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.

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. . .

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. . . .

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.

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.

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.