Thursday, October 29, 2009

Post #31

Finally got the shingles to work properly. Had to rearrange some stuff in the UV space to get it to work properly. Have started texturing the roof tiles. Now need to do a similar gradient effect in order to get the normal map I need.

Post #30

Lesson learned, Crazy Bump cannot be trusted for everything.


Had been working on the siding tiles for one section of the house. Quickly found though that when Imported the diffuse texture into CB it was not exactly doing the effect I wanted, which meant it needed to be substituted for a texture that would give the desired effected of layered panels of roofing.

So began a few hours of tweaking around with that. which ended up leading to the following gradient map. . .



But Luckily I finally got the effect I wanted. Hopefully will be able to share that with you all sometimes soon. But its now early morning. . .

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Post #29

Textures for the main cottage section are now done. Still need to do the normal map, occlusion and parallax for one of the pieces but then this part is done. These are just screen shots of Maya since I'm too lazy to make any nice renders of these.






In other news, just for the sake of some conversation.

What's everyone been listening/watching while they've been working on stuff for Studio?


I've primarily been watching Dead Like Me while here at school, and assorted movies when at home.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Post #28

Starting to get re familiar with unreal. Playing around with parallax occlusions. Also of course working on textures.


Monday, October 26, 2009

Post #27

Crazy Bump is once again my best friend.


Working on textures now while playing with some normals, occlusions and the like. So here are some low res photos to give you an idea of what's going on. Kinda wish I had unreal on this comp so I could see these bad boys being used with some parallax occlusion. . .


Post #26

Oh, actually, one more thing. . . .

Post #25

Maximizing UV Space for the windows and doors:




I feel like I'm dying. . . off to bed finally. . .

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Post #24

Windows Windows Windows.



Modeling almost done with the exception of one last door and potentially a few detail pieces.





Post #23

Fancy Window

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Post #22

Okay so the entire structure is modeled and Uv'd (sans the windows). The main cottage is the most physically modelled as you can see. The rest will be detailed more in normals, bumps and textures. I was able to keep the thing fairly modular. The different window types can be reused in a modular form and some sections of the walls are also reusable. Once I finish the windows this puppy will be ready for texturing and details. Should probably work on importing into Unreal sometime this week also to make sure there aren't any blow ups.








Friday, October 23, 2009

Post #21

Some work in progress of the rest of the modeling. Trying to keep this as modular as possible.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Post #20

Finally some real progress.

A pseudo modular main section of the original cottage. With conveniant gaps for later placing of windows and so forth.



It's early in the morning so excuse my hasty color job. I'll try better next time.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Post #19

Have I mentioned how I am somehow monumentally behind? Rather than dwelling upon it too much, here's a crappy render of the carriage house. Nearly done. . . .

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Post #18

Okay, screw all that zbrush stuff I did. Let's just focus on using crazy bump for normals. . . (at least for this section of the house)

Finished(?) Diffuse

Post #17

Currently working on the textures for the walls on the carriage house. I'm currently waaaaay behind after spending an entire weekend on my zbrush project. Need to just stay up straight for a few days and maybe I can catch up.


Anywho, some work in progress stuff. This is taking longer than it should cause I realize I should have gone about this different. I should have made the textures first than made the stencil based off of that, cause right now its a pain in the ass to have to match up all the brick textures with the brick normals. which means this process is taking 5 times as long as it should.




At least I have realized it with this smaller section of the house, so that I can change my workflow with the other bits.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Post #16

Finally some stuff to show.

Have been playing around with the carriage house the past couple days. Since its the most eroded part of the building, I figure any mistakes I make on the work flow on this piece will luckily be for the most part unnoticeable.

Here's the shanty awning entrance into the back of the carriage house so far:


Diffuse Map and Spec Map:






Though it looks all shiny and pretty, will probably end up bringing down the highlights a bit since I don't know if I necessarily want that for the final product.

Also, did the normals for the main part of the carriage house. Just needs to be textured now. . . I would love to show it to you at this moment, but the maya program on Ben's old computer has decided to castrate itself by pretty much destroying its render settings. Crazy, I know. . .

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Post #15

Currently testing out methods of making a quick brick in ZBrush. I've found a relatively simple way of making a stencil in Photoshop. Don't know yet if I'll distress this anymore with sculpting, may leave that more to the texturing part. . .

In other news, I wish the school computers had XNormals so I could test this out with a bake. . . .

Friday, October 9, 2009

Post #14

I feel like the more I try and really move forward in this project, the more I just keep running into walls. Most of these walls are just decisions I need to make on how to proceed with the project, what techniques will fit my situation best and so forth.

To get some really high detail, I debated with importing sections of the building into ZBrush, which would mean retopologizing parts of the building to make it ZBrush friendly and then later retoping it once I import it back into Maya. Recently though, while doing research for my Zbrush class I found a thread created by a guy who is an environment artist for Gears. (link) I found his method of creating walls rather intriguing since he literally made it out of bricks. He textured (in zBrush) one brick and then instanced it to make an entire wall. I believe (though he doesn't really state it clearly in his walk through) that he then bakes these bricks into the actual wall or manages to cluster them somehow at least.

This got me interested in the idea of baking a high res wall (made out of a bunch of bricks) to create a highly detailed normal map. So this is where I currently am, doing research and watching tutorials and so forth trying to figure out what method works best. Hopefully I'll be able to test this stuff out sometime tonight so I at least am going in the right direction.

In other news, have been working primarily on the carriage house part of the manor (the little mini box part that helps to create the entry "gate". I'm really tempted to just plow away with this section of the house, and get it fully textured, so I at least know what work flow I'm really going to use for the rest of the building. I'd like to work out the kinks as soon as possible.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Post #13

Update update update.


So after being distracted for the past week with zBrush stuff, I can finally begin modeling the building structure itself. I'm putting my concept art on the back burner for now, and will cut away at it little by little hopefully.

After much research and a discussion with Prof. Cookson, I've been debating on how to go about doing the structure itself. Its a bit too quirky of a building to be built modularly (or at least I think so)but my main concern is making sure I can get highly detailed textures without having to worry about limited UV space. So, I've decided to break the building up into sections (mostly based on the style) and will lay out the Uv's like that. I think all window assets will be on one UV space, same with the doors. The roof is probably the only part that will be truly modular, though only time will tell. . .


Here's just a work in progress screen shot. Too busy right now to bother with an occlusion or fancy render.


You may notice my super big grid space. I took extra special care to make sure that the maya units are equal to UT3 units while also giving me a big enough space to make my measurements. I also have a little "dummy" who's currently acting as my actor, helping me to scale things properly. I have a feeling that I may do some swapping around with the scaleling of the building in the coming week or 2.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Post #12

Grrr, forgot to bring my tablet with me today. So I'm stuck doing preliminary stuff for my concept painting. As in, creating an occlusion map to use as a base for the painting. . .




Just a varied angle on the occlusions from earlier, except this time, looking up as opposed to down.