While we discuss how to best create the buildings for the race track, I did some more work on the Riviera.
Here are a few progress renders:
There’s still a lot to do before I begin to add the weapons and armor. I want to make sure I have the best possible base mesh to work with before I move on to the fun stuff…
Weekends are never a good time for me to get work done, with family obligations, Church, and females begging for my attention. I’m beginning to think the three other members of this project who are all in the midst of long term relationships might be on to something, from a time-saving point of view…
Anyways, I’m about to take this model and a few others which are in the early stages of detailing into Unreal. I think the Spec Map on this particular piece is fighting with the Normal map and becoming nosier than I’d like. I’ll see what softening it up a bit does…
…and I’ve been baking some maps from high-poly models.
I’ve got two weeks off work, and I decided to first celebrate with friends, and then come home and spend the wee hours of the morning doing some test renders of my latest model. The purpose of this particular model was to help me establish a good work-flow. Specifically, how to properly incorporate Low-poly modeling in 3DS Max, High-poly modeling in Mudbox, map making in 3ds Max and Photoshop, and finally importing into the Unreal Development Kit. I’m looking for what areas I end up spending more time than anticipated on, so that I can plan for it in the future, and perhaps alter my flow to be more effective.
This prop is eventually going to be scattered all over the level, but it may be hard to tell just what it is… It’s a concrete footing for the huge trellis’ lining the entire level. It’s a bit like an iceberg, and will be buried anywhere from 25% to 90% in the ground. The idea is by modeling a lot of extra ‘give’ into this piece, it will be much easier to fit the tiling trellis pieces together.
This is a straight Hi-Poly to Low-poly transfer, and a such there are glaring errors in the texture maps. Rather than spend lots of time and computer power re-rendering these, I’m going to quickly clean them up in Photoshop later. Right now the Tri-count is 1900. I’ve got a 500 tri LOD already modeled, and I’ll do a quick comparison in the near future.
I have been working on the warehouse. I created these tileable assets to create the exterior walls;
They don’t look like much on they’re own, but when I tile them and throw in a few detail meshes it begins to take shape…
More to come…
The team here at Digital-Mercs laid out our asset list recently, and chose which assets we wanted to work on. It was decided that we will create the tileable assets first so that large areas of the track can be built asap.
I opted to create a two-story warehouse that will appear on the inside of the track’s first turn.
The above image was taken from a screen cap pulled from the blue-ray version of Death Race.
I will be re-creating the building by breaking it up into it’s major parts, and then creating specific assets to add detail.
In the following image, I have highlighted the major areas of the building…
The building is similar to a cake, it is made up of three layers. I will also be creating the smaller blue building. It’s will be used in multiple areas of the track, but with different colors.
The nature of our project lends itself well to lots of tiling assets. The trick to making tiling assets believable, it to make them look like unique versions of the same thing. In the same way that no two manholes on a New York City street would collect exactly the same wear, We don’t want any two tiled assets in our game to look like exact copies.
To this end I’ve been building some simple tests in Unreal to get the most mileage out of our props.
To give you some background on the layout of this test scene, it’s just a bunch of simple BSP cubes. The floor and back wall have a neutral grey material with no specularity applied to them. You’ll see the color of the floor and back wall change though. This is because the level is lit with a single light with Lightmass (Global Illumination) set to 6 bounces. Since the only real color in the scene is red, everything else gets chroma-shifted in that direction.
First off, the scene with a 128×128 Brick texture applied to everything:
Next, the same material with a grunge mask, locked to the world position.
You can see that the grunge mask adds a bit of nice detail to the otherwise plain surface, but still it’s fairly obvious that it is just an overlaid texture.
Finally, the same material with a grunge mask locked to the world position, and a detail mask of a larger tiling scale locket to the world position. This detail mask is designed to add detail near the ground to make it look as if dirt and grime have collected there.
In the course of putting together this project, I made another personal discovery, Global illumination looks a little silly when the entire scene is dominated by one color (In this case, Red.) In actual application this shouldn’t be an issue.
Finally, here’s the material network I created for this demo. The only thing not shown in this picture are the scale values in the TexCoord nodes. I played with the values to make the grunge appear more subtle, and to make the detail layer fit the block height.
I must begin this post with a tip of the hat to Bradd. I was having trouble getting the holes in the Rivie’s wheels just right, and he swooped in with some suggestions that were spot on. My thanks go out to you good sir.
Here are two renders of where I am currently at on the wheels for the Riviera.
The light setup used in these renders is not perfect, but I think it get’s the point across.