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Some progression work-in-progress shots of todays work. Yesterday was spent at university with another Milestone but today, I’m back at it.

Make a clean version of the placeholder with even dimensions. Decided I was going to make the walls separate from the roof and mirrors of each other.

Added dimensions

And started sculpting.

Mirrored the roof part, made it non-symmetrical and kept working on the general shape.

Render of the work so far

Another render, moved the bones into place on one side of the cave.
Now I’m going to move into Mudbox and start detailing.

Screengrab from Maya, no time to do a render because I have to be at university in half an hour. Spent some time woring on wear and tear, defining cracks trough the collormap and generally just get the right saturation. So far I’m keeping my project goal with not using any photo sources for textures.

The last stronghold building has now gone into production. Here are a few work-in-progress screen caps from today, finishing with a render of the model at this point.

Picture from the low-poly dummy building we made in pre-proudction. I started with picking a module….

… Move it to the side of the scene and begin defining its shape. This is a tree that the stronghold will be built around. Later today I’m going to make another version to be detailed in mudbox, so the tree you see here is just a placeholder at this point.

Started on the entrance part, again this is more of a placeholder than final model. Here you can see the outlines of the dummy building too.

Lots of progress. Built the tree-log-wall thing for half the stronghold, added the cloth/skin they use for a ceiling and mirrored the cave entrance.

Made the bones/rib-cage thing at the entrance. Added another bit o cloth. The tree will be animated at a later point, with the branch being moved in different directions. It’s current position is something of a ”neutral pose”, to be considered like the T-pose of a character.

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More of a light test than to show progress on the texture though. Very low quality rendering but still, some progress.

We had a meeting with Lockpick today and because of some recent discoveries we needed to alter all the buildings slightly. It will be less than an hours work So I’m going to do it right after this post. I am taking a breather from both the buildings now because I am done with this weeks work as I worked my ass off this weekend to be able to go home a few days this week. A much needed break, so after tomorrow I will most likely not make any updates for a few days.

Getting some perspective is every so important in all projects. Stare on something for long enough and you go blind, which is why I have time planned in later after all buildings are finished for a ”tweaking” period. I think it’ll do it good and get a nice layer of finish.

Now I’m going to drink some tea, make the adjustments to the buildings and listen to Bungie Podcast ( http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&cid=1340)

The texture is coming along. I’ve made alot of compromises and experimenting to get to this point and it’s all just a big hazzle. For a long time I had no idea where to take the building when it came to texturing. The rock either looked too flat or, after a minuscule alteration, too bumpy. Next the texture didn’t have enough detail to make it compelling and interesting. I decided to pull in and re-read the story of the race and look at the documentation we have for the game and I realized I wanted these ”veins” with glowy magical blue shimmering awesomeness. I made a glowmap and applied it to the model and it looked great. Sadly, we can’t use Glowmaps in Dreamlords though so in the end I had to just add it to the diffuse channel.

I am currently experimenting with doing it another way but for now, this is how it looks.

A few more pics…

Experimented with using alphamask and a”glow mesh”underneath to get a glowy feel to the veins/carvings.

Coming off a 4 hour pass working on the texture for the new building I am finally making some headway. The first 3 hours was spent in tears, swet and all that untill I toss everything out the window and started from the beginning. I added gradients, going from dark to light, on all slanting walls to further define their shape. I added simple block of dark or light color on different shapes depending on their angle and placement.

After that I tweaked the Uvmap-snapshot to have it be highlight at corners of the model. Then I went back to the old texture and used a highpass filter on it and generted this very subtle ”cracked ” effect on the surface.I still have some tweaking of the normal left (At the moment it looks too bumpy and not smooth, as it should). In an hour or so I think I’ll have a good enough texture. The actual coolness of the texture doesnt derive from the actual surface of the building anyway but from the glowy stuff that I’m about to add.

Will post pictures tonight.

Yea so I didn’t rest. I moved my 360 to my computural area (!) and plugged it into my secondary monitor but I ended up watching Halo3 extras and working on the UVmap for the second building.

There is something very, very special about a fully optimized UVmap. When you look upon it it’s like a work of art, a thing of beauty. You know that tears, sweet and blood went into making it and whereas the actual texture is missing at this point you’re starting to get the idea of how you’ll go about making it. The blood part is actually it’s true I got a paper cut from my mouse pad… Okay, so it didn’t make a hole or anything but kind-of-blood.

So I got 4 days of next weeks work done today and yesterday. Yay for me, now I’m going to sleep.

Post of the model, with uvmap and the generic texture applied to it. Not much to see, but still posting it as progress. It’s a bit dark but I’m too tired to bother re-rendering.

Got some work done on the UVmap. Everything is now in uniform scale and I tried setting it up one way but it turned out to be a giant space waster so I’ll have to redo it. I’m going to have a break now though, because I’m very tired. I think I’ll hook up my 360 and play some Halo3 online.

The generic texture for the next building is done. I’m now pausing to make a few renders and make lunch. After lunch I’m gonna make the actual UVmap, after having both talked some stuff over with Dennis and Fransisco regarding a few aspects of the model (We’re not going to use the arm thing but one of the alternative ones I made that can be seen a few posts down.)

LUNCH!