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I just finished reassembling the model using the Uvmapped and optimized modules. Turns out I optimized away around 800 polygons in the process of unwrappin and optimizing! I also added holders for the team flags that will be on the buildings along with the actual flags.

There are always minor stuff you miss when you’re in the midst of modelling like unneeded faces, and the like along with stuff that just wasn’t built in a clever way but that has now all been taken care of.

So: the model is now modelled, UV’s have been unwrapped and mapped into a single uvmap and I can only come to the conclusion that I’m quite a bit ahead of schedule. My part of the production for a single building in this project was calculated at 15 days and so far I’ve actually spent about 3 days on actual production. 2 of 3 elements, modelling and uvmapping have been completed within that time frame and now only Texturing remains.

I’m not 12 days ahead of schedule though. Last week when I realized I had managed to finish the workload of the entire week in two days I skipped town. I went to Stockholm and partied with a few friends, got drunk out of my mind and danced until my legs ached and then the weekend was spent with my girlfriend, mending a hang over and being generally lazy.

Yesterday was all spent on the milestone in university so I got nothing done so today I worked on the project for the first time in almost a week and I managing to get both unwrapping and uvmapping done, something I had scheduled as two days worth of work.

It’s been a good day!
I’m not gonna start texturing tonight though. I’ll spend tonight relaxing and just chilling and get back to it in the morning.

Modelling, unwrapping Uvs and creating the Uvmap. Check, check and check!

It took a while before I wrapped my head around how to put the Uvmap together in the most efficient way. The whole thing can be described as a mix between puzzle and Russian roulette. It is like a puzzle in the sense that you got all these pieces you need to fit together, except there is no guarantee you’ll make it all fit together. The Russian roulette part comes in to play because the times you just can’t get all fit you may feel the urge to play a game of it and hope to lose (wow… that’s a bit dark and morbid…).
I’m exadurating. In fact the process of unwrapping Uvs and creating the Uvmap for this particular model was fairly event less to borderline boring. I’m not complaining though because the faster this is done the faster you can move on to texturing, which is among the most fun things you can do on your own that isn’t either legal or frowned upon when mentioned in public.

In this particular case I also have to reassemble the modules into one cohesive building and then I can get started with it (The texturing.)

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.