Monthly Archives: mars 2008

I just finished unwrapping all the modules in the Castle-church-like fortress seen in a previous post. It took me about 4 hours to get it all unwrapped nicely but I still have to put it all together in a nice Uvmap but that is the easy part in all of this. I’m guessing that process will take about 2 hours or so and then the whole model will be ready for texturing.

As the whole building is made up from a bunch of different modules I decided to disassemble the building and unwrap the modules one by one. The reason for doing so is twofold:

1. It’s simply easier to grab a module, unwrap it and reassemble the building afterwards than it is to unwrap every instance of every module in the already assembled building

2. It gives me a chance to further optimize and clean all the modules from potential problem s.

The process is fairly straight forward but as already stated, it does mean that I have to reassemble everything with the Uvmapped modules but that should at the most be an hours worth of work. I will most likely be able to start texturing tomorrow, possibly even tonight.

Okay, so the company is Lockpick Entertainment. The Game: Dreamlords. Dreamlords is an Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy game. It isbeing revamped a bit and I’m helping out along with with Fransisco (Animator) and Dennis (Concept artist). We are making some new buildings for each of the three races in this game.

We’re just coming out of a relatively long time of pre-production where we did a lot technical and inspirational research along with testing and establishing the new look of the buildings for each race. At this moment we are a week into production and once again, University calls and we got another milestone. Milestones in university terms is where everyone that’s doing something for their final year gets together, sits down and just talk it out. You help each other discover weaknesses in your different projects along with just getting a glance of what everyone is working. It’s pretty cool, considering most projects are focusing around Game Development. In total this is our second milestone but it is the first one we will be bringing anything to show. The renders belowed I got “okay’ed” to show on the milestone presentation along with on this blogg.

The pre-production period was mostly spent on coming up with a look for each of the three races buildings, based on story and previously made buildings and characters. We also spent a lot of time “morphing” and playing around with how it is to be animated. I don’t know how much information I can divulge here so I’ll just zip it.

At this point we got approved concept art for each race, mock-ups or “dummy” buildings as we call them consisting of a very simple, low poly 3D model of each building that Fransico, our animator whizz-guy, can use to start rigging, skinning and animating. Me, I’m just working on the final buildings and last week I modelled the real models. This week is all about unwrapping Uvs and texturing.

The technical specifications for the models of these new assets were 5000 polygons and a 1024×1024 texture map per building. Depending on who you ask they’ll either say “Wow. That’s alot!” or “Wow… that’s a bit low, isn’t it?” For an RTS game some would say it’s quite a lot, but what you have to keep in mind is that there is only one of these buildings in view at any one given time.

At first I admit I was a bit surprised over the specifications, thinking it was a bit low but that’s me. I’m an artist who is used to working with other genres of games and I figure that in the end I, as an artist, will always want to be able to have tons and tons of detail. However, I as a game artist thrive on restrictions because they enable me to push my creative mind in order to get as much detail as possible, using whatever tricks I have up my sleeve.

Now I have to run off because Milestone starts in about 15 minutes.I’ll post this when I get home from the milestone.

For more information about Dreamlords, go to http://www.dreamlords.com

I finished baking the two levels of this cheap buildings last night. Because of better planning and rearranging the uvmapping on a few models I got a third more room to play around with. The plan is for the whole scene to fit into a single texture rather than use two large ones and a number of smaller ones. This texture is about the same size as all the other textures combined but because of a single large space I can maximise the use of it rather than have “dead space” in some of the smaller ones.

The baking process is quite the procedure. Show me a version of Maya that says “fuck yea! 2 million polygon models!” and I will dance a jig.

I thought I’d go trough exactly how I go about doing it seeing as that sort of thing would be very fitting in a development blogg. Because Mayas tendency to crash if it renders high polygon models (various errors such as “Ran out of memory” or even a windows exception error) I make it a habit of using the Outliner to select my models rather than using the perspective viewport. Before I import my high polygon model I even cut down the far clip plane of the perspective view camera to it’s minimum so there will be no chance of Maya catching a glance because that results in the following error message: “YOU WANT ME TO RENDER WHAT NOW?!” and then crashing beyond belief. If there is any need for repositioning to make the high poly fit the low poly I just use either orthographical viewport.

The actual baking process is fairly easy. After switching to the Render layout I go to Lighting/Shading and select Transfer Maps. Using the Outliner I select my high polygon model and place it in the source tab and the low polygon model in the target tab. I set it up so it renders out a normal map by clicking on the “normal map” button. This is very advanced stuff so tell me if I’m typing to fast…of course, that wouldn’t matter to you as my typing speed has no effect on your reading speed. Yea, so that joke sucked, nevermind it.
Before I do the high quality high resolution baking I usually do a low quality low resolution test to see if I get any weird artefacts or something. If there are any these they can usually be fixed by simply clearing all history unless you’re working with a broken model.

So the actual baking process… Depending on the amount of polygons, baking settings such as sampling and resolution you can look at a solid 1-5 hours of fun baking!
In the case of this building I had to split up the high polygon model into three parts; One for the top floor and two for the bottom floor. This process was actually less complicated than I had first anticipated. I just went into Mudbox and pulled down to the lowest sub-d level and selected the faces of half the mode and hid it. Then I went back up to the highest sub-d level and exported what was left into Maya. I had to do this because Maya just cramped out on baking the whole model in 4096 and even with just half the model I got some crazy baking times. In the end I just pulled it down to 2048 to get it to a reasonable level.

I use Photoshop to merge the three baking sessions into a single spectacular Normal map file! I got a few artefacts in this baking so I had to clean it up. Some areas the blue channel had been inverted but this was simply a matter of going into that channel and “inverting it back”.

This is pretty much all work I’ve done on this project for over a week now because I simply have had a pretty full week. Because of the nature of this project (it just being a small personal project) it’s fairly low on the priority list but right at the top of my fun-list. So hopefully I will make another update soon with the final modelled details added to the scene.

Here are a few quick renders as of this morning.

As contracts now have been signed by all parties and I’m getting ready to get to work on this fine Sunday morning I can tell you that I am working as a contractor for Lifeblood games, focusing on environment art.

At the moment I am baking out the second version of the normal maps. I’ve rearranged the Uvmaps for the lowpoly model of the house to make better use of it. Rather than using two 2048×2048 resolution that I was going to size down to two 1024x1024s I’m going to use a single 4096×4096 that I then I’m going size down to a single 2048×2048. I looked at the Uvmap on the two separate pieces the house consist of the house and I just realize how wasteful it was. There was quite a lot of space not being used and I could easily fix it this way with some quick rearangments and also using just a single 4096×4096 rather than two 2048’s.

Of course, baking out a 4096×4096 Normal and Ambient Occlusion map does take some time. So far I’ve been baking for about an hour and I JUST, as I’m writing this very sentence, got to 2%. It’s very exciting!

I’m hoping to be able to fit the whole house with all the smaller details to be fitted on a 2048×2048 and not just the actual walls. The whole scene will consist of maybe 20 or 30 different models of different sizes and polygon count (naturally). I’ll play around with lower resolutions for the specular map and possibly the normal map but it all depends on how it looks in the end. Because this is purely an educational project for myself the spec’s for it is very loose and I can easily adapt. I’m going to try to push it down as much as possible though, just to challenge myself.

I haven’t actually worked on this project for about a week now with production of my final project in university kicking in there simply haven’t been enough time. I’m hoping to get some done this weekend because I think that texturing will be done in no time, around two days or so.. Most of the work with texturing, or really “surfacing”, was done trough high polygon models and the baking bit. Speaking of which, 3% now.

As of next week I will be going in mid production on an unannounced project.

I can’t really say anything about it at all but I am listing it as a project I am working on because in the end, it is a project I am working on.

I am working together with animator Fransisco Robinsson and Concept artist and Illustrator Dennis Chan (www.dchan.se) with making a set of buildings for Real Time Strategy game in a mid-evil fantasy setting.
Because I am doing this for a company I am not able to disclose any information about it until they give me the okay so until then, info on this project will be on the lighter side.

What I can say is that at this point, we have finished our pre-production period and as of last Monday we are in full blown production.

My primary purpose of this project is practicing generating textures from high polygon models rather than from photo source it.

The idea behind the setting is that it should be this temporary, cheap building people could be rent or live in for shorter periods of time. Quality of life would be rather low and living space would be very cramped.

As of this post I am a week into production. I am working on modeling everything still and even though I haven’t started with the actual texturing I have generated normal maps and ambient occlusion maps from the high polygon model. I am hoping to begin texturing next week or so.

Here is a picture of the building, as of two days ago.

Today has mostly been about getting my two monitors to work together again. Last Friday I disabled my at-the-time-completely-functional dual-monitor setup and plugged in my TV so I could watch movies laying in my bed.

Yesterday I plugged my second monitor back in and my original setup, that had worked only a few days earlier, didn’t recognize my second monitor at all and even though I had unplugged my TV it was still there in both the Nvidia control panel and Windows Display properties. I could still activate the TV and set it up with what resolution, screen position e.t.c even though it was unplugged. My main problem was however that I couldn’t get my secondary monitor to work.

Specs:

CPU:
Intel Duo 6850

RAM:
4GB Kingston ram

GPU:
Geforce 8800GTS 640mb

Monitors:
Viewsonic 2216V
Viewsonic VX2025

OS: Windows XP SP2

Let me just state this: I am not a computer whizz but I can build a computer from the ground up (not including making the actual components, of course) and I consider myself to be a fairly logical, if at times a bit slow, person. I have a rather extensive experience with faulty computers due to the fact that I have been around them for the majority of my life. If you are experiencing a similar problem to the one described here but is something of a complete and utter noob when dealing with computer software and hardware, I am TELLING YOU not to follow in my foot steps. And even if you do, I in no way take any responsibility for any miss-haps that may happen.

Back to the problem at hand:
First I’ll go trough everything I did. At the bottom you’ll find the short version of what actually worked.

First I googled after a similar problem but I was unable to find someone in the same situation. I found a few people complaining about the new Nvidia drivers when using Dual monitors but the main complaint was that scaling was a bit weird for alot of people on the secondary monitor. I had the same problem earlier and I solved that by simply installing older drivers, just as suggested in most threads.

For the problem at hand, there was very little information and I was unable to find anyone with the same problem. At this point I turned to the Windows help-section but under all my years using a computer I have never found valid help there and more than anything it just adds to the frustration. A quick look left my not knowing what to do and at this point I realized I just had to manually unplug, switch cables and systematic just see if it could be a cable that was faulty. Luckily I have two sets of DVI-cables and two sets of VGA-cables so I could switch between monitors. Between unplugging and plugging in monitors I turned off my computer between each switch.

For a period of time, in the midst of the switching both my monitors stopped showing anything after windows had loaded. I plugged back the TV and it turned out that in some magical way my TV, that was unplugged, had become the primary monitor. I simply switched it back so my primary monitor was my primary monitor but at this point I was rather fed up.

How I got it to work:
I went to the device manager, uninstalled all monitors, graphic cards along with the drivers using Add/remove programs in the control panel. I downloaded Forceware 163.75, after I had read that they were recommended as “Stable and good drivers”. I turned my computer off and unplugged my secondary monitor and the TV. Back in Windows, I installed Forceware 163.75 drivers and restarted upon request. When I got back in windows I simply switched from one DVI-cable to the other, plugged it in (while still in Windows, even thought I know you really shouldn’t) and Windows simply detected it, installed it and it worked fine.

I may come to update this post if/when I want to watch something off my computer on my TV again.