started on the angel statue sculpt, not too happy with it at the moment, crits would be great. I plan on sculpting most of it in symmetry and then posing it and sculpting further after that.





After a while I decided to take a break from the statue to work on a tiling wall texture that I'm gonna use as a base for all my different wall pieces. I'm trying to create it in the same manner as this floor

here http://www.3dmotive.com/training/zbrush/tileable-zbrush-video/?follow=true

And I'm liking the results so far so I'll probably use the same technique to make a floor tile for my terrain along a pathway to the cathedral.

Also any empty space between bricks will be filled in with a grout sort of texture.

Xelan101

Nother update, I don' think I'm gonna have a chance to work much more today so I figured I'd post some more progress

I finished the stone wall sculpt, baked it down, did a lighting bake with my yellow-green light and red-violet shadows, and threw a dry brush filter on a layer that goes on top of the lighing bake, just to get something that works pretty quickly. I still plan on going in to handpaint some more detail in potentially and get it to match the roof tiles a bit more stylistically, that or I may redo the roof tiles using this Zbrush tiling technique since I like the result I got here and I understand 3D for much better than I do 2D form.

Here's the texture as a standalone, rendered out on a plane with the diffuse and normal maps applied (rendered in Marmoset)


And here it is tiled 3x3




Crits would be nice

Xelan101

Alright big update since I had to have a bunch of stuff to show for class yesterday

The wall texture (which is also on the gate/fence posts) will be getting an overhaul and the plane it's on will get reworked and rebaked.

Also the stained glass windows are more or less just placeholders until I have time to paint much better versions.

I don't really like the pillar but I'll have to wait and see if I have time to change it

The task for next week is to have everything modeled and UV and then have a base texture on it so that we can use the last week to polish the textures and scene

Which means I still need to make
-The Angel Statue
-The creepy trees
-A few more wall variants (which should move quickly thanks to the base wall)
-A couple of trim pieces
-And the Mauseleum, that or I need to choose a different prop to replace it (which I may do since I don't really like it and it lacks a good place in the scene at the moment

I also have to block in the terrain and place my skybox with a placeholder texture on it

This is going to be a tough week

The textured shots of these are all rendered out of Marmoset for time reasons, by next week I'll have shots of everything in place in UDK

On the gate it's supposed to be alpha'd out around the swirled design but I was having a few issues with Alphas in Marmoset at the time, the next shot of it will have it alpha'd correctly

snake85027

I cant really tell by your textures if your going for a hand painted style or if your trying to achieve realism?

Xelan101

I'm shooting for something a little between to be honest.

I was originally planning to do handpainted textures but my teacher insisted that at least two of the props had to have normal maps so I decided to try incorporating them in several other places and see how things came out since I know Carbine uses normal maps in conjunction with handpainted textures for Wildstar, and Darksiders does too I would think albeit with a drastically different painting style.

so in short I'm trying for something leaning more to the stylized side but using Normal maps for some of the details and not painting in the lights quite as strongly as I might otherwise to allow the normal maps to do more of their thing...

It's confusing I know and maybe doesn't come across very well that way... but sadly I only have two weeks left so there's no chance for a big shift in texture style... but my next two projects for this class will be strictly realistic.

DaveSilver

So i want to say i really love the piece so far, I think it has a lot of great potential. Despite that though there are a few issues I think you should work on. Most of what I see as an issue comes from your brick wall texture.

The first thing I want to comment on is the grout you have behind the bricks. Because the grout is pretty much consistently one color it does not fit with the bricks. The bricks have a lot of complex shading and shapes within them whereas the grout is basically just a flat tan. I think you should add more color variation and a rougher texture overlay or quality to it. If you look at this image you can see that the grout used to keep these bricks together is very rough and almost looks like the surface of a rock. On top of that, because of the less precise tools used when walls like this were made, and because of how old walls like this are, there is a lot of variation in the depth of the grout. Towards the top a lot of the grout is even with the bricks but towards the bottom, where there is more weather damage and environmental damage, the grout often goes in very far. This would especially be visible in areas on yours where the bricks have corners missing. In those ares you really want to make it clear that it has been damaged or something along those lines because of how visible the grout actually is in those spots.

The second thing is that the texture repeats very obviously. When I saw the 3x3 layout you did of the texture I immediately saw how it repeated. If you look in this image, i have highlighted two areas I think could be improved.
The red area is an issue because those two bricks are not only perfectly in line with each other, but also directly next to each other. Because of those two facts the bricks tend to make a clear edge that once noticed sticks out everywhere it shows up. When making a tiling texture like this you want to make sure that no individual detail sticks out too much otherwise the tiling effect is broken almost immediately. The green area, while not as much of an issue, could also cause a problem because of how tightly packed it is. Compared to many other sections, the green area has the largest density of stones and thus it stands out as well. It is not as clear an issue IMO as the red area, but I thought I would note it anyway.

The final comment I wanted to make is about the colors of this texture. While the colors are good, I notice that they are much warmer than the colors on the rest of your textures. All of your other textures tend to have a cool blueish tint to them, whereas the color of this texture is more yellowish. This might simply be because of how strong the grout's tan is affecting my perception of the texture but whatever it is, it should be adjusted. If you could adjust the colors on the texture to fit more accurately with the rest of the textures I think it would be a huge improvement.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I hope this all helps and keep going.

Xelan101

Thanks so much, I was planning on overhauling the wall texture some time within the next two weeks since I wasn't satisfied with it and that all gives me a really good direction to take it and things to fix

I was planning on making some big changes to the grout especially since my teacher said the same thing about the grout not really working color-wise, and I agree, so that yellow is going to be completely changed I'll probably go with a bluish-grey that's still somewhat lighter than the stones for contrast but not nearly as much as I'm getting with the yellow. As for wear and damage that sounds like a great idea and I agree it looks really flat and boring in comparison to the stones (it was of course baked from a flat plane) I'll throw the grout plane into Zbrush and beat it up a bunch to give it height variation and add some nice details to it via sculpting or some overlays in photoshop.

That and I plan on rebuilding the base plane I use for the wall and getting the geo cleaner and closer to the actual sculpt (rather than just using a flat plane) to add more depth and interest, as of right now on the new wall pieces they have a few stones cut out and extruded but I think it could be a whole lot cleaner if things are baked closer to the sculpt. it should look a lot nicer and come off more believable.

As for getting more weathered the lower you go I might hold off on that and if I'm able to spend the time I'll make a secondary map with more damage that I can vertex paint on since this wall texture is going to be used on walls that are above ground level as well.

I didn't notice those two bricks lining up, I cleaned up a couple lines that actually went through the whole thing early on but I must have missed those since they were more in the middle of the texture, as for the tightly packed area I'll try to give them some more space if I can find the time.

Getting those other things I listed done needs to be top priority since they'll be due next saturday for the class but after that the wall is at the top of my list.

Xelan101

MASSIVE UPDATE!

Here's all the stuff laid out in UDK, crits are appreciated but if they're too major I won't be able to implement them since this is due next week *Scratch that we've been given an additional week, so it's due two weeks from now*, however I might work on polishing this outside of class so any crits might get used a few weeks/months down the line

I plan on adding some nice thickish ground hugging fog when I get into the effects side of things. The stained glass windows are still stand-ins as are the smooth grey stone and the tree's texture, both of those will be pushed further (the tree already has been just having some import issues with it)

Also any good techniques for getting good screenshots of UDK would be much appreciated, I've heard some stuff about about going into play mode hiding the UI and using a few commands to take a shot but I was wondering if there were any other methods, these are all just print-screened straight from my monitor.













Sorry about having the big roof selected on this one I'll get a better shot up later

Xelan101

Smallish update

Spent most of my time this week getting other classes out of the way so I can really push this thing hard next week

-Pushed up the saturation of the textures
-Added lights for the lanterns and windows
-Repainted windows
-Changed dominant-directional light from white to a blue tint for moonlight
-Made a gargoyle as the first attempt to break the silhouette up more
-Got the angel baked, not as well as I'd like there's still work to be done on the normal but at least it's no longer godawful
-Built my second scene out of the same modular set


Going forward I plan to
-Give several of the textures another once over and more detail etc, specifically the sky
-Possibly rework the brick wall again
-Clean up the tiling of the grass texture in the background
-Possibly add some sort of rain effect, and water streaming from the mouths of the gargoyles
-Fog
-

Xelan101

So I decided I wasn't liking the Gargoyle the way he was so I threw him into Zbrush and started working on him... gonna had some more detail to this tomorrow and build a new low and then it'll be time to spend the day doing all the final fixes and then render things out to turn in on Saturday.

BTW i render him out at that angle since that's pretty much the only angle you'll be seeing him from, and for far away at that so when I do add detail I'll be sticking mostly to large interesting forms as opposed to miniscule cracks.