City Building Scene (WIP)
polycounter lvl 16
Hi everyone, this is my first thread on poly count. I'm working on a modular building for one of my classes, well at least Im attempting to make the building modular and i would greatly appreciate your comments and critiques as I work my way through this.
Just so you know where Im going with this. My goal is to create a modular building for a portfolio piece. I would also like to have my final renders done in the unreal 3 engine. As far as poly budget goes our instructor gave us quite a bit a freedom he said "Next Gen" as in playstation 4 and Xbox 720 etc. I'm hoping you guys can help me as far as slapping me on the wrist when im not using poly's wisely. As far as textures go Im going to use as few as possible mostly 1024's maybe a 2048 if the scene needs it. Same goes for normal maps if the piece needs it Ill at it if its a waste of a map Ill hold off. I'll also be doing several props to support the environment.
Also this is my first time working in Max in a couple of years ive been using Maya for quite a while. So any tips on working with max would be great.
On to the images.
Here's the building ref im working from.
Here's a shot of my scene so far.
Modular pieces so far.
Last but not least my props so far.
Just so you know where Im going with this. My goal is to create a modular building for a portfolio piece. I would also like to have my final renders done in the unreal 3 engine. As far as poly budget goes our instructor gave us quite a bit a freedom he said "Next Gen" as in playstation 4 and Xbox 720 etc. I'm hoping you guys can help me as far as slapping me on the wrist when im not using poly's wisely. As far as textures go Im going to use as few as possible mostly 1024's maybe a 2048 if the scene needs it. Same goes for normal maps if the piece needs it Ill at it if its a waste of a map Ill hold off. I'll also be doing several props to support the environment.
Also this is my first time working in Max in a couple of years ive been using Maya for quite a while. So any tips on working with max would be great.
On to the images.
Here's the building ref im working from.
Here's a shot of my scene so far.
Modular pieces so far.
Last but not least my props so far.
Replies
Agree with Cojax's comments, especially on the f4
Keep it up dude.
Alex
Cojax - I wish I could focus on just the modular pieces but I have to have a prop modeled with maps on it for each week. Thanks for the tips, I dropped the amount of edges on that arch.
Flewda - The textures aren't finished Ill show my maps in my next post hopefully finished.
Sage - Thanks, the building was short I was just making a quick guess at how my modular elements were going to lay out but I think I got the scale issues worked out now.
Update time. I don't have much to show this time my external hard drive kicked the bucket on me so i had to make up some work i had lost on another environment Ive been working on and it really cut my time for this project. So here's what i got. Just the store fronts. I adjusted the scale of the building and the whole scene to use the unreal player height of 96 units as about 6ft tall. I should have some more updates on this project soon. The White block on the corner is the Unreal player scale.
Any tips or plug-ins for modeling in Max would be greatly appreciated. I really need to improve the speed of my workflow. I always seem to get stuck fighting the tools especially pivot points on sub objects. I guess working in maya for so long has spoiled me.
Check out polyboost if you want more bells and whistles with modeling and I think they have tools for placing the pivots. I never use them so I don't really know. Also check out the thread that talks about max plugins in the technical thread. Sorry to hear about the hardrive. I hate it when they crap out.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=34439
check this site as well
http://www.maxplugins.de/
www.scriptspot.com
Alex
I'm trying to go by the ref as close as I can. Here's an adjustment to the scale. It became very apparent when I started to add in the other elements on the first floor. I'm guessing that each floor/window is around 12 feet so about 2 Unreal size players plus about a foot or two for all the molding type work in between the sections. Here are some shots of how Im trying to guestimate the scale. Let me know what you think.
To get the pivots where you want them, you can go into the hierarchy menu and hit "affect pivot only", and then you can go to the Align tool, click on the object that the pivot is for, and choose the min/max of the object's bounding box as the new position for the pivot point so you can get it positioned in a corner.
Looking good so far, keep it up!
I was wondering about having parts welded together. Right now I have my arch's welded because I could see a space in between them but ideally if I could just have a singular modular arch and I could duplicate it and line them up in perfectly in unreal would you still see the space or seam in between the two? Well for my scene I would have three modular arches.
I'll try to have another update tomorrow with more of the modeling done. Thanks for the help guys i really appreciate it.
Good luck
-Tyler
It would be awesome to be able to snap these modular sections into place but at this stage I don't think I could pull it off because the scale of the first floor is at least 576 units high. I don't think it will feel correct to the scale at all to drop it to 512.
I'm going to need some more explanation on how this works. I don't understand how you could keep correct scale for your scene while working within powers of two. The way Im understanding it now is either I scale the building down so the first floor is 512 high and it feels smaller to players than it should or I shoot it up to 1024. It just doesnt seem like it gives you enough flexibility. Unless I keep my scale and just make awkward cuts to make the modular sections fit the power of two.
Any more info on this is greatly appreciated. If I can I would love to apply it to this scene or a new one.
Here's a little update on my modeling. I'll be posting an update with textures in a couple of hours. All critiques and comments are greatly appreciated.
I think the textures on the props need attention. They don't show realistic weathering, just a general "meh" overlay effect. Edged wear out before panels do, dirt congregates in corners and grooves. Maybe an AO pass on baked into the diffuse would help ease the "flat" look.
Hope I was helpful, the scene is very interesting so far.
I thought this Newspaper box had a pretty cool worn look, It looks like people kick the bottom or it, or dirty water/mud gets on it from passing cars.
I'm not sure that I understand your Unreal question correctly, you should be able to snap your pieces together even if they aren't exactly 512 1024...etc. What I do for oddly sized pieces is go to View -> Drag Grid and set it to a number like 1 or 2 instead of 16. Then you can move your pieces around in smaller increments or get oddly sized pieces together.
I hope that helps! I can't wait to see your scene with textures.
I'll try re-arranging the UV's and getting some more parts their own unique space. I'll see how far i can shrink down the front before it looks low res. Here's an image of my color/UV layout for the Newspaper box. The texture is really clean and thats not what I want but I guess Ill have to do some problem solving with my UV layout.
Thanks NanaD, so I guess as long as the edges of my modular chunks snap to a grid of some power of 2 I can get them to snap around with the U3 settings. I really havent been able to spend enough time with the editor.
You may be able to see what Im trying to do with the window Eric gave me the idea of making a color and opacity to throw on the plane that just had a little bit of dirt/residue showing. I don't know how this will look in unreal or if it needs something else to pull off the glass effect.
One of the crits I got during my final presentation was that my bricks looked like giant Legos hopefully Ive corrected this I was just trying to match the reference images
Regarding UVs in Max, which plugin did you get, and what do you miss from Maya's UV editor? Max has pretty much all the same commands, and scripts available for those it doesn't have by default (aligning/spacing etc).
Unwrapping an object like that looks pretty easy to me. I'd just give everything a flat Planar map to start, select all the edges you want to be seams, hit Break in the UV editor to split them, then do a Relax on all parts, should get you off to a pretty good start and the pixel density will be consistent. Will probably need some manual layout/aligning, but in general it shouldn't be much work at all.
Apart from that, I'm just gonna echo what the others have said so far - the lowpoly modelling looks good and the scene in general seems well made, but the textures need a LOT of work. Go for more photo reference, don't try to hand-paint everything, it will just look flat and lacking in variation.
Hope that helps.
MoP, I'll shrink the newspaper box down to a 512 map and see what I can get with unique UV space and more photo ref. I kept getting comments at school that it looked low res so I figured reusing UV space and overlapping parts would fix that. Adding detail when the UV's were overlapped just repeated it too much.
As for my Max plug-in Im using Unwrap Tools MaxScript v1.5 from http://www.sloft.net/ it's pretty nice but the alignment seems to work off of an average vertex position where as Mayas will push all the uv's to line up with the furthest one in the direction you choose the only other gripe I have is the move and scale tools it would be nice to change them. Ive gotten use to most of the other tools.
Thanks for the replies. Ill rework the newspaper box today and try to get up another section of the building textured.
What do you mean by "it would be nice to change" the move and scale tools?
It might be worth you checking out the free-form UV editing tool if you haven't already, it works pretty much like how Photoshop's Free Transform works, and combines move/rotate/scale all into one tool. Worth getting used to, it's a big time saver.
Also, don't get too hung up on people saying "it looks low res"... low res compared to what? If they mean that the pixel density isn't fairly uniform across the object or the scene, then yeah that should probably be fixed, but there's a big difference between "looking good" and "looking low-res" ... you can use the biggest texture in the world and still have a bad-looking asset, while a lot of game artists can make a 256x256 look amazing. It's just a matter of working cleverly and having an artists eye for detail, colour and composition.