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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.

Nothing major in this post. Just mentioning that I finished the little BSP-stuff I had left to do in the level layout and exported the BSP-base to maya. I also set up a project environment within maya so I can just get started tomorrow with all dirs and everything set up.

I did a small color test for the cheap house. Not sure what I think of it just yet but I’ll post it as it is some kind of progress, even if I wake up in the morning and go ”What the hell is wrong with me?!” upon looking on it. At the moment, I’m not loving it but I cant figure out why so I’ll just return to it tomorrow.

Alright, so the texturing is pretty much done. Over the coming weeks until the deadline for the whole project I will most likely be tweaking it a lot though. Sorry for the poor quality of the shots.

Okay, so I still haven’t finished texturing. I still got some tweaking, grunging and detailing left and then generating the normalmap. I promised a few screengrabs tonight though and here they are.

So what you’re looking at here is some simple untextured terrain and the 4500 polygon model with a work in progress texture (just diffusemap at this point).

I think I’ll be able to finish it tomorrow and then I’ll post more pictures.

Yesterday went well, texturing wise. I got most of the basic texturing done and all I have left is grunging it up to get that lovly wear and tear that midevil fantasy castles always get and some detailing and then generating the normalmap.

Because the nature of this project we’ve had to pull some neat tricks to get as good a result as possible. At this point the production phase isn’t done yet but I’m not really exploring new grounds here. I’m just using and combining different tools and technuiqes that I’ve known for quite some time. When going into pre-production on the project we quickly identified a few potential problems and restrictions, that we’ve worked very hard to get into opportunities and solutions.

The specifications for each stronghold:

3 buildings in one (three levels of upgrading)
5000 polygons
1024×1024 texture

Pixel per polygon ratio is about 210 pixels per polygon. That’s not a lot. The polygon count isn’t exactly sky high either, and those were the two major things we saw as problems that needed solutions. There are a few things that are given, but they come at a price:

Mirroring the building so you only have to texture one side but use it on both. This in itself poses a new problem and that problem is that you have to make the texture generic enough to make the mirroring not too obvious but you still have to make it interesting enough to be visually compelling. It’s a very fine balance.

Because of the polygon limit we decided early on to make windows and doors simply part of the texture. I exprimented with making high resolution models and render out ambient occlusion maps and normalmaps on both windows and doors but then I stumbeled upon some good photo references just two days ago that worked better in context of the building. Something I realized while texturing the model was that we had to do something with the windows. As it was, having windows just as textures turned out to be really, really uninteresting. It added nothing to the overall feel of the building and I just had to do something about that. After some testing I came to the conclusion that the best way to solve this was simply to make a new 4-polygon model (top and 3 walls) that can be placed anywhere on the building and have the window-texture on it. This will pose a small strain on the polygon limit but will instead free up texture space and also make for a more versatile model to animate. As it is, polygon limit isn’t as much of a problem because the model as it is now is 4500 polygons and we may be able to optimize it further depending on how Fransissco animates it.

The “3 buildings in one” isn’t as much of a problem as it is an interesting challenge. During our pre-production phase we built mockup models of all the buildings and experimented with how they would go from level 1 to level 2 to level 3 so we knew how the modular pieces each building consists of would be put together. This helped immensely during production for all parts involved in the project.

I’ll try to post some more work-in-progress shots tonight.

I went on with RTS-Buildings and made windows and doors, based on photos from Cgtextures.com I also registered an account there because 15mb/day that I share 300 other game developers on this shared university cable simply wont cut it. The textures turned out pretty good and all in all, I am pleased with todays work. I got a lot of the basics done and I started working on building specific details. The majority of detail in this building will be in the texture and if I need to I may make a few high resolution models as a base. We’ll see though, so far I’ve had no need to.

I also spent a few hours in UnrealED today, working on the Lifeblood-project. I worked out a basic level layout based on the description and reference pictures I’ve been provided and work is progressing well. At the time of writing this post I am rebuilding, a process ever so tedious and annoying but a necessary evil. It beats compiling maps for quake/half life atleast.

I can’t really divulge any information about the project but generally speaking, the direction of the level is pretty self explanatory due to the nature of the reference material. So the work I’ve done so far is blocking up basic shapes in BSP and then I’ll export a select few, namely the ones I’ll be working on, and make a detailed model in Maya and Mudbox. I will be making important game environments so even though I’m really on this project as an artist I’m doing some designer work aswell… I guess Level Artist is as good a word as any.

Enough for today though. Tomorrow I might post some more images of RTS-buildings…

After having wasted the majority of yesterday on texturing using bad methods to mediocre results I decided a change of strategy was needed. So today I took a different path, using good and efficient methods towards a good results. I’ve built two base textures, one Brick texture and one smoothed marble looking texture and now I’m using these two as bases in the actual texture map. I am a bit worried about pulling the texture down to 1024×1024 though, but we’ll see. There is only so much you can do with these limitations of a single 1024×1024 texturemap.

Now I’m going to make some lunch and then get back to work. Afterwards I’m going to get started on Lifeblood project, A.K.A the “unannounced project”.

So I spent a few hours texturing today. I got the basic colours down and then I started working on the actual surfacing. The result sucked. I was just so off with everything I did and hours was spent on stuff that just didn’t turn out anywhere near the quality I’m after.

So Bleh on texturing today, at least for the RTS buildings.

About half an hour ago I just gave Maya the finger when it comes to baking out Ambient Occlusion maps from the “Cheap house” scene. I’ve had numerous attempts but so far I just haven’t had any good enough results. More often than not Maya just crashed, despite optimizing of the models to a fairly ridiculous level and a bunch of small tricks I’ve picked over the years. But as I said Maya suffered a serious case of crashing so I decided to try something else. Using a bunch of tricks with the baked normal map I used Xnormal and the different RGB channels to get something that looked pretty good. I can totally use it to base the diffuse map on so on a day that was more about failing in texturing this was the peak of my day.

Tomorrow I’m going spend on texturing the RTS-building.