Monthly Archives: mars 2008

Been working on a brick texture in 4096×4096. It’s a very unforgiving resolution but luckily I’ll most likely size it down to half or less. I generated a normalmap for a quick rendertest and it didn’t look half bad, even though I’m only a few hours in on it.

Finished unwrapping UV’s for most of the model. I need to talk to a few people before I make the final decision on a few aspects of the model so actually assembling the UVmap will have to wait till tomorrow.

Okay, so work I have for this weekend on this project is that I’m gonna make a generic texture/material for this next building and unwrap the UV’s of the model, map it and optimize the model. This is really next weeks work but I’m getting an early start so I can go home for a few days next week for a late easter holiday.

I made a small sketch of a UT3 level I want to make. I’ve had this visual style in my head for quite some time now and I want to realize it in a small ut3 level. At this point I have no time frame for production or even when production will start. It’s at pre-production and concept stage at this point

I never liked the ”arms” on the concepts or mockup models so I decided to redo it and ”Drevlinalize” it, aka make it cooler. So this probably won’t be used but if it was up to me it would look something like either of these.

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Got the three levels approved with the exception of level 3 where the arms went off to wide. I fixed that rather quickly however. Here are renders, first the three renders I showed to lockpick and then the revised level03 building, that then got approved too.

I finished detailing the major detailing of the model and mocked-up the two lower levels for the building. At the moment I’m just waiting for the okay from Lockpick. When I get it I’ll post renders.

At the moment we’re anxiously waiting for another mail from Lockpick as well, regarding the previous building. Apparently some problems has arisen because of a few things we were not informed of before or during production. It’s regarding the new model, the castle seen a few posts below. It’s quite a serious problem, as far as I can tell. We’ve kept our end of the bargain so the ball is not in our court, at least. Still, hope it works out and I hope they respond saying “Yo, coolers. We fixed!”

So I thought I’d take you trough what happened today, from mockup building to the finished model.

I did not, as I wrote in the previous post, make level02 and 03 because I need both Dennis and Franssico to do that correctly. Instead I spent the rest of the day making the actual modules for the real building.

So this is a picture (above) of the mock up model from the previous post. This is my start point that I use to build the real moduels from.

I took a piece from the mockup model, the module where the arm connects with the building and moved it aside. I modeled it to resemble the concept drawing, which I sadly can’t show until I get the okay from Dennis and Lockpick. It didnt turn out very cool though and looked more like a big lump. So I decided to rework the concept a bit and it turned out like in the picture above. Rather than have that thing be a single block with an angeled surface it now consists of 4 blocks. I think it can be cooler to animate it when it is like this anyway.

I move the arm to it’s correct location in conjunction with the module. Also added a some detail and fixed up the shape a bit. I remade the arm so it now consists of 5 parts rather than one big one. I will have to remake it tomorrow and then it will most likely be closer to 8 blocks because the plan is for the arms to extend from itself and sort of grow.

Duplicated the “shoulder” module and the arm. Remade the /\ shape on the tower and added some detail and played with normals on the /\ shape to make it look smother. Reworked the profile of the tower from the mockup quite a bit to make it look closer to that found in the concept.

Copied base platform from mock up version. Started modeling the front sections and the main gate. Also got into making “Fake Bevels” in a lot of the corners of the building. On the previous buildings I decided not to do this because it didn’t really fit their rocky style and the fact that the polycount didn’t allow me to but in this building, with its smooth magic-y style it’ll look peachy and the few modules will let me keep it within the poly budget anyway. Fake beveling is a process that essentially doubles the polygons in a model by having a small extra segment on each polygon. Imagine each corner looking like an L and that right next to the 90 degree corner you cut in an extra polygon. The 90 degree edge is then set to a soft normal, making it appear as a bevel. But essentially is not. It looks better than actual beveling even.

Copied the rear modules from mock up building, added fake beveling and cleaned them up.

Duplicated front and rear segments and mirrored them to the other side. Added pillars under the balcony on the back of the building and added some minor detail.
And this is the stage the model is at when signing off tonight. I got quite a bit of detailing and optimizing left along with adding something on the roof at the front of the building but for one days work, I am pleased.

Mock up building to the left, actual model on the right. Both made today.

To explain the plan for our workflow: Concept>Mockup lowpoly models>real models. Before we started building our mockup models we got the concept art approved from Lockpick and before we started building the real modules we got the mockup approved.

The reason for doing this was threefold: 1) We got feedback troughout the process of building it and could spot problems early on. 2) The mockup low poly models could be used to start rigging and animation even tho the real models wasnt finished. 3) The concept art was only for level 3, as we decided this as a group that we would only concept level 3 and then use the lowpoly modules to build level 01 and level 02.

This planning worked very well for the building seen in previous post because it passed all stages before we went into production. With the one I’m working on now it did’nt get passed the concept stage. Dennis reworked the concepts quite a bit and about a week ago we got them approved but I havn’t had the opportunity, or even the good eye to spot problems such as this, to realize that even though we got the concept approved we still didn’t have the mockup buildings.

This means that today, according to our schedule should be spent making the real models but instead I have to make the mockup building, get it approved and then make level01 and level02. Not an ideal situation but such is life. Either way, we only got ourselves to blame so all that is left to do is suck it up and take it like a man…

So the mockup for level03 is done and it has been approved by Lockpick. Lockpick expressed worries about the new buildings not having the same rotation as the old buildings so the front gate faces another direction. Most likely we can just rotate the whole scene in maya and this will be a non-issue. I made a bunch of renders and I include some in this post.

Now I’m going to make lunch, then eat it, then shower and then build level01 and level02.

So in these pictures you see the mockup lowpoly version of the new building at level03, along with the finished model of previous building at level03 – for comparsion.

Just found these old terrain textures laying around and I whipped up a quick scene and put the castle in it all, then fooled around with the lighting from the original castle render. I also grabbed a sky texture from Cgtextures.com and fooled around with it.

So to sum up: Lots and lots of fooling around.

Here’s the result.

Made an alternative render to my alternative render, in a night setting and left it rendering overnight.